St Augustine of Canterbury arrived from Rome in 597 to lead the first Christian mission to the Anglo Saxon peoples. The Pope who sent him, Gregory the Great, had long cherished the project. As the centuries went by, it succeeded beyond his imagining. The church Augustine founded, Canterbury Cathedral, grew to become the mother church of a worldwide Anglican Communion. Question, however: why was Augustine sent to start at Canterbury? Gregory would likely have preferred London.

The answer to the question is this: Ethelbert and Bertha. This blog has a brief look at their lives. My book “The Mustard Seed” gives them a whole chapter.

In those days there was no such thing as England (or Scotland, Ireland, Wales or France). In Celtic territories there were differing tribes. In Anglo Saxon territories there were small kingdoms each with its own King. The south eastern territory, Kent as we now call it, was one of those kingdoms. Ethelbert was the King of Kent in 597, and Bertha was its Queen. Their main base was Canterbury. Long story short, Kent was open to the Roman mission. Bertha in particular would have been a focal point, (i), for the mission to be received sympathetically, because she was already a dedicated Christian, and, (ii), for it to be given help as it made its way through Europe from Rome, because her family ruled the European territories through which Augustine’s team passed.

Bertha’s people were called Franks, root word of France. They ruled much of what is now France, but they were not Gallic or French as we now understand this. They were Germanic, and related to the Germanic Anglo Saxons of Kent by similar language, trade and roots. There was one profound difference however: whilst the Franks had become Christian – and Frankish Bertha was a most devoted Christian – the people of Kent had remained pagan. However, in 580, Bertha’s Frankish royal family entered into a marriage of alliance with royal Kent. Bertha was married to Ethelbert and moved to Kent. She was expressly permitted, (i) to continue to practice her Christian faith in Kent and, (ii), to be accompanied by a small team of monks to support her in that. So she and her team were already seventeen years worshipping and praying in Kent before Augustine came to Canterbury.

You can read the fuller story in my book, “The Mustard Seed”. Bertha would appear to have all but won her husband over by the time Augustine’s mission came to Kent, because Ethelbert was to bear the fruits of sincere Christianity from very shortly after it arrived. In those days Kent was the most influential of all the small Anglo Saxon kingdoms. Ethelbert sought to use his influence to spread the Christian message. He also became the first embodiment, in what became the English speaking world, of noble values of Christian kingship. His conversion was a world-history shaping moment, the beginning of an epic sequence of Christian conversions amongst the Kings in the next three generations. As to Bertha, she became a real-life “Mustard Seed”. Jesus Christ told a parable of the mustard seed: God’s kingdom, if nurtured by faith, would be like a mustard seed: tiny, it would grow to become the largest plant in the garden. And indeed, God’s kingdom, nurtured by Bertha’s faith, did become an originating seed of what grew into the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Three points to highlight here:

1. Events at Canterbury in 597 are sometimes called the “Birth” of Christian Identity in the Anglo Saxon world. In my book I say it would be more accurate to call them the “Conception” of it. Anglo Saxon Christian Identity would come to full-on Birth in 635, in the days of Saint King Oswald of Northumbria. You can see that in my book, “The Mustard Seed”. The book structures the story of the Anglo Saxon adoption of Christian Identity around the human growing up cycle: Conception (597), Gestation, Labour Pains, Birth (635), In the Nursery, Toddling, Loss of Innocence and Going Off to School (668-689 under Archbishop Theodore).
2. Bertha’s Frankish people had a great hero Saint: St Martin of Tours. Martin had similar abundant Life in the Holy Spirit of the Christian God to that which Jesus Christ had deposited in the Apostle Paul. It was through Martin that this descended to what became the West after the fall of Rome. He and his spiritual descendants rescued western civilisation, no less. Bertha’s small first church in Canterbury was dedicated to him. It exists to this day, continuously in use for Christian worship since 580. You can still enter Bertha’s tiny mustard seed of a sanctuary. It is now a World Heritage Site. The point is this: practically every small kingdom of the Anglo Saxons came to Christian Identity through spiritual descendants of St Martin. (See my earlier Blog, “Restoring Bede”.) The Celtic Saints who evangelised the north and midlands descended from him spiritually. Because of this, I call them “Martinian”. The Frankish clerics who evangelised the east, south east and south west were Martinian as well. So: the Martinian way of Life in the Holy Spirit of the Christian God – authentic, profound, sparky – is what came to the Anglo Saxons. That is what they received so warmly. St Augustine, en route to Canterbury, went not once but twice via the monastery most associated with passing it on (see again, “Restoring Bede”). And once Augustine arrived, we can deduce from letters by Pope Gregory the Great that, (i), Augustine had the sort of miracle ministry you would expect if the Apostle Paul’s scriptures about Life in the Holy Spirit are true, and, (ii) he became the focal point of what modern Protestant Christians would now call an Awakening. These points of Gregory’s were included by Bede in his more general history of the times. So: a most dynamic stream of Martinian Life in the Holy Spirit of the Christian God came to the Anglo Saxons from north, south and east. Bertha was its initiating seed-bearer. Augustine came in the power of it to the Canterbury base that her team had made a bridgehead.
3. The original Canterbury Cathedral was founded by St Augustine of Canterbury in 602, by the gift of Ethelbert and in the time of Bertha. It lasted to 1067. The present Cathedral building began again from 1070 and is a World Heritage Site. Once you know what to look for, you can see that past generations planted Ethelbert and Bertha firmly into it. They are in, (i), a sculpted frieze of royal figures dating to 1450 – Ethelbert has the pole position. (ii), in Victorian glass, dating to 1897, in the Chapter House – Bertha has the pole position. (iii), in Victorian statues welcoming you into the building either side of the south west entrance, in equal position. These statues are pictured to accompany this blog, Ethelbert holding a model of the original Cathedral, Bertha displaying a cross on her shoulder. The ancestors seem to have known in 1450 and in 1897 that Ethelbert and Bertha were of first importance in history. Modern scholarship appears to have mislaid them. Time to recover them again in our own times, I think. It is worth doing so. Because Ethelbert and Bertha’s fuller story, once you dig into it, and as you can read in “The Mustard Seed”, is a delight.