Sending Augustine of Canterbury

In 596 Gregory sent a band of about forty monks from his monastery of St. Andrew’s, under their prior Augustine, to carry the gospel to the Anglo-Saxons of Britain. The mission nearly failed at the start — the monks, terrified by reports of the barbarian English, turned back from Gaul, and Augustine returned to Rome asking to abandon the venture; Gregory sent them on again with letters of encouragement. They reached Kent in 597, where King Æthelberht, married to the Christian Frankish princess Bertha, received them and was himself baptized. Canterbury became Augustine’s see and the cradle of the English Church. The story that first kindled Gregory’s concern — the fair-haired slave-boys in the Roman market, “not Angles but angels” — is told by Bede and an earlier Whitby Life, and must be received from them.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Pope of Rome; Great Hierarch)

“Not Angles but Angels”

The most famous story about Gregory is the one Bede tells to explain why he cared for the English at all. According to Bede, long before he was pope — while still a monk or a deacon — Gregory was passing through the marketplace of Rome when he saw boys put up for sale as slaves, fair-skinned and fair-haired. Asking where they came from, he was told they were Angli, Angles, from the island of Britain, and that they were pagans. Gregory, grieved that such fair faces should be in the grip of “the author of darkness,” asked the name of their nation, and on being told they were Angli, replied that it was fitting, “for they have angelic faces, and it is right that such should be co-heirs with the angels in heaven” (non Angli, sed angeli — “not Angles, but angels”). Playing further on the words, he asked the name of their kingdom (Deira) and of their king (Ælle), and turned each into a pun on deliverance “from wrath” (de ira) and on singing “Alleluia.” Moved by this, he is said to have sought leave to go himself as a missionary to Britain, but to have been prevented and later, as pope, to have sent others in his place (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 2.1; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

This story is the foundation of Gregory’s English fame, and it must be handled with care. [Disputed: the slave-boys anecdote is not told by Gregory himself anywhere in his voluminous writings; its earliest surviving form is in the anonymous *Life of Gregory* written at Whitby c. 704–714, from which Bede (writing c. 731) drew it, more than a century after the events it describes. Per METHODOLOGY §3.5 it is reported as the tradition Bede and the Whitby monk transmit — a story the English Church told about its apostle — not as a documented episode of Gregory's life. Some scholars accept a historical kernel; others regard the wordplay-laden tale as a pious literary construction (Markus 1997, 177–187; Mayr-Harting 1991, 57–58; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, notes to 2.1)]. What is documented, in Gregory’s own Register, is the genuine mission itself — and a letter of 595 in which Gregory instructs a rector of the patrimony in Gaul to buy English slave-boys to be trained in monasteries, which may preserve the real, prosaic root of his interest in the English (Gregory, Register 6.10; trans. Martyn 2004; Markus 1997, 177–187).

The Mission of 596

The mission proper is firmly attested. In 596 Gregory chose Augustine, the prior (praepositus) of his own monastery of St. Andrew’s on the Caelian Hill, to lead a party of about forty monks to Britain to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.23; Gregory, Register 6.51, 6.53; Markus 1997, 177–187; Mayr-Harting 1991, 57–77). The choice of his own monks for the work bound the mission intimately to Gregory and to the Roman monastic life he had founded.

The journey began badly. Crossing into Gaul and hearing terrifying reports of the savagery of the heathen English and the dangers of the sea, the monks lost heart and halted; Augustine went back to Rome to ask Gregory to release them from “so dangerous, toilsome, and uncertain a journey.” Gregory refused to let the mission fail. He wrote a letter (preserved in his Register and quoted by Bede) urging them on with the words, “it is better never to undertake any high enterprise than to abandon it once begun,” confirming Augustine’s authority over them as their abbot, and sending letters of commendation to the Frankish bishops and rulers along their road (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.23–24; Gregory, Register 6.51 and the cluster of letters of July 596; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969 and Martyn 2004). So strengthened, the monks went on.

Kent, Æthelberht, and Bertha

The mission’s destination was the kingdom of Kent in the southeast, the nearest English kingdom to the Continent and the most open to it. Its king, Æthelberht (Ethelbert), was the most powerful of the southern English rulers, and — crucially — his wife was a Christian: Bertha, a Frankish princess of the Merovingian royal house, who had been allowed to keep her faith and her chaplain, Bishop Liudhard, and had a church (St. Martin’s, Canterbury) for her worship (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.25–26; Mayr-Harting 1991, 57–77; Markus 1997, 177–187). This Christian presence at the Kentish court prepared the ground.

Augustine and his monks landed on the Isle of Thanet in 597 and sent word to Æthelberht. The king, cautious, met them in the open air (lest they work magic on him indoors), heard their preaching, and granted them leave to live and preach in Canterbury, his chief town, giving them the church of St. Martin to use. In time Æthelberht himself was converted and baptized, and with him many of his people — Bede reports a mass baptism, and notes that the king compelled none but favoured the believers (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.25–26; Mayr-Harting 1991, 63–77). Augustine was consecrated bishop (by the Frankish bishops, on Gregory’s instruction) and established his see at Canterbury, which has remained the primatial see of the English Church ever since.

Gregory’s Continuing Direction

Gregory followed and directed the mission closely from Rome through his letters. In 601 he sent a second party of helpers — including Mellitus, Justus, and Paulinus — with books, vessels, vestments, and relics, and with a sheaf of letters: to Augustine, to Æthelberht, to Queen Bertha, and to the Frankish authorities (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.29–30; Gregory, Register 11.34–11.51; Markus 1997, 177–199). In these letters Gregory laid out his plan for the organization of the English Church — famously envisaging two metropolitan sees at London and York, each with twelve bishops, a scheme that did not match the political reality and was only partly realized — and gave Augustine the detailed pastoral and missionary guidance that became the Libellus responsionum (see The Responsa and Method). He also wrote, with evident joy, to congratulate the missionaries and the king on the conversion, and to Eulogius, patriarch of Alexandria, reporting the baptism of the English as a wonder of God’s grace at the ends of the earth (Gregory, Register 8.29; Markus 1997, 177–187).

The Apostle of the English

The mission’s success made Gregory, in the memory of the English Church, its founder and apostle. Bede, the greatest of English historians, opens his account of Gregory by calling him the man “whom we may rightly call our own apostle,” for “while others held the apostolic office, he exercised its power over our nation,” making “of our nation, till then enslaved to idols, a Church of Christ” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 2.1; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). It is no accident that the warmest early veneration of Gregory grew up not at Rome but in England, and that the earliest Life of him was written by a monk of Whitby (see Relics, Feast, and Cult). The English mission also stands at the head of the long history of the conversion of Britain, in which later figures — the Irish-trained Aidan of Lindisfarne among them — would carry the gospel to the north (see St. Aidan of Lindisfarne), and which Bede would gather into his Ecclesiastical History (see St. Bede the Venerable).

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People 1.23–33, 2.1. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The mission, the conversion of Kent, and the slave-boys story at 2.1.)
Gregory the Great. The Letters of Gregory the Great (Register) 6.10, 6.51–6.53, 8.29, 11.34–11.51. Trans. John R. C. Martyn. 3 vols. Toronto: PIMS, 2004. (Gregory’s own letters of the mission; the slave-purchase letter of 595.)
The Whitby Monk. The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1968. (The earliest, English, Life and the earliest form of the slave-boys story.)
Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 177–199. (The mission, its sources, and the slave-boys anecdote.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. London: Batsford, 1991, 57–77. (Kent, Æthelberht and Bertha, and the conduct of the mission.)