Æthelbert of Kent:

Constantine of the Anglo-Saxons

(552-616 A.D.)

“He was the third English king to become High-King (Bretwalda) of all the provinces south of the river Humber, but he was the first to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

—VENERABLE BEDE, ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY

Non Angli sed Angeli si forent Christiani

King Æthelbert

“Angles from Deira,” was the response by the fair-skinned and blonde-haired slaves in the Roman slave market to the question by the erstwhile lawyer and Benedictine monk named Gregory. “Angles?” exclaimed the future Pope St. Gregory the Great, “Not Angles; rather, Angels of God!” “From the anger of God,” he vowed, “they shall be saved.”¹ With this, Gregory resolved to be missionary to the Anglo-Saxons. His monastic superiors however prevented it; they needed his prodigious talents in Rome. But the resolve to evangelize the pagan Anglo Saxons in the former Roman Britain stayed with him even when he became Pope. When Pope, Gregory appointed Augustine, a missionary bishop and monk and later Archbishop of Canterbury and Saint, to evangelize the bellicose and disparate Anglo-Saxon tribes in Southern Britain.² They were to find their freedom and eventual unification guided by the bridle of Christ.

Early in the 5th century, the Roman imperium withdrew from Britain. Faced with the barbarian invasion on the continent and political struggles in Rome, the Emperor Honorius sent a rescript to the British telling them to look after their own defenses.³ The Roman fasces and imperial eagle withdrawn from the isle of Britain, it was ruled in a manner of speaking for a time by Romano-British tyrants, though infighting appears to have been the rule and not the exception. Eventually, Teutonic pagan tribes—Jutes, Angles, and Saxons from the European mainland we label aggregately if not wholly accurately the Anglo-Saxons—invaded Britain and established themselves in the southern part of the isle. They forcibly displaced the Romanized and largely Christian Britons, who were chronic in their disunity and so unable to present a united front against the invaders. The Britons’ house divided, it did not stand against the fury of the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles. The Britons were eventually forced out of their homes and settled in Wales and Cornwall. The Anglo-Saxons then established themselves in the former Briton lands in a number of independent, petty kingdoms known as the Heptarchy: Northumbria, Kent, East Anglia, Mercia, Essex, Wessex, and Sussex. United only in worshipping the God of War, Odin, they found themselves in a state of internecine warfare. For to worship Odin was to worship and live by the sword; and the sword, unlike the cross which reconciles opposites, separated. Odin had never prayed like Christ, “Father, may they all be one, even as you and I are one.”⁴ Converting these warring tribes and bringing them into communion with the Roman Church—that they may be one—was St. Gregory’s hope and was to be St. Augustine’s commission.

One of these petty kingdoms—that of Cantawara Land or Kent—appeared particularly ripe for Augustine’s missionary work. Kent was ruled by Æthelbert (or variously Ethelbert, Ædilberct, Edilbert; the original Anglo-Saxon spelling is Æðelbirht), the son of the former king Eormenric and great grandson of Hengist, one of the original conquering Jutes. Æthelbert succeeded his father to the kingship of Kent when the latter died in 560. In the War of Wimbledon in 568, King Æthelbert attempted unsuccessfully to capture the crown of Wessex from King Ceawlin in his bid for the overlordship (Bretwalda) of Britain. What war did not gain him, death did. When the Wessex king later died in 595, Æthelbert was left nominal ruler of all of Southern Britain, or, as the historian Bede put it, “he had extended his dominions as far as the great river Humber.”⁵

Marriage to Bertha and the Arrival of the Missionary Bishop Augustine to the Shores of Kent

Æthelbert married Bertha, the daughter of Charibert (d. 567), King of the Neustria (a region in the western part of the Frankish realms) and Ingoberga.⁶ Focused on his people in his History of the Franks, the historian-bishop of Tours Gregory (ca. 538-594) in obiter dicta vaguely mentions Bertha’s marriage to King Æthelbert:

A man from Kent; true enough, but the man was king. The details left unmentioned by Gregory of Tours were filled in by the historian for the British, the Venerable Bede (ca. 672-735). In his Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples, Bede informs us that Bertha was a Christian. Part of the marriage arrangement mandated that the then-pagan Æthelbert respect her religion. Æthelbert provided her the old Roman church of St. Martin in his capital Cantwaraburh (modern Canterbury),⁸ and allowed her free practice of her Christianity. She brought with her a contingent of clerics from the land of the Franks, including Bishop St. Liudhard (or Letard) of Senlis, which he goodwillingly tolerated.⁹

St. Augustine's Cross

Pope Gregory, likely informed of all these facts and believing the Anglo-Saxons were ripe for conversion and that Æthelbert’s Christian wife afforded him an opportunity, sent a group of missionaries headed by Augustine to Kent. In May 597 A.D., Augustine and his evangelical contingent landed in the Isle of Thanet off the eastern Kent shores. An unsure Æthelbert met Augustine in the open field, by an oak tree—the tree consecrated to his god Odin—hoping in his superstition thereby to obviate any magic the Christians might bring with them. The meeting between Æthelbert and Augustine—traditionally at Ebbsfleet and now marked by a monument erected in 1884 known as St. Augustine’s Cross—is a remarkable historical event.¹⁰ It is celebrated by no less a poet than Wordsworth. It was the day of glad tidings, a day when England would be made free of its superstitions:

''For ever hallowed be this morning fair,

Blest be the unconscious shore on which ye tread,

And blest the silver Cross, which ye, instead

Of martial banner, in procession bear;

The Cross preceding Him who floats in air,

The pictured Saviour!—By Augustin led,

They come--and onward travel without dread,

Chanting in barbarous ears a tuneful prayer—

Sung for themselves, and those whom they would free!

Rich conquest waits them:—the tempestuous sea

Of Ignorance, that ran so rough and high

And heeded not the voice of clashing swords,

These good men humble by a few bare words,

And calm with fear of God's divinity.''¹¹

Many significant words are lost to history. For example, we do not know what powerful words Christ wrote on the dirt which silenced the words of the detractors of the adulteress that was brought before Him. We do not know with what words Pope St. Leo the Great plied the conscience of Attila the Hun to turn him back from pillaging Rome. Nor do we know what fair words St. Augustine told that pagan king at that monumental meeting at Ebbsfleet. Bede, however, records (or in Thucydidean fashion invents) Æthelbert’s guarded, prudent, but tolerant response:

Æthelbert permitted Augustine and his spiritual retinue to settle in Canterbury, and there to mingle with the burgeoning Christian community centered about his wife, Bertha. Canterbury eventually became the principal see of England, until this very day playing an important role in the spiritual life of the people of Britain.

Conversion of King Æthelbert

Though traditionally Æthelbert is said to have been baptized on Whitsunday (i.e., Pentecost Sunday) in 597 A.D., it appears that his conversion may not has been so early, and that the influence of Bertha, Liudhard, and Augustine took some time before it bore fruit in his conversion to Christianity.

Well-informed of the situation, Pope Gregory in 601 wrote a letter to Bertha, commending her piety and comparing her to the Empress Helena, but pastorally chiding her for not yet converting her husband.

But the Holy Spirit blows where He wills, and will not be rushed (or delayed), even by a Pope. The Paraclete apparently waited until 601 before He dispensed His grace upon Æthelbert’s soul, though the groundwork had been accomplished over many years through the efforts of many men, his one spouse, and the inscrutable guidance of Providence.

When Pope Gregory learned of the Kentish king’s conversion, he sent him a letter of congratulations and encouragement, comparing the king to the Emperor Constantine:

The conversion and baptism of Æthelbert was the linchpin of the conversion of the people of Kent. Though King Æthelbert did not compel his subjects to reject their paganism and adopt the Christian faith, many accepted his example. In a letter to the Patriarch Eulogius of Alexandria written around 597-98 A.D., Pope Gregory informs the Alexandrian prelate that more than 10,000 “Angli” in the “corner of the world” were baptized out of the worship of “stocks and stones” the first Christmas after Augustine set foot on English soil.¹⁵

Lex Juxta Exempla Romanorum

Æthelbert has historical significance as a lawgiver, being the first king to issue written laws to the Anglo-Saxons in their language.¹⁶ Promulgated in the primitive Anglo Saxon tongue around the year 604 A.D., near the time when Justinian promulgated his massive and definitive Digest in polished Latin, Æthelbert’s laws are known as the Ninety Dooms.¹⁷ “English law begins to speak,” Maitland observed, “just when Roman law has spoken what will, in a certain sense, be its final words.”¹⁸

In terms of sophistication, no comparison exists between Justinian’s Digest and Institutes and Æthelbert’s Ninety Dooms. Though the historian Bede insists that Æthelbert’s Ninety Dooms were fashioned “after the Roman model,”¹⁹ other than their being in writing, there appears only a tenuous link between the two bodies of law. “There is little” in Æthelbert’s Ninety Dooms, Fletcher correctly observes, “that Justinian’s great jurist Tribonian would have recognized as Roman.”²⁰

Examples of the dooms²¹ allow us to savor some of their archaic flavor. The first doom protects the Church (church-frith), assessing penalties for those who interfere with the property of the Church:

The fourth doom protects the property of the king:

In the nineteenth doom, highway robbery is made subject to a fine, and if murder committed during that robbery, the twentieth doom assigns a steeper fine:

Personal injury was compensable by the payment of wergeld. In fact, a great part of Æthelbert’s laws are nothing but “a simple tariff of offences and compensations.”²³ The dooms list body parts and appropriate bot or compensation for injury to each:

Efforts were made to control the sexual appetite of his subjects, and the rights of slaves:

Whether based on Roman model or not, Æthelbert’s laws reek, as it were, with their Anglo-Saxon origin and the Anglo-Saxon mindset and customs, except that they contain the germ of future development. Therefore, “we cannot call them primitive in any absolute sense of that term,” noted Maitland, because “[t]hey are Christian.”²⁵ To the extent there is (or was) any accuracy in the maxim that Christianity is part of the common law—a maxim espoused by England’s Justice Hale and Blackstone,²⁶ and America’s Justice Wilson, Justice Story, and Chancellor Kent,²⁷ among others though vehemently rejected by Jefferson²⁸—it finds its origins in the Ninety Dooms of Æthelbert and in the missionary efforts of Augustine of Canterbury.

Canonization

St. Æthelbert

After a lengthy reign, Æthelbert died in 616 A.D., and was buried in the church of Sts. Peter and Paul, where the body of his wife, Queen Bertha, already lay. He was canonized by the Roman Church; his Feast day is February 25. In memory of this noble king a light burned before his tomb for centuries, beckoning pilgrims and kings of England who paid homage to the body of this king which had housed his noble soul. This practice was forcibly ended by Henry VIII. Since that day, the light burns no longer before Æthelbert’s tomb. It sputtered out when the Faith into which Æthelbert was baptized was forcibly spent in England by the tyranny of king driven, as are so many of our personal and social ills, by the fire in a man’s loins.

Endnotes

¹ Another pun on their place of origin, Deira, a region in Northumbria. In Latin, “from the wrath of God” is de ira dei. ⇑

² The story is told in Chapter 9 of The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby (Cambridge 1985) cited and retold in Fletcher, 112-13; Cf. Bede, II.1. ⇑

³ Maurizio Lupoi, The Origins of the European Legal Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 58. ⇑

⁴ John 17:11 ⇑

⁵ Bede, I.25 ⇑

⁶ Fletcher states that it was not likely that the marriage occurred before the late 570s. Fletcher, 110. Other dates for the marriage are 560 or 578. Lupoi, 62 n. 94. ⇑

⁷ Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks (London: Penguin Books, 1985), IV.26, p. 219 (Lewis Thorpe, trans.). ⇑

⁸ Cantawaraburh means “the Kentish people’s stronghold or fort.” ⇑

⁹ Bede, I.25. ⇑

¹⁰ The cross bears the Latin inscription: Augustinus ad Rutupina littola in insula Thaneti, post tot terrae marisque labores, tandem adventus hoc in loco cum Ethelberto rege congressus, primam apud nostrates coneionem habuit et fidem Christiana quae per totam Angliam mira celeritate diffusa est, feliciter inauguravit A.D. DXCVI. (Augustine at length brought to Ebbs Fleet in the Isle of Thanet after so many labours on land and at sea, at a conference with King Ethelbert on this spot, delivered his first discourse to our people, and auspiciously founded the Christian faith, which was diffused with wonderful rapidity throughout the whole of England. A.D. 596.) ⇑

¹¹ Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, XIV “Glad Tidings." ⇑

¹² Bede, I.25. ⇑

¹³ Gregory the Great, epist. XI.29 in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2nd Series (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983), Vol. XIII, 56-57. ⇑

¹⁴ Gregory the Great, epist. XI.66 in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2nd Series (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983), Vol. XIII, 81-82. ⇑

¹⁵ Gregory the Great, epist. VIII.30 in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2nd Series (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983), Vol. XII, 240. ⇑

¹⁶ They were “the first Germanic laws that were written in a Germanic tongue.” Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, vol. I, p. 11. ⇑

¹⁷ Doom is another word for judgment, sentence, or law. ⇑

¹⁸ Frederic William Maitland, The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, ed. H.A.L. Fisher, “Outlines of English Legal History, 560-1600” (Cambridge University Press, 1911). Vol. II, found at http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Maitland0161/CollectedPapers/Vol2/HTMLs/0242-02_Pt05_Essays5.html#LF-BK0242-2pt01ch22. ⇑

¹⁹ Bede, II.5. (iuxta Romanorum exempla). ⇑

²⁰ Fletcher, 118. ⇑

²¹ Æthelbert’s dooms can be found at the Internet Medieval Sourcebook sponsored by Fordham University: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/560-975dooms.html#The%20Laws%20of%20Æthelberht. ⇑

²² Weagreaf = highway robbery. Bot = compensation. ⇑

²³ Fletcher, 118. ⇑

²⁴ Esne = slave. ⇑

²⁵ Maitland, supra note 18. ⇑

²⁶ King v. Taylor, 1 Ventr. 293, 86 Eng. Rep. 189 (K.B. 1676) (“Christianity is parcel of the laws of England.”); WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND, IV.59 (1769, reprint) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); see generally Stuart Banner, When Christianity was Part of the Common Law, 16 LAW & HIST. REV. 27 (1998). ⇑

²⁷ The Words of James Wilson, ed. J. D. Andrews (Chicago: Callaghan & Co., 1896), vol. 2, p. 425; Joseph Story, “Christianity a Part of the Common Law,” The American Jurist 9 (1833); People v. Ruggles, 8 John. 290, 293 (N.Y. 1811). ⇑

²⁸ Jefferson's letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, from Monticello, February 10, 1814, in THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Ass’n, 1905), XIV.93 cited in Stuart Banner, When Christianity was Part of the Common Law, 16 LAW & HIST. REV. 27 (1998). ⇑