A History of the Church of England; Pre-Reformation Period (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. THE ORGANISATION AND LEARNING OF THE EARLY ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. The very name Anglo-Saxon is objected to, and in some sense rightly, by some of our leading historians. They urge that the term is misleading, as though the people whom we thus style were not our bone and our flesh. Did they not, it is asked, call themselves the English people ? Are not we, by inheritance of race, of customs, and of language, the same and not another nation ? All this may be true, and yet the prevalence of the name may imply a certain convenience in its use. And surely in speaking of the Church of England after the Conquest, we find it separated from the Church before the Conquest by sufficiently conspicuous distinctions. It is, therefore, at least a matter of convenience and clearness to retain a nomenclature which marks off a defined period of history. The present chapter will deal with the principal events in the history of the early Saxon-Church during the century and a-half which followed its missionary stage of existence. During that time it passed from the first fervour of conversion, and the first excitement of the novelties of before unexplored knowledge, into coldness, laxity, and indifference. There will be found here no complete chronicle of events, but a summary account only of the leading circumstances and personages, from the missionary epoch of the Church until the approx- PAPAL CHOICE OF AN ARCHBISHOP. 63 imate union of the Saxon tribes under Egbert early in the ninth century. After the death of Honorius, the last of the early Italian archbishops of Canterbury, a West Saxon, named Frithona, who assumed the appellation Deusdedit, was appointed to the Metropolitan See, 655. He died in 664, the date usually assigned to the Council at Whitby, which united the...