Organization of the Church Theodore of Tarsus

As yet, however, the church in England had little organization or unity. Thus far each missionary and bishop had worked more or less by himself and in his own way. Everywhere there was need of some leader who should bind together the churches of the several kingdoms into a common whole. Such a man was found in Theodore of Tarsus, who in 669 was sent by the pope from Rome to Britain. There he remained for twenty-three years. " This was the first archbishop whom all the English church obeyed," says Baeda; and under him discipline was improved and many instances of faulty management were corrected. He introduced the system, already in use on the Continent, of doing penance for crimes committed. In the old days if one man killed another, he was liable to be killed himself by the relatives of the murdered man, but the church had already succeeded in substituting a payment of money for such injury. The new system went further, and said that a crime was a wrong done not only to the family or the tribe, but to God also, and was to be paid for not only by money, but by some act of penance, such as fasting, repeating prayers, going on a pilgrimage, or the like. This added very much to the power of the clergy over the people.

Theodore convoked synods of bishops, one at Hertford in 673 and another at Heathfield in 680, at which rules were laid down, to be obeyed by all the clergy. He increased the number of dioceses, of which there had formerly been but seven, and made the bishops more responsible than before for the management of them. He encouraged the clergy to study, to take good care of their parishes, and to enforce the law and discipline of the great church of which they were a part. The unity thus effected in the church prepared the way for unity among the different peoples and made easier the formation of an English nation.

Influence of the Church in England

The blossoming time of the English church was from 600 to 750. While the tribal peoples in the petty kingdoms were warring against one another, the church stood as the one great uniting force seeking to place the peoples on a common footing as brethren in Christ. While the mass of the English, often only half civilized, clung to many forms of their pagan life, the church slowly and patiently sought to teach them practices that were more humane and methods of life that were more refined, and so became a factor in civilization.

In the monasteries it provided peaceful centres where learning, art, agriculture, and the sciences were encouraged, and where refuge was provided for those who wished to withdraw from the confusion of the world about them. The first monastery was established at Canterbury by King thelbirht; others were founded by pious kings and nobles. By the middle of the eighth century, a score or more of monasteries possessing lands and rights over lands, conveyed in written charters, existed in England. In worship and discipline, following the rules laid down by Benedict of Nursia two centuries before, the monks maintained religious services, encouraged learning, and trained men in the practices of humility, charity, and obedience.

The monks also cleared the forests, drained the marshes, built roads and bridges, and in other ways improved the great stretches of land granted to them. In the cultivation of these lands they borrowed Roman customs from the great ecclesiastical estates of the Continent, and often forced the free cultivators upon the lands they controlled to render payments and perform labor that was servile in character.' Occasionally they erected buildings of stone, in which they put glass windows, bells, and other ornaments. They obtained manuscripts which they copied and illustrated, and imported workmen who made glass vessels and iron utensils. In general they brought Roman art, architecture, literature, and ideas to England. Thus upon the lands around the churches and monasteries arose a more advanced civilization than was to be found elsewhere in England. Because the records written down by the clergy are almost the only sources of our information, there is danger of ascribing to the people of other parts of England conditions of life that existed only on the ecclesiastical lands.

The men trained in the monasteries spread widely the influence of the English church. From the monastery of York went Wilfrith, and afterward from Ripon went Willibrord and twelve monks, to convert the Frisians. From Nutsell went the great Winfrith, better known as Boniface, who erected an archbishopric at Mainz and died a martyr among the Frisians in 755. From other monasteries went the brothers Hewald to labor among the Old Saxons, and Swidbert to labor among the Bructeri. The monasteries trained scholars as well as missionaries, men who had been inspired by Theodore of Tarsus to seek learning. By them schools were established, books gathered together, and works hitherto unknown made accessible to both clergy and laity. The most famous schools were at Jarrow and York in England itself. Among the learned men were Bishop Aldhelm, Baeda, the monk of Jarrow, to whose history of the English church we owe the greater part of our knowledge of the early history of England, and Alcuin, librarian of the school at York, who in 782 went to Aix-la-Chapelle and became the teacher of Charles the Great and the head of the palace school.'