Well, when those who were becoming the French blessed those who were becoming the English.
I recently found myself in the Church of St Vedast in Foster Lane, London. There was a large glass window featuring Clovis 1st, 466-511, King of the Franks. (The photos show the church of St Vedast with a close-up of this magnificent stained glass representation of Clovis 1st and his wife and queen, Chlotilde). I refer to Clovis in my book, “The Mustard Seed”, in the chapter about St Martin of Tours. I had not come across St Vedast before. Vedast was a Gallic missionary bishop to the Franks. In those days the Franks were one of many Germanic tribes invading Gaul, what we now call France. In 496, Vedast prepared the Frankish Clovis 1st for Christian baptism. The descendants of Clovis became the Merovingian dynasty and ultimately the royal house of the French.
Once Christian life had become established amongst the Franks, they sent their most gifted missionary bishops to the still-pagan Anglo Saxons. Most notably, in 635 the Frankish Bishop Birinus prepared the royal family of Wessex for Christian baptism. That family eventually became the royal house of the English. So: the Christian best in the proto-French Franks descended to bless the proto-English Anglo Saxons. A great irony, for those brought up in a modern world of innate Anglo-French rivalry.
Both nations, the French and the English, grew up out of adopting Christian ways. The Franks assimilated with Latin and Gallic Christian ways. The Anglo Saxons morphed into the English through multi-ethnic Christian inputs: Latin, Frankish, Gaelic, Greek and North African. The blog “John of Beverley Fusion Roots” shows you the process. This blog tells you more about the Frankish stream in the Christian Fusion. It is important to remember that in the early days the two people groups, Frank and Anglo Saxon, had yet to become French and English. They had common Germanic heritage of ancestry, language, culture and mutual trade.
Now, you can’t recover the Christian heritage which descended from the Franks without finding that many of their rulers, despite their bearing the label of “Christian”, were a gift to Horrible History. If you want to give the children a sense of easy superiority to the past, the Frankish rulers are a gift that keeps on giving. Clovis 1stwas a brutal ruler emerging from a brutal culture. His male descendants, although labelled Christian, were lecherous and violent.
Therefore, we must remember the realism of Jesus Christ here. The good seed and the bad seed, said he in parable, will grow together until the end of the age. Only he, Jesus Christ, has authority to sort it out once and for all, and only when the time comes. Until then, in uprooting the bad you may also uproot the good. Very frustrating. But until then the Bible makes it crystal clear that what matters is not the relative righteousness of the Kings but whether the Christian light which is put on the lampstand of their culture is true or false.
In this respect, the Franks received two prodigious gifts.
Firstly, they had their Christian culture by spiritual descent from St Martin of Tours. Truthful Christian understanding descended into the West via St Martin. He had that same Life in the Holy Spirit of the Christian God as had been in Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul. For Clovis and all his descendants, however dissolute they became, St Martin remained their enduring cultural hero. St Vedast, coming a hundred years after St Martin as the first Christian instructor of the Franks, was also of a Christian culture that descended spiritually from St Martin. This is important. In those times, many of the Germanic tribes were receiving a corrupted form of Christian understanding called Arianism. The Franks, however, because their Christian ways descended from St Martin, received a truthful form of Christian understanding. It was the light on the lampstand of their culture. Their Kings may have struggled to keep integrity with it. But enough of the Frankish Queens had sufficient integrity with it to make a difference. And amongst the Frankish males, so too did enough of their earlier missionary bishops. (In my book “The Mustard Seed” I explain the difference between Arian and Christian.)
Secondly, coming out of Ireland in 596, a hundred years after St Vedast had first taught Clovis 1st, a fiery Pictish Celtic Saint made a profound impact on the Christian spirituality of the Franks. His name was St Columbanus (not Columba). He was another spiritual descendant of St Martin. Founding new monasteries in Frankish territory, he reinforced truthful Christian doctrine and Life in the Holy Spirit amongst those Frankish missionary males who did have Christian integrity. The reinforcement was greatly needed at the time. A generation later, there emerged, from the ways reinforced by Columbanus, Bishop Felix of East Anglia and Bishop Birinus of Wessex. Both of them made a nation-shaping impact on Early English history. Of that, more shortly.
Before that, for lovers of irony, or those who like to trace what Christians might call God’s Providence, St Columbanus would quite likely have shaken the dust off his feet at the then-pagan Anglo Saxons. He never encountered them. However, the Franks whose Christian spirituality he reinforced did; and when they did, the pagan Anglo Saxons loved the Holy Spirit Life that Columbanus had reinforced in them. Then again, St Columbanus was criss-crossing Frankish territory in 596 whilst St Augustine of Canterbury was also on a long journey through Frankish territory on the first Christian mission to the Anglo Saxons, travelling from Rome to Canterbury. They never met.
Now, I will highlight nine Frankish Christians whose legacy combined into a transforming impact on the Anglo Saxons. Five Queens: Clotilde, Ingoberg, Bertha, Ethelburgha, Eanflaed; and four Bishops: Liudhard, Felix, Birinus, Leuthere. All except Ingoberg are recovered in my book “The Mustard Seed”
Queen Clotilde of the Franks was the wife of Clovis 1st. She was the great grandmother of Queen Bertha of Kent. She was also the starter link in a long and history shaping chain of royal female Frankish Christians. Clotilde was a forthright Christian while Clovis was a pagan. In a battle he was losing, Clovis called on that Jesus Christ who Clotilde insisted was the only worthwhile God. The battle turned his way in remarkable circumstances. He agreed to be baptised. The preparer for baptism in 496 was St Vedast. Vedast seems to have done a good job: many of Clovis’s court converted as well.
Queen Ingoberg of Paris was the wife of a grandson of Clovis, Charibert. She was also the mother of Queen Bertha of Kent. Charibert had many vices. Ingoberg was probably relieved when he put her out to grass in the Loire Valley, well away from his wicked ways in Paris. It was she who had Bertha brought up with her there in Christian devotion. It was also she who insisted – a world history shaping insistence – that the young Bertha should be permitted to continue to practice her Christian faith upon marriage of alliance to the pagan Anglo Saxon King Ethelbert of Kent.
Queen Bertha of Kent features in a separate blog on this website, “Ethelbert and Bertha, time to recover their story”. In my book “The Mustard Seed” I single out the tiny seed of her Christian faith as that which grew into the worldwide Anglican Communion. She was the reason that St Augustine of Canterbury was sent to Canterbury from Rome when Pope Gregory the Great, sending the mission, might have preferred London. Bertha had several generations of dedicatedly Christian female descendants, including the next two named here.
Queen Ethelburgha of Northumbria was the half-Frankish Kentish daughter of Anglo Saxon Ethelbert and Frankish Bertha. She features in my book “The Mustard Seed” in the chapters that I call the “Gestation” and “Labour Pains” of the birth of Christian Identity in the Anglo Saxons. On marriage to King Edwin of Northumbria in 624, she went North with the Latin monk Paulinus, from the old team of St Augustine of Canterbury. In 627 Paulinus became the focal point of a Christian Awakening in the North. One would imagine that in the three years of 624 to 627 the prayers and Christian testimony of Ethelburgha would have done much to pave the way.
Queen Eanflaed of Northumbria was the daughter of Anglo Saxon King Edwin and half-Frankish Queen Ethelburgha. As a new born, she was actually the first to be baptised in Northumbria. As a child she was a refugee in Kent: following the death of Edwin in battle in 633, her mother fled with her back to Kent. Eanflaed therefore grew up in the Christian ways of Kent, not Northumbria. Kent’s were an amalgam of Latin spirituality reinforced with Frankish, Roman in outward expression. Grown up, after 642 King Oswy of Northumbria took Eanflaed as his wife, so she went back North again. Interestingly, Oswy when aged five, and Eanflaed when aged seven, had both been child refugees, he at Iona amongst the Gaelic Celtic Christians, she in Kent. Anyway, in those days there was some tension in Northumbria between the outwardly different expressions of Christian worship deriving from Rome on the one hand and from the Gaelic Celts on the other. Oswy, product of Iona, favoured the Gaelic, as mediated out of Lindisfarne. Eanflaed, product of Kent, favoured the Roman. There were also two different political power bases in the North: Bamburgh, near Lindisfarne, power base of Oswy; and York. Eanflaed’s father, Edwin, had been of York. Bamburgh was partisan for the Gaelic Christian outward forms. York was partisan for the Roman Christian outward forms. Therefore, as you can read in the blog “Easter Dating – Unintended Consequences”, in 663 King Oswy called a conference at Whitby to sort out the various tensions that were emerging. As I show you more fully in my book “The Mustard Seed”, the decisions Oswy took there had consequences for building what became England: he steered Northumbria away from the purely Gaelic and into the York-ish Fusion Christian identity around which the rest of the proto-English were developing. As to Eanflaed in all this, behind the scenes at Whitby there was a key influence at work to promote both the conference and the outcome: Queen Eanflaed: more Frankish than Anglo Saxon in her ways, I would say. Interesting again to think that two child refugees, Oswy and Eanflaed, brought up in different forms of outward Christian expression, had so much impact in shaping a nation which grew up around a Fusion of different forms of Christian expression.
Bishop Liudhard was the chaplain bishop of Queen Bertha of Kent. He came to Canterbury with Bertha in 580, along with a small team of monks, to help Bertha maintain Christian devotion faithfully amongst the pagan Anglo Saxons. This was upon her marriage to King Ethelbert of Kent. I suspect Liudhard must have been most impressive behind the scenes. Ethelbert was very ready to convert to Christian Identity by 597. It would not have been solely down to Bertha. Liudhard’s ways can be inferred to have impressed the warrior-culture King Ethelbert. He would also have given much Christian instruction to Bertha.
Bishop Felix was the Frankish missionary bishop to the East Angles from 634. I say more about him in “The Mustard Seed”, in the chapter about the “Birth” of the Christian Identity in the Anglo Saxons. He became one of the three great Awakeners of that in 635. His king there was Sigeberht. Sigeberht was a son of semi-pagan semi-Christian King Raedwald, who is probably in the Sutton Hoo burial. In exile amongst the Franks, Sigeberht had converted to their more truthful Christian ways, as derived from St Martin and reinforced by St Columbanus. Bishop Felix, product of the same, was displaced by political upheaval in Frankish Burgundy in 634. He made his way to Canterbury in hope of finding new work. At that time, Sigeberht just so happened to send to Canterbury to see if they could send him a bishop to help with evangelising and educating his people. Canterbury sent Felix. He and Sigeberht hit it off. Felix’s ministry became as successful as his name, which means “Happy”.
Bishop Birinus was the Frankish missionary bishop to Wessex from 634. I say more about him in “The Mustard Seed” chapter about the “Birth” of the Christian Identity in the Anglo Saxons. He became another of the three great Awakeners of that in 635. (The third was St Aidan in Northumbria, a Gaelic Celt from Iona). I say more about Birinus in the book and in the blog, “Bishop Birinus – Light in the Darkness”. Arguably, Birinus had the most history shaping impact of all the Franks I recover here. Teaming up with Saint King Oswald of Northumbria (central hero of my book, and see the blog “Legend versus Reality, King Arthur versus King Oswald”), it was Birinus who led the ancestors of the UK royal family into Christian Identity. That happened as part of a treaty between Northumbria and Wessex which became the first building block of England. The spiritual root of Birinus is uncertain, but I think he would have been of the same stream as Felix.
Bishop Leuthere was a Frankish bishop in Wessex between 670 and 676. He was one of those at the heart of things when the Greek Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury set up the proto-national church around which the Early English coalesced into one nation. There were two important and much overlooked things about Leuthere. I explain them more fully in my book, but briefly here as well. (i) He got the Wessex church overseen from Canterbury rather than, as it had been in the time of Birinus, from the Frankish mainland. That became a key step for unitary nation building. (ii) The Wessex kings in his time were wobbly in their Christian ways. And Wessex was chaotic politically for many generations. Leuthere, however, built a non-wobbly way of church which carried Wessex through all manner of trouble and backslidings for generations until the great non-wobbly Christian royals of Wessex between 878 and 927 – Alfred the Great, Aethelflaed the Lady of the Mercians, and Athelstan – prevailed through great troubles to found the nation of the Christian English. You can read about that process in my book, and about Aethelflaed and Athelstan in the blog “The Making of England, a Lady’s Dying Prayer”. However, my point here is a simple one: No Leuthere, no enduring Christian kingdom of Wessex to found the nation of the English in 927.
So, the Frankish kings were a gift to Horrible History. One or two of the Frankish Queens were Hallowe’en Queens. But what remarkable Christian blessings descended from the Franks, the proto-French, to shape the real world history of the Anglo Saxons, the proto-English. Truly, as Jesus Christ taught, the good and the bad seed grow together until the end. It is the fashion of our times to dwell on the bad seed. But how much more rewarding and uplifting it is to recover the good seed. The good seed in the Christian Franks was Life in the Holy Spirit of the Christian God. Building upon what was first planted by St Vedast, it was sown into the founding times of not one but two nations. In the real world.