Today we're going to talk
about Ireland and England, predominantly England not
because Ireland isn't important, but because we know
less about Ireland. The reason we know relatively more about England in
its Post Roman period, that is to say after 420 is because of the historian Bede writing in the early
eighth century, a monk at Jarrow which was a part of
a twin monastery in Northumbria. You can see on your map
the Northeastern part of England before you
get to what's now Scotland. Bede wrote among other things a history of the English
church and people, which is full of miracles and very pro Christian as
much as Gregory of Tour, but is a much more easy to follow narrative and a narrative with
a certain kind of point. It's about the
conversion of England and the establishment
of the church. The other advantage for
England over Ireland in terms of evidence is archaeology. A lot more has been done with excavating sites in England, and by England we mean
literally England, the part that is not Wales, not Scotland, not Ireland, the part of the British
Isles, the ensemble. Essentially the two islands are referred to as
the British Isles. Britain is England, Scotland, and Wales, Ireland is Ireland. The Britons however,
B-R-I-T-O-N-S, are the collective term
for the Celtic population. Celtic is both a linguistic group and a somewhat vague ethnic term. It means the people
who were there in the British Isles
before the Romans came, and who were there afterwards fighting invaders from Europe. These invaders who come in the 440 is known as the Anglo-Saxons. Bede tells us it's
the Anglo at the Saxons, excuse me, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jews. The Angles give
their name to England, Angle land, the Jews
we know nothing about. So a certain kind of medievalist will go on
about funding a journal of jute studies and inviting contributors to something
that we really have absolutely no idea of it
being in that league of smallest thinnest bond
[inaudible] at least in terms of
three-dimensional books. The Saxons come from there is still a very large part
of Germany called Saxony. What the nature of
these peoples are, how they were
differentiated among themselves is
a source of a lot of real or at least it looks real scholarship as opposed
to studying the Jews, but we don't have
to go into that. But you need to get
the cast of characters. Celts, Anglo-Saxons,
the Anglo-Saxons conquer much of
the island more or less what would become
England but not all. They do not conquer Scotland, they do not conquer Wales, and they don't really
conquer Cornwall. So the Western part of
Britain remains Celtic and to this day Wales and Scotland considered themselves
different from England. You can get into a lot
of trouble by calling that area England
with the people there and particularly in
Scotland there's a possibility that
they may separate from the United Kingdom
at some point. Ireland, Ireland was never
occupied by the Romans. Ireland was chaotic, was in contact with
the Roman Empire, but was not part of it. This makes some
difference and we'll talk about it when we come
to talk about conversion, but it doesn't make
as much difference as it sounds because the thing
about England or Britain is that the Roman impress there would be almost wiped
out once the Romans withdrew. So in contrast to what we saw with Gregory of Tour
and Merovingian Gaul, Merovingian Frankish kingdom, the Roman influence in
Britain is almost wiped out. Recall what we saw as
persistence of Roman practices in the Merovingian kingdom,
bishops, cities, the Latin language, tax
records, written legal codes, that is not to say that the Merovingians weren't as I said before to be described by
technical terms like thugs, or that this was a sleek
well-functioning Kingdom, you landed at the airport and got the train immediately
and everything was sleek and nice like Amsterdam or someplace like that as
opposed to Kennedy. But that the Roman inheritance was visible and influential. In Britain when
the Roman troops withdrew to fight the invaders in Gaul, this ended Roman
society in Britain. The reason for this is partly that Britain
was a frontier, viewed from the point of view of the Mediterranean the center of gravity of the Roman Empire. The frontier symbolized most dramatically by walls the most famous of which
is Hadrian's Wall, a wall that separated
out the Barbarians. But since you didn't have a river like the Danube or the Rhine, there seemed to be
no natural frontier. Remnants of Hadrian's Wall are the largest souvenir
of the Roman era, a wall to keep out
the Barbarians from the North because in fact the Romans didn't conquer the entire island. They conquered the parts they
thought were worthwhile, and they did think
it was worthwhile. Frontier or not, we know that
the Romans built villas, might be a little cold the somewhat open-air
Mediterranean plan things, but Mosaic courtyards,
drank a lot of wine, much of it imported,
built cities, walls, other fortifications,
cultivated land. So it's not as if there wasn't
a serious Roman province of Britain from its conquest
in the late first century, until its abandonment in
the early fifth century. But here the invaders
tended to obliterate much of what had been
there in Roman times, and the Celtic population who had been Romanized at least
at the elite levels, the Celtic population didn't really save very much
from the Roman Empire. The Celts might remain Christian whereas
the invaders were Pagan. But the Celts tended not to have cities or at least large centers, and they tended not to have or retain Roman forms of government. The one kind of, if not literally interesting at least weird aspect of Celtic Roman Resistance is
the figure of King Arthur. I'm going to bring him up now and then I'm going to drop him. King Arthur belongs properly to the continuation of
this course because his legendary status starts really in the world of romance, of French romance and then of international romance
chivalric literature. By romance we mean, not only love stories but
novels of chivalry, of knights, of battles. He is a figure who is
99.9 percent legend. Whatever the remainder of
that 0.1 percent real. So far as he's real, he may be identified with Celtic resistance to
the Anglo-Saxon invaders, Celtic Roman resistance in the late fifth, early
sixth centuries. But the proportion of art
to history in this is, if not 99.9 at least
very, very substantial. The original setting of
the Arthurian stories is that of the resistance to
the Anglo-Saxon invaders. The Arthurian romances do have a Celtic beginning,
well not a kind of, they have a Celtic beginning, and then they are
appropriated by people in the Romance
language tradition, French, first of all. So as Walkom says on page 151, nowhere else in the Roman Empire was the collapse of culture, economy and urbanization
so complete. He uses that wonderful phrase again, radical economic
simplification, ie, there's no more plumbing, there's no more of what we would consider to be
affluent civilized society. The ceramics don't come
from Africa anymore, the wine doesn't come
from France anymore, people are reduced to a kind of subsistence or at least most people
because as we'll see, some of these kings
actually are able to get some luxury goods
from abroad. If it were just a story
of barbarisation, it would be less
interesting then. In fact, the peculiar nature
of England in this period, which goes from being
a contested territory between the Germanic invaders
and the Celtic population, to a kingdoms slowly converted in the course of the seventh century to Christianity from paganism, to the leading center
of culture in Europe. Bede, who lived from 673-735 was the most cultivated scholar in Europe of the early
eighth century. The most cultivated
scholar in Europe of the late eighth century
was also from England, Alcuin, counselor and
adviser to Charlemagne. How do you go from being a barbarian enough area to having the largest libraries, the most cultivated scholars? Now, it is true as I
think I've said before that any time you can say that such and such a person
was the smartest person in Europe has got to
be a fairly bad time. In the 19th century, you have your choice from
all sorts of scientific, literary, other kinds of intellectual experts who
would even dare to say. But we know that Boethius
and Cassiodorus are the smartest guys in Europe in the sixth century
because they have access to stuff that
almost no one else does, because their writing about classical authors
that almost no one else has in their libraries. We know that Isidore
of Seville is probably the smartest guy of the early seventh century,
and Visigothic Spain. Because we have his works, we have an idea of
what he's read, we know his sources and again he's got
the biggest library. Biggest library may
mean 100 books, but 100 books in 700 AD is a serious collection
of knowledge. Now, this is not easy knowledge, this is not as if everything were like Wikipedia five years ago, elementary and often wrong, these are very different kinds of works from what
might interest us. Certainly a lot of
biblical stuff, but also for example a lot
of computing of time. Bede would be remembered for the history of
the English church and people, but also for a lot of his
works on figuring out time. He is credited, although
not uniquely credited, but as an important person
in the development of the BC, AD scheme. Believe it or not people
are not born into the world calculating
according to BC, AD, lots of people calculate
according to other systems, how did they come up with this, and moreover how do they then
fit the calendar into it? How do you keep
time when you don't have electric or battery
operated clocks? How do you know what
the seasonal changes are? But in fact the most
troublesome problem which had been particularly controversial to the conversion of England in the
generation before Bede, in the early seventh
and mid seventh century was the calculation of Easter. Easter is a real problem. Now, naturally it's not a problem if someone
else tells you. If in 1970 you open up a little pocket book
calendar and it says, okay, Easter is this day, you trust them, or now, if you have some feature on your iPhone that gives you Easter for the
next 3,000 years, in case you want to
know when Easter is in 3500 AD, no problem. But if you're out there in Northumbria or anywhere
for that matter, in a monastery somewhere, where it's really crucial to celebrate it on the right day. Remember what I said about dogma and religious observation, God doesn't want you
to say something like, "Dude, I don't really
know when Easter is, but I think I'm going
to celebrate it now." You can't do that, you can't just decide, I know it's sort
of in the spring, nobody around here for miles and miles and miles knows
how to calculate it, so what the heck, we'll do it on
a Tuesday because I'm busy on what I think is Easter. That's not the way
monasticism works, and we'll talk about
that next week. The schedule is really,
really important, but it's also difficult
to figure out, and people disagree about it. To this day, the Eastern
Orthodox churches celebrate a different date for Easter than the Western because they operate according
to a different calendar. All right. Well, I'm not saying that this is
the kind of knowledge that you ought to drop
everything else to pursue, but it is a knowledge
that requires a sort of observation that
in fact we do not have. Most of us unless
we're astronomy majors have no idea what the sky
looks like at night. A, because we can't see it
because of artificial light, and B, because we're
not very curious. We cannot track
animals most of us, and those of you who can, I'm interested in your knowledge. Most of us haven't
the faintest idea how things grow except because we'd
been to the Yale Farm, and "Oh my gosh look
at this stuff." That's part of the reason
for it because we're not very close to nature. I think that
environmental concerns notwithstanding most of us have a huge investment in not
being too close to nature, but the observation of
phenomena is something that is much superior in
so-called indigenous, primitive, traditional
or historical societies. So the story of
England and Ireland, centers on conversion and
the reason this is so, is because conversion represents
a change in orientation. A change in orientation
towards a larger world. Instead of a tribal and
fragmented identity. I'm not making a statement about the truth or non truth
of Christianity. But about the sense
of belonging to a larger world whose purposes encompass not only your group but a larger group
of people out there. I think we can get
a feeling for this from a famous passage of Bede's Ecclesiastical history,
written in 731. He is describing events of
about a century earlier, when King Edwin of
Northumbria summoned the council to decide whether or not to accept the Christian God. The chief of the Pagan
priest's speaks in favor of embracing Christianity
even though you would think that he would be the defender of the old faith, he in fact, speaks to this assembly according
to Bede in favor of Christianity on
the grounds that it tells us what went before us and what will come after us. The passage goes like this, "And one of the King's Chief
men presently said, thus seems it to me oh King. The present life of man on earth against that time
which is unknown to us is as if you were sitting at a feast with your chief
men and your Thanes", nobles in winter time, T-H-A-N-E-S. "The fire
burns and the hall is warm, and outside it rains
and snows and storms. There comes a sparrow and swiftly flies through the house." The installation is not
great in these halls, right? "It comes through one door
and it goes out another. Low in the time in
which he is within, He has not touched
by the winter storm. But that time is the flash of an eye and the least of times. He soon passes from winter
out to winter again. So is the life of man
revealed for a brief space. But what went before
and what follows after, we do not know. Therefore, if
this teaching can reveal any more certain knowledge it seems only right we
should follow it." Now this is not why people
necessarily converted, because not everybody's
really bothered by that. But most people figure, "Wow, I'm in the hall, it's warm. It's great. I'm having
such a good time." When I have to leave brief though it will be
I'll deal with that. But, it does explain some of the appeal
of Christianity and why the invaders who
were Pagan converted. Indeed why people tend to
convert to world religions like Christianity and Islam to
this day, a local religion. I'm calling tribal only because
by that I mean confined to a people whose identity is caught up in their religion. A tribal people or
a tribal religion has trouble surviving extensive contact
with other people. Because it's uniqueness is
threatened by the realization that there's a huge world
out there of lots of other people and when you
start interacting with them, that is when you're
no longer isolated, you will tend to seek an explanation for things
that is grander than just, this Gods protect my sphere. This God protects my heart. This God protects against
accidents in childbirth. There are exceptions. Judaism is one of
the most obvious. Here is a religion of
a small group of people that survives over the centuries. But it is not exactly a tribal religion in
the sense that it's monotheistic and
historical sense is very strong. This is what the priest means, or this is what I mean in
interpreting the priests words as reported by Bede,
by historical sense. A sense that God rules over the world
even if I'm not in it. That there is something to come, not necessarily that there is an after-life although that obviously is part of
the teachings of Christianity, but that there is
a purpose to life. So conversion. The conversion of Ireland
and England are different. The process of converting England begins in 597 with
a missionary known, unfortunately, his
named is Augustine. He's Augustine of Canterbury not Augustine of Hippo
The Confessions Augustine. He is sent by
the Roman Pope Gregory, the first Gregory the Great. Bede tells us that he was
motivated to do this, it's very strange thing
to do there had not been missionaries sent
by the Pope before, that he was motivated
to do this by seeing British boys for sale in
the slave market in Rome, and asking who they were? He was told they were Angles, A-N. Angls as an
Angle-Saxon A-N-G-E-L-S, and he is reputed to have said we should make
them Angels not Angles. Angenly known Angle
or Angels not Angles. Whatever the story
Augustine arrived around 597 at an island that had some remnants of
Celtic Christianity, but is basically
a Pagan and barbarian. He landed in Cant in the southeast corner of the island closest
to the continent, and on this map what I'd like
you to know particularly are Cant with Canterbury as its capital in the south east, Westx in the west, I think I've
helpfully underlined, Mercia towards the center,
Northumbria northeast. The most important kingdoms
in England and Wickham has emphasized how
fragmented this territory was. The most important kingdoms
would be at different times Northumbria, Mercia, and Westx. But the first place
to convert is Cant. It faces the continent, the pagan ruler of Cant
had actually married a Christian princess
from Merovingian Gaul. Augustine established
the first bishopric in Cant at Canterbury which
would be henceforth, the major ecclesiastical center of Britain it's Archbishop wreck. Bede tells us about this, but he also tells
us a lot more about Northumbria which
is where he lived. Here you can see the off again on again pace
of conversion. The pious King Edwin who had that council that
we just described, converted his people
after a vision, but after his death in 633
his successor went back to the old traditional religion,
renouncing Christianity. Then the successor to that king, a man named Oswald,
re-established Christianity. But he was killed in battle by the pagan king of Mercia in 642. Only in the 660s, 670s is England pretty definitively converted
to Christianity. We can see this kind
of transition in two of the most famous sources of information about this world. The poem Beowulf,
how many people have read this? Yeah, everybody's read this
at one time or another. Beowulf does have some little Christian
themes and there is some debate as to what extent the poem is to be understood in Christian terms, but in its atmosphere, its rituals, the
burial and the ship, the burning of the body, the devotion not only to war but to feasting and two gold, ring giving, it evokes,
not merely evokes. It is a description of a warrior society in which although it is
written in old English, remember that it actually
takes place in Denmark. This is a north
sea world in which the communications patterns
are such that you could write an English poem
about someone who goes over to the mainland
for adventure. The other source is one of the great archaeological
triumphs of the last 100 years, the so-called Sutton Hoo treasure which is in
the British Museum. In East Anglia
close to the water, actually close to the sea, a burial ship was found in 1939. Probably the king buried
here was Raedwald, a king of East Anglia, who died in 627. Now it's a pagan burial because
of all the grave goods, all this stuff is in there
or so it would seem. But it's hard to tell
just as in Beowulf, is it pagan? Is it Christian? It's hard to tell about
this burial scene, because he's got a lot of stuff from what might be called
foreign gifts or maybe plunder. Foreign gifts. He's got
two Byzantine silver spoons. So two silver spoons made in Constantinople or [inaudible]. He's got gold coins. They're mostly from
the Merovingian kingdom and they're different.
They're all different. This is not an economic thing. This is a treasure thing. The difference
between economy and treasure is that treasure
is just for hoarding, and economy is fluid
and transactional. The hoarding of course we see in Beowulf most obviously
with the dragon. The dragon is not accumulating the treasure in
order to safeguard his retirement or
trade up in caves. He just sleeps on this treasure. The point of that is of
course that people accumulate treasure for
non-economic reasons. For reasons that have to do with their own satisfaction
or their own anxieties. The utility of treasure is
generally overestimated. Nevertheless of course
at the same time this is a world in which gold, treasure accumulation
is what men do. So what else is at Sutton Hoo? A wonderful helmet, unique because these things
tend to disintegrate. A sword, a male shirt and then all sorts
of paraphernalia. Some of it with Christian
symbols like crosses, some of it very much
in the pagan world. Beowulf and Sutton Hoo
go together. They both show us
a world of treasure, of weapons, of drinking halls,
of palaces, isolated. The drinking hall is important
as you know from Beowulf, it is the manifestation
of civilization. It is that protection
from outside that Bede describes in the little
sparrow anecdote, but it is also the center
of government. We're back to the ruler and
his entourage or comatose, his gang, if you want to put a more cynical
coloration on it. So the conversion of England is completed by
the late seventh century, but it is a more
complicated story than just monolithic
Christianity versus monolithic paganism because
there are two kinds of Christianity that seek
to convert England. One from Ireland
and one from Rome. Ireland, let's just
pause over Ireland. Never part of the Roman
Empire, as I said, but it's also the first
place outside the Roman world to have been
converted to Christianity. The first place in
Europe actually. The first place period
is Ethiopia. Ethiopia of course in northeastern Africa would be converted to
Christianity very early, fourth century AD probably, but within Europe, Ireland was
converted to Christianity. By the British or English
missionary, St. Patrick, this is a little
embarrassing but in fact, the Apostle to Ireland is one of those British Celtic Roman fourth century figures, Patrick. So in 600 AD, Ireland was largely Catholic while England was mostly pagan. Irish Christianity had
certain peculiarities, some of them related to
its lack of a Roman past. Thus, for example,
it did not have bishops really or
the bishops were weak. Because there had
not been cities in Ireland on the Roman model. Therefore Christianity
didn't have an urban background but rather a very decentralized
and rural background. The most powerful institutions in Ireland were monasteries. Because these were
great rural centers and so the monks ruled over
the bishops generally. Irish monasticism
was very austere. The Irish monks were more ascetic than
the monks we'll be meeting next week from the Benedictine tradition
started in Italy. They also were less
fixed in one place. In Benedictine monasticism,
you're not supposed to move, you're supposed to be stable, you're supposed to go through
the same routine everyday. The Irish favored
a more wandering existence and the establishment of
little communities or colonies far away. The Irish form of piety
emphasizes exile. It might be exile to a scary and almost unimaginable
kind of environment. There are, for example, lots of little islands in the Irish sea that seemed
to be uninhabitable. That is, if you look at
them from the tour boat, you see a lot of birds and
it's birders paradise. But in the middle of July, it's overcast, raining
and the sea is pounding. Then you notice, there are
little remnants of houses. Yeah. Question? Little caves where people in
the sixth and seventh century lived or the island is tiny, smaller than this building. It looks like 20 people
were living there. What are they living on? Well, poultry I guess. But this is a very severe
form of asceticism. The wandering also can mean, just holding up on some island or wandering around the European continent
and converting people. The Irish were
great missionaries both to England and to the continent and we'll be talking
about that some more. What about the Irish as
the saviors of civilization? A book published about eight, nine years ago, How
the Irish Saved Civilization, is like most such popular books, kind of overdone
and reductionist. It's not literally exactly true. But here again, as with England, we have a society that had
no Roman influence and yet had a highly developed tradition of learning,
preservation of Latin. In part, very good
knowledge of Latin because they didn't
think they spoke it. Remember, we said the people
in the former Roman Empire, it's hard to date the point
at which someone in Spain is no longer speaking Latin
but is speaking something that we can start
to call Spanish. In Ireland, the distinction
was quite clear. You had to learn
Latin in lessons. You had to go to class. You had to be taught Latin. So the Latin that was
taught was bookish. But for that, in
many respects, correct. Finally, the Irish celebrated Easter according to
a different calendar. So we refer to the Irish
or the Celtic church. We mean this more
decentralized church. The somewhat more wandering,
missionary church. A church that was
less hierarchical and less organized around bishops than that of its rival Rome. The story of the seventh
century in England is therefore partly the story of competition between paganism and Christianity and
flip-flopping between them and competition between Irish Christianity
represented by, for example, the Monastery of Iona in what's now
Scotland, I-O-N-A. The missions of St.
Aidan, A-I-D-A-N, whom Bede describes
with great sympathy even though he doesn't
agree with him. But the controversy really
centered ultimately or at least in an immediate
sense over Easter. At the Senate of Whitby in 664, it was decided to embrace the Roman calculation of Easter. With that, bishops, hierarchy, a more organized church. I have a lot of trouble with this Easter problem and
you will have noticed that I've evaded telling you exactly what
the calculations are. Some of you may know
much better than me. But the Jewish Passover is
established by lunar months. Christians wanted to break with Jewish tradition and celebrating Easter according to
a somewhat different calendar. So it combined lunar and
solar methods of calculation. Very complex operation therefore. In the year 455, Rome, that is to say the papacy, under our friend Leo the first, mission to the Huns, definition of
the two natures of Christ. Leo the first and Rome opted for a 19-year cycle of
calculating Easter. But the Celtic churches cut
off from the continent, remember we're in this post Roman world of
very little contact, kept an 84-year cycle. So in the seventh century when the Roman missionaries
had arrived again, you have two conflicting dates
for Easter every year. I mean, occasionally just as with the Orthodox and Catholic
Easters, they come together. So every so often they will
actually be the same Sunday, but generally
speaking, different. So you get these ludicrous scenes like King Oswiu of Northumbria celebrating Easter according to the Celtic tradition
and his wife, who was from Kent, celebrated it according
to the Roman tradition. So one Sunday was Celtic Easter and then the
next Sunday was Roman Easter. So it's not so much
that Easter is so important
intrinsically but it is a symbol of the embrace of the Roman form of
Christianity and the bringing of England into
an orientation more towards the continent than
towards the Celtic west. What is amazing,
as I said before, is how quickly once the
conversion takes place, England becomes not only integrated into the continent but a place of great
cultural accomplishment. The great archbishop
of Canterbury of this post Whitby era, Theodore, Archbishop
of Canterbury, 669 to 690, established
bishoprics, monasteries and endowed
them with books. Theodore is an
interesting character. He is actually from Syria. How somebody from Syria becomes
Archbishop of Canterbury, something that would
be very unlikely now, in the seventh century AD
is an aspect of some preservation
of the outlines of the cosmopolitan Roman world that we began the course with. There are a lot of
Syrian Popes at this time too. Syrian and Greek popes from
the Eastern Mediterranean. The first manuscript we have of the Bible as a single
manuscript, in other words, where all of the books of
the Bible are contained in the same volume is from
this place and this era, the so-called Codex Amiatinus. A magnificently decorated Bible, sent to the Pope in 716, written at Bede's
monastery of Jarrow. Now in Florence, at
Lorentzian library of Florence. It is decorated in this very distinctive style
that you all know, if not from courses, from Christmas cards and stuff. The Book of Kells is
the most famous example of this. This is the so-called insular style because
it's shared by both Celtic Ireland and
Anglo-Saxon England. Lots of intricate curlicues,
complicated animals, magnificent contrast of color, a kind of abstraction when
you first look at it. It looks like an oriental carpet. But in fact, if you look at
it a little more closely, you can see that all sorts of little intertwined animals or fantastic shapes and
colors within it. Questions? Problems?
We could spend an entire semester on England
but I think we've had at least a taste of its significance both
in its own right and as one more and rather
different aspect of the post Roman world that
we've been occupied with. I'll see you for
the exam on Monday.
