The Emergence of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms

Abstract

In AD597 a large and high-powered body of Christian missionaries arrived in the pagan kingdom of Kent. They had been sent from Rome by Pope Gregory ‘the Great’ (590–604), in the hope of bringing people that Gregory called the ‘Angles’ (or English) from heathen darkness into Christian light. Whatever else they achieved, they certainly brought new light into Anglo-Saxon history, because Christianity meant literacy and literacy means written historical sources. Thanks to these sources, above all to the great Ecclesiastical History of the English People¹ by the Venerable Bede, which was completed in 731, we know far more about the seventh and eighth centuries than about earlier times. Nevertheless, to the modern eye, the political map of early Christian England looks remote and unfamiliar. Even the four great kingdoms, whose emergence is the most striking historical feature of the two centuries after 597, survive today largely as police authorities or water boards.