Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/295

Rh EFFECTS OF THE CONVERSION.] ENGLAND 281 which was then usual in Italy, churches of brick or stone with round arches. Sometimes a Roman ruin was still able to be repaired ; more commonly it supplied materials for a new building. Vheii the tall bell-towers came into fashion in Italy, they were imitated in England also. Thus arose, in England as elsewhere, that early round- arched style, based directly on Italian models, which formed the usual style of all western Europe till the eleventh cen tury. The art of those days was mainly ecclesiastical. Houses were commonly, most likely always, of wood till the coining of the Normans. The Roman military works seem hardly to have been imitated till the great tera of forti fication in the tenth century. With the new religion the land received a wholly new class of mankind, utterly unknown to the heathen Teutons, the class of men and women devoted to the religious life. Monasticisni forms a marked feature in some pagan systems ; but it had no place in the old Teutonic religion. We had not so much as anything that answered to the virgins of Vesta. But Teutonic monasticism took a charac ter of its own. Monasteries became private inheritances ; the distinction was not always very accurately drawn between the ordained monk and the secular priest, between the unordained monk and the layman. Celibacy was doubtless essential to the very laxest form of the monastic life ; but we shall look in vain in the early monasteries of England for any very strict observance of the rule of Saint Benedict. There was room however in them alike for the ascetic scholarship of Breda and for the ruder zeal which led a crowd of men and women of all ranks, among them kings daughters and even reigning kings, to forsake the world to embrace the religious life. A large proportion of the native saints of the English calendar were supplied by those kingly houses whose pride had once been to be sprung of the blood of the gods of heathendom. This last idea had of course wholly to change its shape under the influence of the new faith. The pedigree was not forgotten ; Woden was still the forefather of all the kingly houses. But Woden was now found out to have been a mere mortal hero, the descendant of Noah in such and such a generation. We may suspect that one effect of Christianity was to lessen the reverence for the kingly stock as such, to strengthen the elective element, and to make it easier to choose kings who were not of kingly descent. The analogy alike of the Roman emperors and of ecclesiasti cal officers of all kinds would work the same way. But kingship, as an office, was in Christian hands clothed with a higher majesty, and became an object of deeper reverence. If one form of sanctity was taken away from the son of Woden, he gradually obtained another in his new character of the Lord s Anointed. At least from the eighth century, perhaps from an earlier time, English kings began, as the emperors had long been, to be admitted to their office with ecclesiastical ceremonies, among which the rite of unction held the chief place. The king thus became in some measure a sharer in the sanctity of the priesthood. He was clothed in sacred vestments, and enjoyed sacred privileges beyond the laymen of ordinary degree. But this only brought out more strongly his position as holding an office according to law. The priest, the abbot, the bishop, was chosen and admitted to his office according to a known law. According to the same law, he might, in case of demerit, be deposed from his office. So it was with the kingly office. The greater the mysterious sanctity that was shed over the kingly office, the more was his person shorn of all mysterious sanctity. He held a sacred office; but that sacred office might, like any other office, be taken away from an unworthy holder. On the other hand, the growing practice of personal commendation stepped in to restore the balance, and to strengthen the king s personal authority. He became the personal lord of all the chief men in his kingdom. They were bound to him by a voluntary tie of personal faith and honour. But these two growing notions, which made the king, on the one hand a personal lord, on the other hand an ecclesiastical officer, worked together somewhat to wipe out the older idea of the king as the hsad of the people, the chief, the judge and captain of the community, commanding obedience directly as the head of the state, without any need either of religious consecra tion or of personal allegiance. But if the new religion thus modified the older ideas of The na- kiugship, and tended on the whole to strengthen the kingly * ion power, it affected the national being of the English people ^Tthe in a yet more direct way. In fact, it created that national church, being. Hitherto there had been no tie to bind together the various Teutonic kingdoms in Britain, except the preca rious and fluctuating tie of the Bretwaldadom. Had the Bretwaldadom been permanent, it might have gradually fused all the Teutonic settlements into one nation. In the form which it actually took, it was a mere momentary superiority of one kingdom over others, which was naturally irksome, and was thrown off as soon as might be. The Church sowed the seeds of a truer national unity by accus toming Englishmen from different kingdoms to act together, national synods long before she had national parliaments. Her kingdoms acknowledged a common primate long before they acknowledged a common king. The original scheme The two of Gregory would have divided Britain into two ecclesiasti- cal provinces of much the same extent. York was to have taken in all Scotland ; but the claim of York to ecclesiasti cal jurisdiction over Scotland was always precarious, com monly nominal, and it was in the end formally abolished. The regular succession of archbishops of York began later than that of Canterbury, and the northern primate, some times with one or two suffragans, sometimes with none at all, never practically held the same metropolitan pDsition as the archbishop of Canterbury. This last became, long before any king could so call himself, the &quot; head of Angle- kin,&quot; 1 the chief of the English nation, irrespective of political divisions. And such an influence was purely national. It gave no political importance to the secondary, soon to become the dependent, kingdom of Kent. It worked however when Kent had been merged in Wessex, to help the advance of Wessex, and to settle the general headship of England in the south. And, in the same way, the position of the see of York, which in practice was not so much an archbishopric as a great and powerful independent bishopric, doubtless did much to strengthen the general tendency of Northumberland to keep up a being distinct from that of southern England. Thus, before the end of the seventh century, Teutonic and Wars no heathen England had embraced a new creed, and with that lou g cr creed it had received those changes in thought, law, and ex t enil {. custom which could not fail to follow on such a conversion, nation. One change above all affects the general history. Warfare still goes on, warfare alike with the Britons and with Englishmen of other kingdoms ; but warfare no longer im plies extermination. Where the heathen conqueror carried mere slaughter and havoc, the Christian conqueror was satisfied with political subjection. The overthrow of Deva by ^Ethelfrith may well have been the last case of mere destruction. The greatness and fall of Penda form part of the history of the conversion ; his reign was the armed 1 In the poem on the martyrdom of JSlfheah in the Chronicles, 1011, the archbishop is called &quot; Se J&amp;gt;e ei wses heafod Angulcynnes And cristeudornes. &quot; VIII. 36
 * and to acknowledge a common head. England had