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RELIGION ANDPOLITICS IN THEKINGDOM OF MERCIA

When the rulers of theAnglo-Saxons began to turnthemselves into Christiankings from the late sixthcentury, they were joining aclub already peopled by themost successful of theEuropean kingdoms thathad emerged from thewreckage of the WesternEmpire in the fifth century.Mercia became one of thesenew Christian monarchies.

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St Chad, Staffordshire’s Saint and Bishop of Mercia.

THE LANDS OF ST CHAD

cast aspersions on the quality of Chad’s consecration. Nevertheless, both men wereapparently so impressed with Chad’s humility under fire, that Theodore re-consecrated him, and assigned him the vacant Mercian bishopric, whilst Wilfrid gaveChad a Mercian estate he had earlier received from Wulfhere: Lichfield.

The Diocese of Mercia The Mercian diocese was initially very large, as by 655 Penda had extended his ruleout of the royal heartland centred on southeast Staffordshire, taking in the MiddleAngles of the East Midlands and the people of Lindsey in Lincolnshire. Chadestablished the diocesan cathedral at Lichfield; we do not know if previous bishopshad a central church, although given the size of the diocese they might have movedaround quite frequently.

After Chad’s episcopate the diocese was gradually confined to the northwestmidlands as parts of it gained their own bishoprics: Lindsey in 678 and the MiddleAngles in 737. Meanwhile, by the end of the seventh century, the Mercian kings hadsolidified their control of what is now Cheshire and northern Shropshire, colonising apower vacuum caused by the extinction of various Briton dynasties, andincorporating the area into Lichfield’s diocese.

Chad’s experience as bishop might have been politically volatile, but it alsodemonstrates that there was more than politics to the Anglo-Saxon Church.

RELIGION AND POLITICS

eligious authority was mouldedover political power, and amongstthe Anglo-Saxons one bishop was

initially appointed to ministerto each kingdom. Thus,

when the Christian King Oswiu ofNorthumbria defeated and killed the paganKing Penda of Mercia in 655 AD, he created asingle bishopric to serve this newly-conqueredrealm. This article explores its history duringthe seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, when itformed the primary diocese of the kingdom of Mercia.

Christian missionsBede, the Northumbrian monk who wrote hisEcclesiastical History of the English Church andPeople in about 730, described two primaryconduits of the Christian religion into Anglo-Saxon society. These were a Roman missionsent by Pope Gregory the Great which hadarrived in Kent in 597, and an Irish missionestablished at Lindisfarne in 634 by KingOswald of Northumbria, who desired in part tooverride the Roman bishopric established atYork by his predecessor and rival, Edwin.

The new Mercian bishopric, a product ofNorthumbrian imperialism, wasoverwhelmingly staffed from Lindisfarne.Although Penda’s son Wulfhere regained theMercian throne from Oswiu in 658, theNorthumbrian connection remained influential.Several of the diocese’s early bishops wereNorthumbrian or Irish in origin, including itsfifth bishop, Chad.

St Chad Chad had been raised at Lindisfarne, one offour brothers given to the Church at a youngage. Chad’s brother Cedd became an influentialabbot, participating in the Synod of Whitby in664, at which King Oswiu decided to followRoman rather than Irish customs ofChristianity. Chad himself had travelled toIreland to seek further education at themonasteries there. Returning to Britain onCedd’s death, he was appointed bishop of arevitalised diocese of York, as part of whatappears to have been a competition for powerbetween King Oswiu and one of his sons.

However, in 669 Chad was ousted by Wilfrid,one of the former losers in this competition,who exploited the high Roman standards of anew archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore, to

Bede’s eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English Church and Peopletells us much about Chad’s mission.

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Christianity affected the entire cosmology of the Anglo-Saxonpeoples; it claimed they had souls in need of saving, and bishopssuch as Chad appear to have taken this seriously, and to haveconsidered the cure of souls in their dioceses part of theirresponsibility.

In southern Europe the old Roman cities had survived imperialdisintegration and acted as bases for the bishops and their churches.In northern Europe, urban life had largely disappeared, and newcentres were needed to support religious life. In England, thesetook the form of ‘minsters’, a label used by scholars to describequasi-monastic institutions containing both monks (and/or nuns)and clerics, and supported by landed estates.

Lichfield was one of these, and as such was a centre for religious life. Chad erected a small oratory there, believed to havebeen located on the site of the present church at Stowe, specificallyset aside for him and a select group of his companions to studyand pray.

A network of minsters

In order to preach and deliver the sacraments (such asbaptism and the mass) to the people of his diocese, abishop worked to establish a network of minsters, used asbases by clerics who toured the surrounding settlementsand estates.We can glimpse the network assembled by successive bishops of

Lichfield in the distribution of episcopal estates recorded in theDomesday Book of 1086. Many of these had no doubt been in thebishops’ possession for centuries, and many supported minsters.Most were also located on Roman or important medieval roads,enabling the bishop to progress around them on a yearly basis, aswas required by Church edict. Some of the bishops’ minsters werelocated on the sites of older churches established by the Britons:

Chester was a Roman city, and Eccleshall’s place-name implies thepresence of an older church there.

Although many people, high and low, were content to visit thebishop’s churches or await the tours of his priests, others, notablyimportant aristocrats and especially kings, founded their ownminsters, often themselves becoming the abbot or abbess of theplace or assigning a family member to the position.

The differences between episcopal and aristocratic minsterswere not great; after all, bishops were aristocrats too, and allaristocrats lived in a world of patronage centred on the king.Nevertheless, where aristocrats provided for their own religiouslife, bishops sometimes became anxious about their relative lack ofoversight; in theory bishops had the right to visit any religiousinstitution in their diocese, but this was sometimes hard to enforce,especially where the minster’s head was a member of the royalfamily.

Royal and aristocratic minsters can be identified in the dioceseof Lichfield by the location of Anglo-Saxon saints’ cults, whichoften sprung up around the remains of a prestigious founder orholy inmate, whose life or death was considered to epitomise thereligious ideal.

It is notable that such minsters are concentrated in the south-eastern parts of the diocese, near the Mercian royal heartland,where they had ready access to royal patronage. Only the bishop’sminsters (which tended to be dedicated to St Chad) are moreevenly distributed, testifying to an episcopal concern for the cureof souls across the diocese.

Achievements The eighth and earlier ninth centuries were a productive periodfor the Anglo-Saxon Church. Churchmen appear to havesustained contacts with others in Ireland and on the continent,

Lichfield, the heart of Chad’s diocese.

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Dr Andrew Sargent, Department of History, Keele University.

Further ReadingJohn Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford UniversityPress, 2005).Michelle P Brown, The Book of Cerne. Prayer, Patronage and Power inNinth-Century England (University of Toronto, 1996).Catherine Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils c.650 – c.850(Leicester University Press, 1995).Warwick Rodwell, Jane Hawkes, Emily Howe & Rosemary Cramp, ‘TheLichfield Angel: a Spectacular Anglo-Saxon Painted Sculpture’, in TheAntiquaries Journal, 2008:88, pp. 48-108.

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encouraging a mixing and fusion of religious culturesdisplayed in manuscripts such as the Book of Cerne (whichmight have been produced for a bishop of Lichfield) and insculpture such as the ‘Lichfield Angel’, discovered atLichfield and thought to be a panel from St Chad’s shrine.Sculpture and architecture elsewhere testify to a desire toglorify the bones of saints across the diocese at this time.

Meanwhile King Offa cultivated important relationshipswith the Pope and the Frankish king Charlemagne. Underhis auspices a papal legation was received in England in 786,aimed at reforming both religious and worldly life,considered the proper role of a Christian king.

Nevertheless, the possibilities for tension between royaland religious prerogatives found dramatic expression whenOffa began to use the yearly synods of the SouthumbrianChurch (which included all the Anglo-Saxon dioceses southof the Humber) as a forum for governing his expandingempire. At particular issue was his control of Kent, becausehis desire to consecrate his son as his heir required the assentof the head of the Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In the end, unable to get what he wanted, Offa used hisinfluence with the Pope to get his own archbishopric,raising Bishop Hygeberht of Lichfield to the honour in 787and cutting Canterbury’s Southumbrian province in half.This split was only undone after Offa’s death, whicheloquently testifies to his ability to interfere in religiousmatters whilst alive.

Survival s the ninth century wore on, destructiveinfighting wracked the Mercian royal dynasty,and the ravages of the Viking Great Army from865 set the seal on the disintegration of the

Mercian empire and the extinction of itskings. Many minsters suffered at the hands of paganwarriors, and the bishops of Lichfield may for a short timehave been exiled from their own see. Nevertheless, thediocese of the Mercians outlived the kingdom it wasfounded to serve, eventually enjoying a new life within thekingdom of England. l

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