Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/200

 164 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE medieval Church, and Pope Gregory too gave a great im- The o petus to the spread of Christianity. Moreover, the monks, he increased the authority of the Papacy by and missions .. . ., .,1 ... j i_ i_ • • allying it with monasticism and by bringing new heathen lands under its control. Under Gregory's guidance began the conversion of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had been conquering Britain Conversion piecemeal since the middle of the fifth century, of the Anglo- and blotting out the Latin and Celtic languages and the Christian religion. About 600 they were divided into a number of petty kingdoms, and the previous inhabitants of Roman Britain still held Wales and some parts of western England. Gregory, whose custom it was to buy barbarian slave boys and give them 'a Christian edu- cation, had been especially attracted by the beauty of some English lads with light hair and complexions, and deter- mined to send missionaries to their land. In 597, a monk named Augustine landed with forty others in the Kingdom of Kent in the southeastern corner of England. Here they soon converted King Ethelbert, whose Frankish wife was already a Christian. Their first church was St. Martin's at Canterbury, which was still standing from the days of the Roman Empire and which may still be seen to-day. Can- terbury was henceforth the religious capital of England and the seat of an archbishop. Another archbishop came to be located at York in the north. The emissaries of Pope Gregory were not the first mis- sionary monks in the British Isles. The conversion of Ire- Irish land by St. Patrick, while the Roman Empire monasticism was f a n; n g to pi eC es in the West, and the peculiar clan monasteries established there have already been men- tioned. In those monasteries some ancient culture was preserved and even Greek was still studied. Over a hundred early Irish manuscripts still extant in Continental libraries testify both to the culture and to the widespread missionary activity of these Irish monks. What writings have come down to us in Old Irish are exclusively religious. The Irish monks also surpassed the rest of western Europe at this