A SAXON CHURCH

My wife and I were in the U.K. this weekend, celebrating the 18th birthday of my godson (hence no blogging). On Saturday we visited St. Peter's church at Bradwell-on-Sea in Essex, one of the earliest church buildings in the country. It was founded by St. Cedd in 654AD on the site of an abandoned Roman fort, and still stands on its own at the end of the Blackwater Estuary, some 100 yards from the foreshore.

Saxon Britain was exposed to Christianity from two separate sources. St. Augustine came across from Rome, founded Canterbury, and then moved north and east from there; while St. Colomba sailed from Ireland to the Scottish island of Iona, from where monks moved south and east into Northumbria. Cedd was sent south from the abbey of Lindisfarne to convert the East Saxons, and brought with him the "Celtic" tradition, which stressed the importance of abbots, and which downplayed the "Roman" emphasis on dioceses, in which bishops called the shots. These differences on matters of authority were further complicated by disagreements about the date of Easter, the church's most important feast day. Cedd was one of the principal participants at the Synod of Whitby in 664AD, which decisively resolved the matter in favour of the Roman adherents, a resolution that has been unchallenged ever since.

Three things struck me as I was wandering round the church. First, it is fantastic that we still have such buildings dotted around Europe, to help us understand what happened in the past. Secondly, although many things have changed since 654AD, some surprisingly major things have not. The administrative boundries of the bishoprics of the Church of England, for instance, are not much different from that time. Canterbury and York (which took over from Lindisfarne as head of Northumbria after the Synod of Whitby) remain pre-eminent, and early foundations such as Rochester retain their status, even though they are modest towns today. So too is the system of counties, many of which would have been known to Cedd and his contemporaries; Kent, Essex, Sussex and so on.

Thirdly (and by far the biggest thing) is the sheer bravado and self-belief of men like Cedd. Sent with one companion on a dangerous voyage down the North Sea coast into a hostile, pagan land where the people probably couldn't understand him and might well have thought about killing him, he tackled the job with not much more than his natural resilience and an iron belief in the Christian message. The problems he faced were immense; that he solved them and left a monument which still stands, more than 1,300 years later, is impressive indeed.

Walter Blotscher