Page:Public School History of England and Canada (1892).djvu/16

8 gods, water-spirits, and wood-demons. Their chief god was Woden, who rewarded them after death for their bravery and for the number of enemies they killed. Heaven was to them a place where they could fights and carouse, for these German tribes were very fond of eating and drinking. From the names of their gods we get our names from the days of the week, such as Wednesday or Wodensday, from the god Woden.

It took some time to get the English to accept Christianity, for being a steadfast race they clung to their own customs and religion. At last, as the story goes, some English slaves were taken to Rome to be sold, and Bishop Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, when a young man, seeing how fair and beautiful they were, asked whence they came, and was told they were Angles. “Not Angles,” said he, “but Angels,” and when he became bishop he sent, in 596, a missionary named Augustine, with forty monks to convert the English. Augustine landed in Kent, and his first convert was Ethelbert, King of Kent, whose wife was a Christian from France. Afterwards, many of Ethelbert’s people were baptized as Christians and Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. From Kent the Roman missionaries carried the new religion to Northumbria, where King Edwin ruled. Edwin called his Witan together and, after listening to the missionaries, they also accepted Christianity.

But other Christian missionaries had been busy in the north of England before Augustine came to the country. These same from the small rocky island of Iona, on the west coast of Scotland, where a mission statement had been planted by Columba, an Irish monk. For the Irish had become Christians under the teaching of St. Patrick more than a hundred years before, and Irish missionaries made their way to the north and middle of England and did much to introduce Christianity among the fierce and heathen English. After a time, in 664, the Irish and Roman missionaries disputed about some trifling matters relating to church services, and as the King of Northumbria took the part of the Roman missionaries, the Irish monks went back to their own land, and the work went on under bishops in sympathy with Roman practices. The effect of their teaching was soon seen, for the rude and restless English settled down to steady work, began to learn trades, and to build up small towns around the monasteries which now sprang up in