Gregory the Great and the Mission to the English

In 590 a plague killed the bishop of Rome, and the people chose the deacon Gregory to succeed him. Gregory I came from a senatorial family, had used his wealth to found six monasteries in Sicily and a seventh in Rome, and had served as the pope’s representative at Constantinople. He wrote to the emperor asking not to be confirmed, and was seized and consecrated when he tried to hide (Gregory of Tours, Histories 10.1) (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 2.1). In his letters he mourns the quiet he has lost (Gregory the Great, Letters 1.5).

At the start of his episcopate he wrote the Pastoral Rule (Gregory the Great, Letters 5.49), on who should take up the care of souls, how a pastor should live and how he should teach. It calls the government of souls “the art of arts” (Gregory the Great, Pastoral Rule introduction and 1.1). When the bishop of Constantinople used the title “universal”, Gregory protested that no bishop should claim it (Gregory the Great, Letters 5.18), and he refused it for himself when the bishop of Alexandria addressed him as “Universal Pope”: “my honour is the honour of the universal Church” (Gregory the Great, Letters 8.30). He styled himself instead “servant of the servants of God”, as at the head of his letter to the missionaries (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.23).

Bede relates, as a tradition, that Gregory once saw English boys for sale in Rome and wished to go to their people himself (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 2.1). What his own letters show is an order, sent about 595 to his agent in Gaul, to buy English boys to be raised in monasteries (Gregory the Great, Letters 6.7). In 596 he sent Augustine of Canterbury, a monk of his own monastery, with a party of monks. They lost heart on the way, and Gregory wrote urging them on (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.23) (Gregory the Great, Letters 8.30). They landed on the Isle of Thanet. Aethelberht of Kent, king of Kent, whose Frankish wife Bertha was a Christian, heard them in the open air, allowed them to preach and gave them a house at Canterbury (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.25). The king was later baptised (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.26). Gregory told the bishop of Alexandria that more than ten thousand English had been baptised at one Christmas (Gregory the Great, Letters 8.30).

In 601 Gregory sent more helpers, the pallium for Augustine and a plan for two provinces of twelve bishops each (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.29). He urged the king to suppress idols and overthrow temples (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.32). After the party had left he sent different advice: the temples should be kept and turned into churches, and the old feasts replaced with Christian ones, since whoever climbs to the highest place “rises by degrees or steps, and not by leaps” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.30). Augustine set his see in an old Roman church at Canterbury (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.33).

Gregory died in March 604. Bede, whose text gives the year as 605, calls him the apostle of the English (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 2.1). The later history of the church he founded is taken up under the Synod of Whitby.