IN BRITAIN BEFORE AUGUSTINE

By The Late Robert Simpson

MOST ordinary folk seem to think it was Augustine, the monk; sent here by Pope Gregory in AD597, who brought Christianity to Britain; a few have heard of earlier churches in places like Cornwall, Scotland and Wales, without asking how they came to be there, or for that matter how they failed to continue as places of Christian worship, when the present buildings came to be erected. Others believe that whatever Christianity there may have been in Britain before Augustine, had all been wiped out by the invading Saxons and so had to start all over again.

This is more or less the idea Augustine intended to establish in Britain because of the British dislike and rejection of his autocratic teaching about the then comparatively recent claims of the Bishop of Rome to supremacy and of his own arrogance. Many have never heard that it was Augustine himself who instigated the hostilities between the Saxons and the British. It may be discovered in the nearly contemporary account of this imposture given in Ecclesiastical History by Bede, the Venerable monk of Jarrow whose disclosures are most enlightening (Bk.ll .ch.ii). It is not generally appreciated that there were Saxons settled in Kent, even during the Roman occupation and although most of the seafaring tribes had fled to the Baltic and Scandinavian regions to escape the domination of the Caesars, their return to Britain was a natural sequence to the collapse of the Empire; and their hitherto peaceful relations might never have been disturbed had Augustine not seized upon the stratagem of kindling Saxon hostility to implement his aggressive designs for Roman Ecclesiastical supremacy over the British Church.

Even in Canterbury, when King Ethelbert first permitted Augustine to preach to the pagan Saxons, and to repair churches, there was already a Christian church acknowledged to have been built while the Romans were still in the island – St. Martins, where King Ethelbert’s Christian wife worshipped – so why was it necessary to build another almost next door? Some think that Augustine was out to boss in the name of Papal supremacy, and to crush British opposition by every means at his disposal. His church was to be The Cathedral, and he himself Britain’s Archbishop with Papal approval.

The Church established in Britain, as found by Augustine, was better known in those days, than it is today; and but for the damaging effect of Roman Ecclesiastical influence, there might never have been need of a Reformation.

Among the early, pre-Augustine Christian records, some very significant evidence may be found: indeed right up to the time of the Reformation generally accepted authorities unhesitatingly relate Britain’s very early acceptance of Christ’s teaching.

Some of these records are listed in the following table:

When Paul was acquitted after appealing to Rome, he extended his excursions into other countries, including the islands surrounded by the sea.

(l)This was how Roman writers generally referred to Britain.

(2) Delegates, list not entire, British names missing; but British assent recorded.

WELSH SOURCES

Welsh sources yield considerable evidence which, however, is not so easily appreciated. A knowledge and understanding of the history of these islands during the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era is an almost indispensable framework; and a careful assessment of the influences and conflicts which unsettled the period between the invasions of Julius Caesar and the Reformation is also important. Most of our histories begin with Julius Caesar and continue with a predominantly Roman Catholic flavour. One needs to be something of a detective to discover the logical inconsistencies in many of the writings upon which we have been accustomed to rely for so long and for so many of our misguided ideas of British beginnings.

It was Caesar himself, however, who recorded that the education system of Ancient Britain was so celebrated that the sons of nobility in Gaul (France) were sent there for learning; and what is more, he remarks the difficulty of stamping it out, in order to impose his own control, because the Britons committed everything to memory, using writing, in
Greek, only for special purposes. The practice of oral tradition has long been held in contempt by those who hoped to monopolise the commitment of learning to Latin; but there is all the difference between whispering a rumour around the village, and the method of the British Bards who arranged essentials in Triads or verse and made a song about it. Bards toured the country with these songs, holding conventions, parties at which everyone learned the songs and continued to sing them among their families and friends and neighbours until their meaning and significance was thoroughly understood.

When it is realised that these Triads and songs were not committed to writing until long after Christianity had replaced the Druidic faith, and indeed not until the Roman system of Christian writing reached Britain with Augustine, when there was a dangerous threat that learning would be confined to those who owed allegiance to the Papacy, and acquired it in the form and manner prescribed by Papal authority, was there any serious attempt by the Welsh to preserve their knowledge in native writing.

Unfortunately there is very little of this original writing left to assist us. The hostility of the Roman Church to anything of Celtic origin, whether written or not was, and indeed still is, so intense that unless there are some secret hiding places which escaped the fires of the enemy and still remain to be discovered, almost all we have left are what purport to be Latin translations by Roman Catholic monks of now lost originals, some of which Latin versions have been retranslated back into Welsh. Latin and Welsh are not the most compatible of languages and in some cases several centuries elapsed between the translations, so that unless one can see through the plot, and recognise the truth amidst the misrepresentation, study in this field is apt to be very confusing.

Among the earliest surviving Welsh manuscripts, there is general agreement on a number of significant points that shows their universal acceptance. Thesemainly concern the eastern characteristics of the primitive faith of British Christians; its having first reached here direct from Jerusalem by sea; its national establishment by Lucius; the antiquity of Glastonbury and Llandaff even when Augustine arrived; and the close association of the British Royal Family,during their captivity in Rome, with the Apostle Paul.

Glastonbury and Llandaff have both come in for the Papal treatment but Glastonbury came under Roman ecclesiastical influence considerably earlier than Llandaff, so the veneer of superstition and ritual grandeur has cluttered the simplicity of its true beginnings worse than those of Wales.

A characteristic of ancient British Bardic records is that they were not chronologically arranged as in the classical Roman order now generally adopted. The Ancient British, rather like the Hebrews, thought in terms of families, genealogically and ideologically, and to arrive at dates is sometimes very difficult. To believers in eternity, and the Druids certainly believed in this, nothing was more important than the truth about life. Time was not so important as people, or even as events; so one of their methods of commemorating was a grouping of comparable characters, events, etc. in threes, called Triads: and there is an interesting example concerning the introduction of Christianity to Britain, among the historical triads (Triads of the Isle of Britain, Series 3 No.35) which, translated, runs thus:

The three blessed princes of the Isle of Britain:

First: Bran the Blessed, son of Llyr Llediaith, who first brought the faith of Christ to the Cambrians from Rome, where he had been seven years a hostage for his son Caradog (Caractacus), whom the Romans put in prison, after being betrayed …

Second: Lleirwg, (Lucius) son of Coel, son of St. Cyllin, called Lleuver the Great (i.e. the Great Light), who built the first church in Llandaff, which was the first in the Isle of Britain. and who gave the privilege of country and tribe, with civil and ecclesiastical rights to those who professed faith in Christ.

Third: Cadwaladyr the Blessed, who gave protection, within his lands and within all his possessions, to the Christians who fled from the infidel and lawless Saxons who wished to murder them.

According to the Liber Landavensis (Sectn.l,Ch.ii), and to the Venerable Bede (Eccles. Hist. Bk.l, iv), Lucius was King of Britain in AD156. There are other sources which suggest the date should be 167 or even 176, so the latter half of the second century AD is a reasonable approximation. His responsibility for establishing Christianity in Britain on a National basis was pleaded at the Councils of Pisa (AD 1417), Constance (1419), and Sena against France and Spain, in evidence for precedence, and Britain’s claim was accepted and confirmed.

The first Christian Church in London is also attributed to Lucius. There used to be an inscription in the vestry of St. Peter’s upon Cornhill commemorating the event in AD179, and stating also that Lucius was crowned King in AD124, and that he reigned 77years.

The betrayal and capture of Caradog with his family occurred circa AD54. Their return, therefore, after seven years of captivity in Rome would be circa AD61, just about the time of the massacre of the Druids in Anglesey which roused the whole country to revolt under Boadicea. By AD86 the Roman army had withdrawn the second time to the continent, and it was not until AD120 that Hadrian incorporated Britain with the Roman dominions, by treaty whereby the Britons retained their kings, land laws and rights and accepted a Roman nucleus of the army for defence of the realm: these local kings and princes being obliged to serve as lieutenants of the Roman Emperor.

For the Christian Faith to have been held in regions of Britain not penetrated by Roman arms, as authoritatively stated by Tertullian, Bishop of Carthage, AD192-198, either the Gospel had preceded the invading forces, or it had taken root in isolated places able to preserve a remarkable independence unnoticed by the annalists. Lack of enemy intelligence, however, detracts nothing from the validity of native tradition that Faith in Christ was first introduced to Britain in Somerset and Glamorgan. Add to this the fact that the west of Britain was wide open to the sea over which, ever since the BronzeAge, there were lines of direct communication with the Mediterranean, and light begins to lift the fog of plausible objections.

Dorotheus, Bp. of Tyre, AD300 tells us Simon Zelotes preached, was crucified slain and buried in Britain. The date of his martyrdom was AD74 and crucifixion was a peculiarly Roman practice, unknown to British Law. He must, therefore, wherever he landed, have been preaching in occupied territory, and this is borne out by tradition which sites his
martyrdom at Caistor in Norfolk.

These are very early years. The Church was in its infancy, and any evidence at all from an environment as hostile as all Rome against Britain a must be something of a pearl in the ocean. It may be interesting, therefore, and perhaps of more importance than generally realised, to refer to a couple of monumental relics: one in Scotland and the other in Wales.

At Whithorn in SW Scotland, near where Ninnian built the church of St. Martins in the fourth century, there has been found a rough stone pillar, about four feet high and fifteen inches wide. bearing a Latin inscription in debased Roman capitals, which, translated reads: “The Place of Peter the Apostle”. Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, AD320 declares
unequivocally that “the Apostles” came to Britain. Perhaps from his plural we should understand Peter was included. I believe it was Cornelius, a Lapide, a Roman Catholic, commenting on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (c.xvi), who answered the question why Paul did not salute Peter, by saying: “Peter, banished with the Jews from Rome by the Edict of Claudius, was absent in Britain” – a reason probably weightier than his credentials.

The other monument concerns Conbelin (Conubelinus or Kimble), who has left his name in the Chiltern villages adjoining Chequers. He was king of Britain in AD15-40, the early period of hostilities with Rome, before the election of Caradog (Caractacus) to the supreme command of the British forces. Yet at Margam Abbey in the vicinity of the
ancient Christian College settlement of Cor-Eurgain, traditionally founded by Eurgain, the eldest daughter of Caradog, at LIan LIid (LIantwit Major, near St. Athans, Glamorgan), a Celtic Wheel-cross stood (I) to the memory of Conbelin, whose conversion must, therefore have occurred before AD40.This is so early that very little room is left even for speculation. Someone must have brought here the Good News of Christ at least twenty-one years before Caradog and his family returned with it.

[Note: The ancient site of Margam Abbey is now occupied by the recently erected giant steel plant in consequence of which this great wheelcross together with numerous other early commemorative stones from the same site will now be found safely in Margam Abbey Museum. There is also a replica of Conbelin’s Cross in the National Museum of Wales Cardiff]

Gildas, who wrote De Excidio Britanniae about half a century before Augustine’s arrival, is sometimes called the British historian. He was about the only writer of contemporary British events and conditions in this period; but he spent most of his time in France and wrote in Latin. His work is rather a lament than a history and has come in for more than a fair share of criticism. Our reason for citing him here, however, is that in the course of his recollections of the heights from which the Romans and their boasted civilisation had degraded us, before abandoning us to their own foes. he tells us that: “We certainly know that Christ, the True Son, afforded His Light, the knowledge of His precepts. to our
island in the last year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar”. And that was AD37. Who then could possibly have brought this Great Light to Britain? The options are minimal by any standard, but carried back to the period of anti-Christian fury which preceded the conversion of Saul they are slender indeed; and the question might well be asked: Why could it NOT be that very fury which tradition associates with the casting away in a boat without sails or oars those very disciples from Jerusalem who are said to have reached Britain from Marseilles?

As for dismissing this matter as myth invented or perpetrated by John Foxe (1): what about the recorded affirmation of the Council of Constance. AD1419 ?A clear century before Foxe was born! that: “The churches of France and Spain were bound to give way in the points of antiquity and precedency to the Church of Britain, which was founded by Joseph of Arimathea immediately after the passion of Christ” (“statim post passionem Christi”) (2)

(l) Vide Alan Kreider’s contribution on John Foxe in LION History of Christianity, p.19

(2) An account of the pleadings at the Council of Constance will be found in a thin quarto, Disceptatio super Dignitatem Angliae at Galliae in Concilio Constantiano, Theod. Martin, (Lovar 1517).

ACCEPTATIONS

Besides pre-Augustine testimony, native British traditions. Bardic records, monuments and Church Council rulings, there is overwhelming acceptance by well-known authorities on both sides of the Reformation that the Christian Church was established in Britain ages before Augustine. The following is but a short selection:

• Polydore Virgil, Parliamentary address to Philip and Mary, AD 1555: “Britain was the first of all countries to receive the Christian faith.”

• Gilbert Genebrard, a Benedictine professor of Hebrew in Paris, who went to the Priory of Semur, Burgundy where he wrote a Sacred Chronology. He died AD1597:
“The glory of Britain consists not only in this, that she was the first country which in a national capacity publicly professed herself Christian, but that she made this confession when the Roman Empire itself was Pagan and a cruel persecutor of Christianity.”

• Bp. Godwin, LIandaff and Hereford, 1562-1633.

• Arch. Bp. Ussher, 1550-1613.

• Sir Henry Spelman, 1564-1647.

• Bp.Edw.Stillingfleet 1635-1699

• Michael Alford, 1587-1652.

• Hugh Paulinus Cressy, English Benedictine, Fellow of Merton Col., Canon of Windsor, published Church Hist: 1668, Rouen. etc.

Incidentally, John Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs, records Simon Zelotes making many converts in Britain. and being crucified by the Pagans in AD74. So why has the writer on John Foxe in the LION History of Christianity, nothing to say about this?