Augustine of Canterbury

The Anglo-Saxon conquerors of Britain were converted by St Augustine of Canterbury, who founded a mother church for them in the old city of Durovernum, now Canterbury, on the Kentish Stour. Perhaps there were, in Augustine's day, Christians who prayed still at the old martyria of Roman Britain. Certainly there were, away in the west and in Ireland, Celtic Christians cut off by the heathen invaders from the Christians of the Continent. St Bede tells of their sanctity, but criticises their observance of a different date of Easter.

King Aethelbert (whom Augustine later baptised) had a Christian wife, but Christianity was not the religion of southern England despite the presence of isolated Celtic Christian communities.

It was St Augustine who brought the bulk of these heathen invaders to Christianity, despite his initial doubts about going to a country with what he considered inhospitable weather and people.

His converts and their children held the old apostolic faith and looked for help and protection to the See of Peter, whose bishop - Pope St Gregory the Great - had been their founding father: they were part of the western patriarchate of the Church, and again part of the mainstream of European culture.

This study deals with St Augustine's training, character and background; the sending of his mission; his work in Kent; the structure of the church he established; the nature of the ministry he founded for the continuance of his work.

Here, then, is an attempt to see St Augustine as his contemporaries saw him and as St Bede portrayed him, just over a century later.

This work, widely acknowledged as the only definitive, accessible account of the life and mission of the saint, was republished in 1997 to commemorate the 1400th anniversary of the landing of St. Augustine in Kent.

MARGARET DEANESLY was Professor Emeritus in the University of London and author of many books and articles on the Mediaeval Church. She died in 1977.

Augustine of Canterbury, by Margaret Deanesly.
176 pages, paperback. ISBN 1 901157 25 3.
£9.95 ; $22.95 in the U.S.A.
Published by The Saint Austin Press.
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