Page:VCH Norfolk 2.djvu/247

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY WHEN Christianity first took root in Britain, and under what cir- cumstances it was brought to our progenitors, and over what area its influence extended in Roman times, are subjects over which it is almost idle now to conjecture in the lack of any trustworthy information from written or monumental records. It is, how- ever, probable that when the Romans withdrew their legions from Britain at the beginning of the fifth century, Britain south of the Roman wall was a Christian land with an organized church, whose bishops — except perhaps in Wales — exercised their authority over certain territorial dioceses, whose clergy were not seldom men of learning and trained in dialectics, a church, too, which possessed a version of the Scripture differing from that Vulgate or generally accepted Latin version current among the Christian churches of Gaul with which it had relations on equal terms. Lastly, it was a church which had its monasteries with some schools or educational machinery, and some of these monasteries were supported by their own endowments such as they were.^ When in the latter half of the fifth century the Angles, from what is now Schleswig and Holstein, left their old homes, swarmed across the North Sea and settled down upon the coast of Norfolk, which became henceforth their home, it may safely be assumed that they found among the old occupiers some form of Christianity. They dispossessed those occupiers of their houses and lands, using some of them as slaves to tend their flocks and herds and to till the soil. The theory that a general obliteration of the old civilization ensued, along with a general sweeping away of all that stood tor religion and culture, though the prevalent theory at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is now accepted by very few. Religions die hard, are not easily stamped out, and often survive (even though few material ruins remain to attest their former existence) in the superstitions which defy extinction and live on. ' For much of what is asserted in the text the student is referred to Hadden & Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, , I, 120. Mommsen's edition of Gildas in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica cannot be accepted as final. The researches of Mr. Anscomb, ' St. Gildas of Ruys,' 1893, have necessitated a new edition, which I am told is preparing. Bp. Stubbs, writing to me in 1895, accepts Mr. Anscomb's date for the death of Gildas (some time before A.n. 554) as 'provisionally settling that point.' As to the monasteries and their existence as powerful institutions in the sixth century, they are taken for granted by Gildas, and — not to mention Glastonbury (on which see Freeman, Norm. Conq. [1-435]) — '^ <^'"^^ ^^^ '" the west there were still many of them at the end of the seventh century, which can only have been survivals from much earlier times. See the ' Life and Letters of St. Boniface,' Monumenta Moguntina Jaffce. 213