“A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom broadens slowly down;
From precedent to precedent.”
– Lord Alfred Tennyson –
Introduction
In our last two essays, we outlined the development of the idea of person from its origins in Greek theatre all the way to its philosophical and theological apex as the quintessential category for Christological and Trinitarian orthodoxy. The concept of person is so basic to Western philosophy, culture and tradition that it comes as quite a surprise to learn that it had to be invented. And it was invented within the Tradition of Catholicism.
However, even Augustine’s masterful analysis and translation of the concept of person into mainstream Western thought, still did not offer a philosophically complete definition of person. The idea that each man possessed his own individuality- an inner life compromised of memory, intellect and will particular to him- was insufficient to once and for all ground the concept philosophically. To be an individual because you were comprised of your own individuality, still lacked the specific difference that sets each man apart as his own person from all other individual things. Men are not persons because they are individuals, because many things are individuals but they are not persons. Each individual horse is its own thing- with its own temperament, dispositions and behaviour- but no horse is a person. It would be a complete nonsense to treat any individual thing comprised of its own identity as a kind of person by extension. This final part of the puzzle will not be put in place until the work done by Boethius, which will then ultimately be brought to it proper conclusion by Aquinas.
However, Augustine’s contribution remains invaluable. In particular, there are three ideas associated with Augustine’s thought, that because of his philosophical genius, have laid the foundations for Western Civilisation. The first idea is the most basic; yet, because it is so foundational, it takes a genius to be able to capture it. And that was Augustine’s extension of the concept of person from the three prosopa of the Most Holy Trinity into the idea that all men were persons by analogy. Even though Augustine’s definition is incomplete, he makes the case in the City of God that each man, regardless of his race or citizenship is an individual person like all other men; and that as such, he is comprised of the same dignity and worth as any man. That each person is a subject both of rights and duties regardless of his status in the society in which he lives. This idea sounds so basic to us, that it can be difficult to accept that we had to work it out. It was not obvious to any ancient thinker or philosopher; and up until Augustine, was an idea completely alien to the ancient world. It stands in stark contrast to the prevailing ethos in the Greco-Roman world, where only citizens of Rome or Athens were subjects of rights and duties, while the greater part of humanity that lived within its borders languished outside its protection. And even then, the enjoyment of such rights and duties was heavily influenced by social status and wealth. A perennial problem in our fallen world.
The second idea that Augustine’s thought introduces and makes clear, is that as each man bore the indelible image of God, what was most God-like in the human person was his interiority- where he possessed his own memory, intellect and will which individualised each man as something unique and irreplaceable. The central element to this idea was not simply a repetition of Genesis, but rather its elaboration into the notion that the image and likeness of God was itself something dynamic and highly individualised in its expression. This again, was an idea antithetical to the ancient world view, where the distinguishing factors between the mass of men were material: slave or free, civis (citizen) or xenos (foreigner), rich or poor. Even Aristotle, for all his genius, still held that the mass of men were brutes and thus subject to slavery for the greater good of the polis. The ancient world, for all its marvels, of which there were many, had no concept or idea to capture and explain the individuality and uniqueness of men. It would take the genius of Augustine, to translate the glories of Christian revelation into the beginnings of Western civilisation.
The third and final major idea that Augustine bequeathed to the West is what we could call the great speculation: that your interior life- memory, intellect and will- matters to you as much as mine maters to me. And that both interior lives matter equally to God Almighty. This really is one of the foundational ideas of Western culture. No longer were the priorities of men categorised by the importance of the man- both in the culture and before God. That the hopes dreams and desires of the ordinary man- his interior life- mattered and were just as important to him as those of the Emperor or the King. That in terms of the interior life of man- each man mattered a great deal; and not according to a hierarchy of external or material importance. This idea would take several centuries to unfold and to come to some form of maturity in Western Civilisation. But nowhere is this unfolding clearer than in the development of Western jurisprudence. And in particular, the formation of the English Common Law.
Son of the Church- son of the Tradition
Augustine is a bridge between the ancient world and the mediaeval period. He was also a bridge between classical antiquity and the new Western Christian civilisation that was emerging. If there were no Augustine, there would be no Christendom as we know it. Such was the importance of his prodigious influence.
Augustine’s contribution, although that of a genius, was the effect of something greater: the idea of Christian Tradition. We know that at present there is a return to tradition taking place in many corners of the world- both secular and religious. There is an element within the younger generations that is turning its back on the dominant secular narrative and searching for something more substantial. ‘Something’ that has been refined by time and has endured the test of ages. This return to tradition is very small, and can seem insignificant when compared to the dominant narrative of secular progressivism. Whatever change is underway, we are witnessing the first fruits of something very important that must be nurtured and formed in the lives of the next generation. But before we can support this return to tradition, we must first understand what tradition is. And we must also understand how it came to be displaced from the domain of the public conscience.
The dominant secular progressive narrative, which is really a return to the materialism of the pre-Christan world, is a fruit of the scientific and industrial revolutions. But to be more precise, it is the fruit of a collapse in robust philosophical and religious thinking that accompanied those revolutions, as opposed to anything that the revolutions themselves possessed. We should not underestimate the incredible upheaval that the industrial, scientific and technological revolutions have brought to human civilisation. That is not to decry those revolutions. Where would be in the 21st century without electricity, the microchip and the internet? Our return to tradition must not tempt us into becoming neo-luddites. Rather, we are called to live into these incredible discoveries with wisdom and insight that comes from tradition.
The scientific revolution began in Europe in the second half of the Renaissance period, with the 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus[1] publication De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). The drastic change that this revolution had on the formation of the human mind cannot be underestimated. For the first time in human history, the dominant idea was that there was more wisdom, knowledge and insight to be found in tomorrow that had not yet come, than there could be uncovered in the centuries of yesterdays that we had lived through. For almost all of human civilisation, the understanding was that we stood on the shoulders of giants; the scientific revolution introduced the idea that we would give birth to them. From that moment, we had the distinct awareness that someone tomorrow would make a discovery that would make everything we thought about the world redundant. What began culturally and philosophically with these revolutions, was that we ceased to look back on history, rather we began to look down on history. And from this shallow way of thinking, we have not as yet recovered.[2]
The effects of the scientific revolution were cemented in the minds of men with the publication of Newtown’s Principia.[3] The Newtonian revolution meant that not only could we reject the physics of Aristotle- we could reject all of Aristotle. The central philosophical and thus cultural impact of Newton’s work, was the idea that science could predict outcomes. That the universe was Newtonian and we could predict its successive sates- even its final state- was a revolution in thought that we have still as yet not properly digested. The effect of these revolutions lives on in the belief that tomorrow’s smart phone will be radically better than today’s; and that because tomorrow’s next ‘big thing’ will be radically better than what we have today- we can actually be indifferent to what we have and contemptuous of what we had. The belief that there is more value in tomorrow than there is in yesterday, had a profound impact on the human psyche. Revolution became not only a legitimate means of bringing change- it became a necessity. That is, until we realised that our smart phones getting one millimetre thinner per year is perhaps not the earth-shattering event that we thought it was going to be. Not every single ‘revolution of tomorrow’ was the game-changer we had hoped. That despite all the technological progress- and there has been an abundance of such advancements- we still find ourselves wrestling with issues of male-female relationships, we still struggle with raising our children, and we still grapple with a profound lack of genuine happiness in our lives. That despite all our conquests and discoveries, we still find ourselves adrift with some of the most basic and perennial questions of human existence. Not only had we abandoned the physics of Aristotle, we had rejected his theory of virtue and its path to eudaimonia[4].
Now, it possibly seems like we are bouncing around from topic to topic in this lesson without a clear argument in sight. This is only superficially the case; for there is some method in my madness. Although to be honest, there is possibly much madness too. That even though we have jumped from Augustine’s City of God to Copernicus’s Revolutions, the point we are arguing towards in these lessons, is that despite the fact that the past several centuries have been full of some of the greatest discoveries the world has ever seen; and even if future discoveries may eclipse what we have witnessed up until now, culturally and philosophically, how best we can harness these momentous events for the betterment of our lot, is to embrace them within the received wisdom of Catholic Tradition. That Tradition- in its fullest and most Catholic sense- is a moral response to truth. Even though we generally understand Catholic Tradition as a content of revealed truth, we must begin to understand that it is also that process which receives that content and hands it on. Catholic Tradition is a living Tradition- a means whereby truth is received in each generation. And it is this process that has shaped the glories of Western Civilisation, even though the West has forgotten that it is founded on this very idea of tradition. However, this process must be laid bare in order for us to be able to return to it. And the next lesson in how this process of Catholic Tradition has shaped the West, is for us to examine the formation of one of its truest marvels- the English Common Law.
From persecution to public life
The great persecutions of Christianity within the Western Roman Empire ended in 313 with Constantine’s Edict of Milan[5]. Unlike the Edict of Serdica,[6] Constantine gave instructions for Christian ‘meeting places’ and other properties to be returned and compensation to be paid by the state to the current owners.[7] Eusebius in his Church History gives an account of the profound effect this had on Christianity.
What is important to note for our discussion, is that in 313, Christianity for the first time became a public reality. It was no longer simply defined by the internal struggle to conform one’s life to Christ, as St. Paul had taught, but rather Christianity as a corporate entity, began to have to figure out how to relate to the state in an official and public capacity. Although these issues will take some time to mature, Christianity was no longer obliged to be a religion of personal piety alone. The question now became: how does Christianity as a public reality, interact and relate to the state?
The questions facing the Church in the first three centuries, were concentrated on internal theological questions about orthodoxy of doctrine (e.g., Jewish Law, Christology and the Trinity) and moral questions about what obligations these doctrines placed upon the shoulders of Christians (e.g., the Donatist Controversy[8]). In the 4th century, Christianity and the Church in particular, had to answer a question that up until this point it had never even contemplated: does Christianity scale from individual piety into empires and kingdoms?
The answer may seem obvious to us with the benefit of 1700 years of philosophical and theological reflection. But for the first several centuries of the Church’s life, survival- both personal and doctrinal- were paramount. The idea that Christianity could shape the Roman Empire was not even contemplated directly during those years. And even if it had contemplated an influence- it did not have a theory of what a Christian Empire would be. Does a Christian society mean that only Christians were Romans? Or that ‘enough’ Romans had to be Christian? Did it mean that a Christian civilisation lived by charity alone and so therefore would never fight wars or defend peace? These are still questions that we debate and struggle with today. When we say that we are a Christian nation- what do we mean? An empire or nation ‘inspired’ by Christian ideals? That sounds as meaningless in 313 as it does in 2025. These are not easy questions, and the Church in 313 did not have the benefit of years of thought and experience- it had to act as on an opportunity that was presented to it.
The other question about the ability of Christianity to scale into the public and the imperial, was that Christianity did not have the law as its central concept. The Jews had developed over the years, a real understanding of what gave Judaism its identity: its law. Judaism without its mitzvot was nothing. The Jewish law had also been at the heart of Jewish society and the Davidic Kingdom. Yet Christianity conversely, had shed almost all of the laws of its ancient origin (cf Rom 7:6). This is not to say that Christianity was lawless, or even disdained the idea of the law. St. Paul is quite categorical in his letter to the Romans that every Christian must be subject to the rightful secular authority (cf Rom 13: 1-7). Christianity too, did not abandon the Decalogue either (cf Rom 13:9). But in so far as Christianity contemplated a public facing religion, it concentrated on love of neighbour (cf Rom 13:8). How was Christianity to shape an Empire without a robust system of laws?
From the time of the Edict of Milan was decreed, Christianity did not seek to influence the Roman Empire by legislating Christianity. It did not try to pass laws, enact legislation or form a political movement that would enshrine Christianity into the laws of Rome or force the Romans to adopt Christianity. Rather, the first three centuries had taught Christians an invaluable lesson that would enable their religion to scale from the personal into the public: culture mattered more than politics. It did not matter a great deal if all the laws of a civilisation were perfectly ordered, if the men who had to observe and enforce them were utterly anarchical. The culture that created and formed the individual and his conscience, mattered far more than the politics of the day. The great Christian struggle as taught by St Paul, is between the inner man’s old self and his new creation (cf Rom 7:21). How does one reconcile the struggles within the inner world of the person- his hopes dreams and desires- with the temptations of the material word? The great battle of Christianity was within the heart of man, that then informed his battle with a fallen world around him.
In Christianity, culture matters far more than politics. Even though the political is part of the cultural, it is subordinated to it because of the priority of the interior life of the person within Christianity. Politics orders the outer world according to those principles that the inner man brings forth (cf Mt 15:11). Both for good and for ill. Culture is part of the order of a man’s soul- his interior life. If Christianity were to influence and form the Roman Empire, then it must first change the culture of that Empire. And this is where we see the first stirrings of a Christian civilisation, and this is what lies at the heart of the development of English Common Law: Christianity did not try to legislate a change in the Empire, it built that change one person at a time- starting with the common man.
Christian Britain
This understanding shaped the Church’s missionary efforts to Christianise the pagan world. The Church did not begin with a theory about what a Christian world would look like or what it should be. Rather, the Church had a very clear understanding of what a Christian man must be- and then it began to form those men through its missionary work. According to medieval traditions, Christianity arrived in Britain in the 1st century. The historian Gildas’s[9] 6th century account dated its arrival to the latter part of the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius.[10] In 1854 on Mount Athos an account of the seventy disciples[11] was discovered with the name Aristobulus[12] as ‘bishop of Britain’.[13] Some of the earliest historical evidence of Christianity among the Britons is found in the writings of Tertullian and Origen in the first years of the 3rd century, although the first Christian communities were no doubt established prior to their writings.[14]
Christianity in Britain is ancient; and even more ancient is the influence of Imperial Rome[15]. The presence of Rome and its culture remained in Britain for some 350 years. The breakdown in Roman rule began with the Saxon invasion-migration to the British Isles eventually leading to Rome’s withdrawal from the territory[16]. Although well beyond the scope of this Lesson, this is a fascinating period of history and well worth your attention. With Rome’s departure, England came to be progressively settled by Germanic groups collectively known as the Anglo Saxons. This eventually led to the rise of the Anglo-Saxon kings and their influence over the laws of the land. One of the key principles of this new and non-Christian kind of law was custom based in Germanic law that owed little if anything to Celtic or Roman influences. Anglo-Saxon law largely derived from unwritten customs termed folk-right (justice of the people). Customary law differed between local centres. There were different folk-rights of West and East Saxons, of East Angles, of Kentish men, Mercians, Northumbrians, Danes, Welshmen. These main folk-right divisions became even more important after the battle of Deorham in 577[17] which was critical in establishing Anglo Saxon rule.
A further aspect of Anglo-Saxon law was that an individual’s actions were considered not as an exercise of his own will but as acts of his kinship group. Many aspects -personal protection and revenge, oaths, marriage, wardship, and succession- were regulated by the law of kinship. The natural alliance of family became a means for enforcing what was an essential element of Anglo-Saxon law: the preservation of the king’s peace. For our study, what is imprortant to note is that the principal difference in this new kind of non-Roman and non-Christian law was the absence of any concept of the person and his free will. This is evidenced by the fact that Anglo-Saxon law had no real concept of personal liability, which requires a concept of personal (individual) will; but was rather centred on the idea of collective responsibility. We will return to this idea in our next lesson when we examine the specific contribution of Christianity and its tradition to the formation of the English Common Law.
Into this collection of Saxon kingdoms steps Pope Gregory and his mission to re-Christianise the British Isles.[18] When the mission arrived in England, it went straight to the kingdom of Kent in order to convert Æthelberht[19], the king, whose wife Berthal, was a Frankish princess and practising Christian. In 597, forty missionaries arrived in Kent and were permitted by Æthelberht to preach freely in his capital of Canterbury. The king himself eventually converted, and although the exact date is unknown, is most likely to have occurred before 601. Again, what is important for us to recognise, is that even though the king’s permission was sought in order to evangelise his kingdom; and even though the king himself converted to Christianity, there was no co-opting of the king’s conversion in order to force the conversion of his subjects. As Bede recounts, Æthelberht did not require his subjects to become Christians as he had learned from the missionaries that service to Christ must be accepted freely and not under compulsion. The first stirrings of the doctrine of individual conscience and the sanctity of a free and personal will common to all men because they were individuals each comprised of the same dignity and freedom as the king, was introduced into English culture. Christianity introduced these ideas into the British Isles, although it will take some time before it becomes the English Common Law.
Conclusion
We have spent little time in this lesson actually discussing the English Common Law. What we have done rather, is give an historical account of those events and some of the ideas that will lay the foundations for what will eventually become the Common Law. The main reason we have done this, is to demonstrate that Christian Tradition is not the tabula rasa imposition of a new system or way of being on the pagan world; because Christianity itself is not a religion that was created ex nihilo. Christianity and its Tradition have a tradition. They both emerged from within the context of the Jewish religion, even though they surpassed their origins, they did not renounce those origins. Christianity rejects nothing that is good in the world- because God is the origin of that goodness (cf Gen 1:31); even if Christianity is destined to reform that goodness and refine it. This is an idea that is so basic to Christianity that it can be hard to believe that most Christians have forgotten it. But forgotten it we have.
The notion that Catholic Tradition has a tradition underpins the central thesis of these lessons: that Tradition is as much a process as it is a content. Tradition is not something that can be invented or imposed- it emerges as a moral response to the truth. The process of tradition is not the cancellation of what has come before it, rather it is a purification of what has been handed to it. The heart of Christin life is to sanctify- not replace. It is an elevation of all things good, and not their destruction. But that purification, that refining of ideas into distilled truths takes time. Christianity did not become legal in the empire and then try to legislate mass change in order that everyone should be forced to convert. Christianity did not seize upon its new found freedom and then begin to impose a Christian theory of Empire. The imposition of a theory from above is a Modern invention- that all things should conform to the latest discovery or novel idea. This is not the Christian way- even though some Christians may act that way. It is antithetical to Tradition.
The English Common Law although profoundly Christian in its DNA is not a Christian project. No one sat down and tried to create a Christian system of laws. So much of the Common Law is really precepts and practices whose origins have been lost to history, but yet still live on because Christians saw in them the same thing they see in themselves- goodness that needs redemption. The Christian vocation takes whatever is good in the world and elevates it- it does not destroy it.
Next Lesson- we will begin to examine specifically just how Christianity transformed a hotch-potch system of local tribal practices and the ancient Roman understanding of jurisprudence into the greatest legal system the world has ever known.
[1] Nicolaus Copernicus (19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance polymath who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its centre. Copernicus likely developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier. The publication of Copernicus’ model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, was a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution and making a pioneering contribution to the Scientific Revolution.
[2] In a future lesson, we will examine in far greater detail the nature of revolutions in human history and the role of Christian Tradition in both accommodating and overcoming their effects.
[3] Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (English: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), often referred to as simply the Principia, is a book by Isaac Newton that expounds Newton’s laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation. The Principia is written in Latin and comprises three volumes, and was authorized, imprimatur, by Samuel Pepys, then-President of the Royal Society on 5 July 1686 and first published in 1687.
[4] Eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία) In the works of Aristotle, was the term for the highest human good in older Greek tradition. It is the aim of practical philosophy-prudence, including ethics and political philosophy, to consider and experience what this state really is and how it can be achieved. It is thus a central concept in Aristotelian ethics and subsequent Hellenistic philosophy, along with the terms aretē (most often translated as virtue or excellence) and phronesis (‘practical or ethical wisdom’).
[5] It is not until 380 that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire when Theodosius I, emperor of the East, Gratian, emperor of the West, and Gratian’s junior co-ruler Valentinian II issued the Edict of Thessalonica which recognized the catholic orthodoxy, as defined by the Council of Nicea, as the Roman Empire’s state religion.
[6] The Edict of Serdica, also called Edict of Toleration by Galerius, was issued in 311 in Serdica (now Sofia, Bulgaria) by Roman Emperor Galerius. It officially ended the Diocletian Persecution of Christianity in the Eastern Roman Empire. The Edict implicitly granted Christianity the status of religio licita, a worship that was recognized and accepted by the Roman Empire. It was the first edict legalizing Christianity and preceded the Edict of Milan by two years.
[7] Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.15–17
[8] Donatism was a schism in the Diocese of Carthage from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid. It began after the persecutions of Christians under Diocletian. Named after the Berber Christian bishop Donatus Magnus, Donatists were rigorists who believed that only the pure could be saved.
[9] Gildas (c. 450/500 – c. 570) — also known as Gildas Sapiens (Gildas the Wise), was a 6th century British monk best known for his religious polemic De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, which recounts the history of the Britons before and during the coming of the Saxons. He is one of the best-documented figures of the Christian church in the British Isles during the sub-Roman period, and was renowned for his Biblical knowledge and literary style. In his later life, he emigrated to Brittany, where he founded a monastery known as Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys.
[10] Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus (16 November 42 BC – 16 March AD 37) was Roman emperor from AD 14 until 37. He succeeded his stepfather Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Tiberius was born in Rome in 42 BC to Roman politician Tiberius Claudius Nero and his wife, Livia Drusilla. In 38 BC, Tiberius’s mother divorced his father and married Augustus. Following the untimely deaths of Augustus’s two grandsons and adopted heirs, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, Tiberius was designated Augustus’s successor.
[11] The seventy disciples (Greek: ἑβδομήκοντα μαθητές), were early emissaries of Jesus mentioned in the Gospel of Luke 10: 1-24. The number of those disciples varies between either 70 or 72 depending on the manuscript.
[12] Aristobulus of Britannia is a Christian saint named by Hippolytus of Rome (170–235) and Dorotheus of Gaza (505–565) as one of the Seventy Disciples mentioned in Luke and as the first bishop in Roman Britain
[13] Pseudo-Hippolytus (1999). “On the Seventy Apostles of Christ”. Ante-Nicean Fathers. Vol. 5. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers. pp. 254–256.
[14] After the Edict of Milan, the efforts to Christianise the Roman world intensified. Three Romano-British bishops, including Archbishop Restitutus of London, are known to have been present at the Synod of Arles in 314. Others attended the Council of Serdica in 347 and the Council of Ariminum in 360. There are several references to the Church in Roman Britain found in the writings of 4th century Fathers. Britain was also the home of Pelagius, who opposed Augustine’s doctrine of original sin.
[15] In 55 and 54 BC, Julius Caesar, as part of his campaigns in Gaul, invaded Britain and claimed to have scored a number of victories, but he never penetrated further than Hertfordshire and could not establish a province. However, his invasions mark a turning-point in British history. Control of trade, the flow of resources and prestige goods, became ever more important to the elites of Southern Britain; Rome steadily became the biggest player in all their dealings, as the provider of great wealth and patronage. In retrospect, a full-scale invasion and annexation was inevitable (Guy de la Bedoyere, Roman Britain: A New History, 2010).
[16] Gildas (De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae) states that when the Roman army departed the Isle of Britannia in the 4th century, the indigenous Britons were invaded by Picts, their neighbours to the north (now Scotland) and the Scots (now Ireland). Britons invited the Saxons to the island to repel them but after they vanquished the Scots and Picts, the Saxons turned against the Britons.
[17] The Battle of Deorham (or Dyrham) is portrayed by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as an important military encounter between the West Saxons and the Britons in the West Country in 577. The Chronicle depicts the battle as a major victory for Wessex’s forces, led by Ceawlin and one Cuthwine, resulting in the capture of the Romano-British towns of Glevum (Gloucester), Corinium Dobunnorum (Cirencester), and Aquae Sulis (Bath).
[18] The Gregorian mission or Augustinian mission was sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 596 to convert Britain’s Anglo-Saxons. The mission was headed by Augustine of Canterbury. By the time of the death of the last missionary in 653, the mission had established Christianity among the southern Anglo-Saxons. Along with the Irish and Frankish missions it converted Anglo-Saxons in other parts of Britain as well and influenced the Hiberno-Scottish missions to continental Europe.
[19] Æthelberht (c. 550 – 24 February 616) was King of Kent from about 589 until his death. The eighth-century monk Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, lists him as the third king to hold imperium over other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. In the late ninth century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, he is referred to as a bretwalda, or “Britain-ruler”. He was the first Anglo-Saxon king to convert to Christianity.