could, converting King Æthelberht of Kent (who, through his Christian wife Bertha, a Frankish princess, must have known a great deal about Christianity already), and setting up his see in a town in Æthelberht's kingdom, Canterbury: a town, that is, in the sense of being enclosed by Roman walls, though in 597 it was, like other Roman towns in Britain, no more than a collection of ruins inhabited, perhaps, by a few Anglo-Saxon farmers. The final achievement of the Gregorian mission was the founding of an episcopal see in York in 627, and the baptism of Edwin of Northumbria by Paulinus, the last of the missionaries sent by Gregory. But Edwin's successors apostatized, and Paulinus had to flee back to Kent. Iona and Lindisfarne took over from Rome and Canterbury as the driving forces behind the conversion of the English. This caused some problems, notably in the area of church customs. In the mid-seventh century northern Irish clerics (but no longer those from southern Ireland) calculated Easter according to an outmoded system, and wore tonsures which possibly owed more to druidic practice than to Roman precedent. The settlement of the dispute which arose, in Rome's favour, at Whitby in 664 did not end the influence of the Irish Church. English clerics went to Ireland for their education, and brought back books from Irish monasteries. The new connections with Rome, however, made it possible for the English Church to have the best of both worlds. The Northumbrian nobleman Benedict Biscop made four expeditions to Rome, collecting books there and in Gaul for his twin monastic foundation of Jarrow and Monkwearmouth. This monastery had probably the best stocked library in northern Europe; it is not surprising that in the early eighth century it produced northern Europe's greatest teacher and scholar, the Venerable Bede.

By the 680s all the English kingdoms had been nominally converted, and Anglo-Saxon kings were beginning to enforce Christianity by law. The Church had been reorganized under the vigorous rule of the elderly imported Syrian, Theodore of Canterbury, and seemed now secure. The energies of its more idealistic clergy began to turn outwards, and to think of the souls of their Germanic cousins on the Continent. Wihtberht

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