Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (16 page)

It should be noted that the ship burial is generally attributed to the East Anglian king Raedwald, who played a vital role in the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons.

This fresh flowering of Latin civilization in Britain was augmented by several new and vital technologies, such as the moldboard plough, which powered an agricultural revolution that enabled new land to be brought into cultivation and consequently to support a far greater population. These technologies, which shall be discussed more fully in Chapter 9, were not infrequently popularized and spread by the monasteries, which themselves became centers of learning and technology. The growth of the monasteries was accompanied by a revival of building in stone. These structures were of late Roman design and were the first stone edifices to appear in Britain since the fourth century. The very first was Canterbury Cathedral, whose foundations were laid by Saint Augustine in 602. The original cathedral and associated buildings has of course – with the exception of the foundations – disappeared, though a little more of the church which served Augustine’s suburban monastery of Saint Peter and Saint Paul has been recovered by excavation, and fragments still survive of two adjacent churches of the same period. These have all been shown to be of Italian design.
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From then onwards church-building spread throughout England, and by the mid-seventh century we have several fairly intact examples of Saxon churches, amongst which are: All Saints’ at Brixworth in Northamptonshire; Saint Martin’s, Canterbury (seventh century nave with parts of possible earlier origin); and Saint Peter’s on the Wall, at Bradwell-on-the-Sea, Essex (c. 654). Several others, reduced to their foundations, are also known. These structures, modest though they may be, bear eloquent testimony to the new expansion and growth which we have detected in Merovingian Gaul during the sixth century, and which we shall see again in Visigothic Spain in the same epoch. All of this is quite contrary to the view expounded by Hodges, Whitehouse and Ward-Perkins of a decrepit and dying late classical world from the second half of the sixth century.

Before moving on, we should note that the next surviving Anglo-Saxon churches date from the second quarter of the tenth century. There is nothing – or virtually nothing – attributable to the eighth, ninth, or early tenth centuries.
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Church building reappears with Saint Mary’s Priory Church at Deerhurst in Gloucestershire, dated to circa 930. The new tenth century structures, notwithstanding the enormous gap of time separating them from their seventh century predecessors, bear striking resemblance to the latter and look, to all intents and purposes, as if they represent a natural continuation and progression from the earlier buildings.

Here then, once again, we find an example of that puzzling three-century long gap in the historical narrative of European civilization and society.

* * *

Unlike Britain, Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire. During the centuries of Rome’s occupation of the neighboring island, Ireland had remained essentially a barbarian Celtic society, little different from the Gaul conquered by Caesar several centuries earlier. Then came Christianity. Famously, the new faith was said to have been introduced to Ireland by Saint Patrick, a native of Britain, who had apparently been captured by Irish slave-traders whilst still a boy, and forcibly brought to the land with which his life was to become so intimately connected. After escaping and training for the priesthood, he returned to the country as a missionary, where his teaching found fertile ground. Within a short time most of the island was converted; the last conquest, so it has often been said, of the Roman Empire.

Patrick is traditionally credited with preserving the tribal and social patterns of the Irish, codifying their laws and changing only those that conflicted with Christian practices. He is also credited with introducing the Roman alphabet, which enabled Irish monks to preserve parts of the extensive Celtic oral literature. The historicity of these claims remains the subject of debate and there is no direct evidence linking Patrick with any of these accomplishments. Nevertheless, they are all clearly connected with the appearance in the country of Christianity; and from Patrick’s time at least Irish scholars excelled in the study of Latin learning and Christian theology. Nor was their knowledge confined to Latin: as we shall see, there exists ample evidence to show that Greek too, and the Greek writers – not all of them ecclesiastical – were taught in the Irish centers.

In effect, Ireland was now, by the late fifth century, added to Roman civilization. What the legions had failed to do, Christian missionaries accomplished within a decade or two. The Irish, previously remarkably resistant to Roman influences, now opened up. Fine ceramics, including African Red Slip Ware, as well as other
objets d’art
, began to make their appearance in the country.
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Churches and cathedrals were erected, and monastic settlements became miniature universities. Very little of these structures has survived, but we know that, initially at least, they were of wood, or at least partly of wood. Several examples of apparently seventh century stone monastic churches, most famously the Oratory of Gallerus, provide us with a tantalizing glimpse of what once existed. Two contemporary descriptions of the larger Irish buildings have survived. The first, in an obscure seventh-century work called the
Hisperica Famina
, describes a square oratory fashioned out of massive wooden beams, with a western porch, a central altar, an ornamented roof, and four “steeples.” The second is in Cogitosus’
Life of Saint Brigit
, also of the seventh century. The account is worth quoting in full:

There (at Kildare) repose the glorious bodies of both Archbishop Conled and the noble virgin Brigit in their sarcophagi, the one to the right and the other to the left of the beautifully adorned altar. These sarcophagi are richly decorated with gold, silver and multicoloured precious stones; they have also pictorial representations in relief and in colours, and are surmounted by crowns of gold and silver. The church, however, is not the original one: a new church has been erected in the place of the old one, in order to hold the increased numbers of the faithful. Its ground-plan is large, and it rises to a dizzy height. It is adorned with painted tablets. The interior contains three large oratories, divided from one another by walls of timber, but all under one roof. One wall covered with linen curtains and decorated with paintings, traverses the eastern part of the church from one side to the other. There are doors in it at either end. The one door gives access to the sanctuary and the altar, where the bishop, with his school of clerics and those who are called to the celebration of the holy mysteries, offers the divine sacrifice to the Lord. By the other door of the dividing wall, the abbess enters with her virgins and with pious widows in order to participate in the Supper of Jesus Christ, which is His flesh and blood. The reminder of the building is divided lengthwise into two equal parts by another wall, which runs from the western side to the transverse wall. The church has many windows. Priests and lay persons of the male sex enter by an ornamented door on the right-hand side; matrons and virgins enter by another door on the left-hand side. In this was the one basilica is sufficient for a huge crowd, separated by walls according to state. Grade and sex, but united in Spirit, to pray to the almighty Lord.
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A few of the famous Irish Round Towers (an adaptation of similar structures in Merovingian Gaul) are said to date from the sixth and seventh centuries.

With the adoption of the new faith (complete with its injunctions against warfare and infanticide), Ireland appears to have experienced substantial population growth. Certainly it was an epoch of expansion. Irish colonies were established along the western coasts of Britain and in Scotland (Caledonia). With the colonists came Irish missionaries and educators. Though their first efforts were concentrated in western and northern Britain, they soon moved further afield, bringing the Christian faith to previously barbarian regions such as eastern and northern Germany, and establishing monasteries and centers of learning wherever they went. Some travelled to Rome and beyond in search of precious manuscripts. The influence of Egypt, both in terms of art and religious ideas, began to be felt on the western shores of the Atlantic.

One of the best-known of these Irish missionaries was Columba, who left Ireland for western Scotland following a conflict over a book and its copy. Eventually he settled in Iona, off the coast of Scotland, where he established a monastic settlement that was to become renowned across Europe as a centre of Christian education. Columba had pledged to “convert as many souls for Christ” as he could and his new monastery was designed specifically for this undertaking. His monks were sent throughout Europe.

When King Oswald of Northumbria in England wanted a center of learning to be established for the education of Anglo-Saxon boys, he called upon the great monastery of Iona to provide him with a spiritual guide. The task was taken up by another Irish monk, Aiden, who, traditionally in 635, but probably earlier, arrived at Lindisfarne Island, which soon became the base and cradle of Celtic Christianity in north-east England. From there, the whole of Northumbria and the northern half of England was converted.

Two of the first pupils accepted into Lindisfarne were Anglo-Saxon brothers called Cedd and Chad. The elder of these two, Cedd, was sent to Mercia, in the English midlands, where he quickly transformed the region. He was so successful that when King Sigbert of the East Saxons (Essex) asked for a similar mission, it was Cedd who was sent with one companion. Cedd’s first church in Essex was built of wood, but this was soon replaced by a more permanent structure using cut-stones from a nearby Roman fort. This new church, now called Saint Peter’s on the Wall, was modeled on the churches of Egypt and Syria, illustrating the profound influence that the Eastern Church then exerted in the far-off regions of the west. Although generally dated to later in the seventh century, the Egyptian influence would seem to indicate that this structure must have been completed before circa 630, when, as we shall see, Arab piracy severely curtailed travel on the Mediterranean.

The monastery attached to Saint Peter’s on the Wall was said to have incorporated a hospital, a guest-house and a library. All in the middle of a supposed Dark Age!

Perhaps the most notable of Ireland’s scholars, as opposed to saints, of this period, was John Scotus Erigena (or Eriugena). As well as being a theologian, he was a Neoplatonist scholar and a poet. He travelled to various parts of Europe, and seems to have had a thorough knowledge of Greek, as well as Latin. About the age of thirty, we are told, he moved from Ireland to France, where he took over the Palatine Academy at the invitation of King Charles the Bald. He succeeded Alcuin of York as head of the Palace School. It is generally believed that he remained in France for at least thirty years, during which time he undertook, at the request of Byzantine Emperor Michael III the translation into Latin of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius. He also added his own commentary, thus being the first to introduce the ideas of Neoplatonism from the Greek into the Western European intellectual tradition.

Erigena was a “truly original thinker,” a Christian universalist who he believed that all people and all beings, including animals, reflect attributes of God, towards whom all are capable of progressing and to which all things ultimately must return. His thought was Neoplatonist to the core, and “while recognizing the validity of authority in thought and accepting the authority of the Scriptures, he insisted upon the equal validity of reason.”
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“Authority,” he wrote, “sometimes proceeds from reason, but reason never from authority. For all authority which is not approved by true reason seems weak. But true reason, since it is established in its own strength, needs to be strengthened by the assent of no authority.”
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To Erigena, hell was not a place but a condition and punishment was purifying, not penal. He was a believer in apocatastasis, which maintains that all moral creatures – angels, humans and devils – will eventually come to a harmony in God’s kingdom.

Erigena based his beliefs on the Greek writings of the early Christian fathers, like Origen, and considered himself an orthodox Christian thinker. And his knowledge of Greek is a crucial chronological marker. Having travelled to the East and studied there, he must have lived and worked before the middle of the seventh century, though he is generally placed at a somewhat later date.

* * *

The sixth and early seventh centuries therefore saw the expansion, rather than the withering away, of classical Latin civilization. The great works of Greek and Roman literature were now known and debated in the formerly barbarian lands of Ireland and Caledonia. Paganized Britain, or England, was again being Romanized, this time mainly through the offices of Christianity. Churches and cathedrals, based on Roman and Near Eastern models, began to appear throughout the British Isles and in the previously savage lands of eastern Germany, on the borders of the Elbe. Around these ecclesiastical centers towns and cities began to form in regions never reached by the armies of Imperial Rome. Far from being in terminal decline, classical civilization was on the move.

Although the art and technical know-how of the peoples of western Europe in the fifth to seventh centuries is a topic we shall deal with in a separate place, it would be impossible to complete this section without mention of the astonishing craftwork that appeared in Ireland and Britain at this time.

Fig. 13. Page from the Book of Kells, probably early seventh century. The Hiberno-Saxon illuminated manuscripts of this period, which used blue pigment derived from Afghanistan lapis-lazuli, are by common consent among the finest and most technically brilliant works of miniature art ever produced.

Influenced by the Anglo-Saxons in mainland Britain, Irish artists in the fifth and sixth centuries, many of them monks, developed a new decorative style, described as Hiberno-Saxon, which combined the old Celtic motifs of the region with the interlinking animals and serpents which the Anglo-Saxons had brought from Germany (ultimately under the influence of the Goths). The new style was now applied to some of the most outstanding artwork ever created. Illuminated books and metalwork, whose microscopic detail is justly celebrated, make us wonder whether the insular artists were in possession of an understanding of the magnifying lens. And the materials used in these masterpieces, such as lapis-lazuli from Afghanistan (the source of ultramarine blue), convince us that both the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels were created before the middle of the seventh century.
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