I recently visited the village of Ilam, near Dovedale, central England. Inside the church at Ilam (see photo showing the current porch entrance and, to the right, the stone outline of the earlier Anglo-Saxon entrance way) is a presentation of its Christian history. The site was first set apart for Christian worship during the 600/700s. In that period, a most dynamic Christian Awakening transformed the many pagan and fragmented Anglo Saxon small kingdoms. In the follow-through, they gradually united around their new found Christian Identity into the one Nation of the Christian English. Ilam would have been an early starter in the process. It was part of old Mercia back then (the Midlands of what became England). Noteworthy too: Mercia also came to control London. This blog recounts how Mercia in general and London in particular first embraced the Christian Awakening in the 600s.
Events actually took a most turbulent and dramatic course in Mercia. You wouldn’t think it now. At Ilam, for example, you find another quiet old church, with the usual old church smell and feel, and featuring a rather obscure Saint, one St Bertram. However, Mercia had been the most resolutely pagan of the small Anglo Saxon kingdoms. It had been more than disinterested in the Christian message: it had murderously opposed it. Between 633 and 655 its pagan King, Penda, became a serial killer of the first Christian Kings in the other small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
As I show you in my book, however, “The Mustard Seed”, the Christian God replied to Penda, seven times over. To highlight just two of the seven replies here, Penda’s family, and also his kingdom, embraced Christian Identity after Penda died. Whereupon Mercia, the powerful landlocked Kingdom which interlocked the many other small Kingdoms, went on to advocate the Christian Identity within those other Kingdoms. What became the Nation of the English coalesced around that Christian Identity. Mercia gave a hefty shove to the process.
As for London, the Christian message had not interested it. Although it had received a Latin Christian mission sent in from Kent in the early 600’s, it soon expelled it. London remained attached to pagan ways.
However, for Mercia in general, and London in particular, that all changed in the watershed year of 655. In that year King Penda of Mercia perished in battle with King Oswy of Northumbria. Whereupon King Oswy, temporarily the ruler in Mercia, sent the Saints Marching In to Mercia. These were the Anointed Brigade trained by the Gaelic Celt, St Aidan, at Lindisfarne (North East England). Mercia embraced their message of Christ. You can read how King Oswy came into this position in my book, “The Mustard Seed”, and also in the blog on this website, “655, King Oswy’s World Shaping Decision”.
Oswy also sent the Saints into London in 655. This had come into Mercia’s sphere of influence by then, and would come under its direct control in the 660’s. Oswy persuaded the King of London, Sigeberht, to receive missionary monks drawn from those trained at Lindisfarne in the Gaelic Celtic brand of Life in the Holy Spirit of the Christian God. One notable was St Cedd. Cedd, whose main base was at Lastingham in what is now North Yorkshire, became the first successful Christian evangelist to London. Interesting to note here: London responded not to the Christian ways of the Latins but rather to those derived from the proto-Scots (the Roman word for the Gaelic Celts was “Scoti”).
One cameo in Bede’s history of the times reveals how a strong presence of the Christian God was upon St Cedd in London. King Sigeberht, caught out in a transgression, prostrated himself at Cedd’s feet. The King had been supping with an adulterer who later became the King’s murderer. Keep away from him, Cedd had said to the King, saying it not as counsel but rather as command.
The conventional modern understanding of Cedd in this cameo tends to be “controlling church”. We should look more closely. We dislike the word “command” in modern times. We prefer the word, “counsel”. We might wish that Cedd had counselled rather than commanded. But … was Cedd’s command for his own power’s sake, therefore controlling? Or for the King’s good, therefore wise? It was a wise command as it turned out. Have nothing to do with someone who will become your murderer. Best given as a command, perhaps? Something urgently to be heeded?
Cedd, we can see, was a man who exercised a particular Gift of the Holy Spirit as promised by the Christian Bible, that is, he could accurately discern spirits: in this case, the spirit of a murderer. And he had no sword. He had a staff. The King had the sword. So the King had no reason to be controlled by Cedd. We might infer that there must have been a mighty presence of God upon Cedd, and the King was in awe of it. Interestingly, Bede tells us that London had joy in those days, which is a certain sign of Christian Awakening into Life in the Holy Spirit. So: “Controlling church”? Applied to later Medieval times, the label sometimes fits. But applied to the early Anglo Saxon times it does not. It hides the truth of our earliest Christian past: that the glory of God was at work within the proto-English origin times.
After Cedd’s time, during the later 660’s, the Kings of Mercia took over from King Oswy of Northumbria in appointing missionary Bishops into London. It is instructive to see the sort of persons they chose. Notwithstanding a long tradition of Mercia versus Northumbria rivalry, the bishops came out of Northumbria. Gaelic-rooted at first, they soon developed a Fusion Christian Identity as the more southerly part of Northumbria, centred on York, became progressively more influential in Mercia. York had gone through not one but two transformative Christian Awakenings. In 627, the Roman monk, Paulinus, had exercised Christian Revelatory ministry there. And between 635 and 651 the Gaelic St Aidan and his team had promoted Christian Revelatory and Miraculous ministry there. From its earliest times, York had taken to the prestigious ways of the mainland Roman church. But its inner spirituality had developed to draw upon both the best of Roman Christian spirituality and the best of the Gaelic Christian spirituality. This Fusion spirituality, mediated within the prestigious outer container of Roman Church forms, was what the Kings of Mercia began to promote. They took great care in the 660’s to appoint bishops to London who partook of it.
The next history-shaping steps were in the Midland heartlands of Mercia. Here, the great Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury took a hand. You can read about him at length in my book and within the blog “The Lost Nation Builder” on this website. Along with his number two at Canterbury, Abbot Hadrian, he added Greek and North African leadership into the developing Fusion Christian Identity. (You can read about this more fully in the blog on this website, “John of Beverley – Fusion Roots”.)
In 670 Theodore appointed the first Bishop of Mercia, St Chad, to Lichfield (which is quite near Ilam). Chad was Cedd’s brother, another product of Gaelic-Celtic-rooted Lindisfarne. Before coming to Lichfield, Chad had also spent time (a difficult time, but an instructive one) at York as a Bishop (with not quite authentic orders). Theodore made good his orders and sent him on to Lichfield in Mercia. Theodore seems to have admired the Gaelic Celtic way of Life in the Holy Spirit. He embedded it wherever he could in appointments of Bishops into the proto-national Church in proto-England.
Theodore was to go much further than this. The main political background to his time was generations-long warlike rivalry between Mercia in the Midlands and Northumbria in the North. Much overlooked by conventional histories, from 655 onwards Mercia began to embrace with open arms the Christian Life in the Holy Spirit which came out of Northumbria, initially from purely Gaelic sources, but soon from Fusion Christian York. And, from 663 onwards, the Fusion Christian ways of York also gained traction in all of Northumbria. So from 663 the two Kingdoms, below the surface, were developing a common Christian spirituality. Theodore capitalised on this to the maximum to develop ways of peace. In what may have been his Finest Hour, in 679, the great Archbishop finally brought the two powers to formal peace on the basis of that common Fusion Christian Identity.
It seems clear that this peace was the second major building block of what became England. The first one was in 635, when Saint King Oswald of Northumbria godfathered the ancestors of today’s UK royal family into Christian Identity in Wessex. You can read about Oswald at length in my book, and in the blog “Legend versus Reality, King Oswald versus King Arthur”. Interestingly, a phenomenal light over Oswald’s bones lit the night during the times when the powers of Mercia and Northumbria were coming to peace in 679. You can read a reasoned non-superstitious understanding of that in my book, “The Mustard Seed”.
Anyway, to come back to the main flow, Mercia would go on to advocate its Christian ways to the many small Kingdoms which it interlocked. However, as I also tell you in my book, as time went by it would become given to religiosity and power, outward forms without inward substance, more than to genuine Life in the Holy Spirit. In the longer run, the baton of genuine Christian Life in the Holy Spirit would pass from 878 to King Alfred the Great of Wessex and family. To them too would pass the power. Mercia would lose its power after it lost much of its genuine Christian spirituality.
However, this blog has not been about Mercia’s later decline. It has been about the pristine Christian spirituality of the 600’s. And those, in Mercia, were times of most amazing transformation.