The Synod of Whitby and its Aftermath

 

In my previous blogs I have argued that the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’cemeteries to be found scattered across Britain within Iron Age enclosures dating from 450 – 650 AD are not Anglo-Saxon at all but evidence of Christian Druid monasteries and from the evidence of bed burials from Wiltshire to Northumberland around the latter date many of these seem to have been double monasteries run by women.

The cemeteries ceased to be used after about 650 AD suggesting that the community living there at the time of the Synod of Whitby (664 AD) when the Roman church gained the support of the then High King (Bretwalda) Oswiu of Northumberland and thus official ascendancy over the Christian Druid (Celtic) church.

The question for archaeologists and historians is did this phasing out of double monasteries occur in a single purge, like the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16^th century, or was it a more gradual process?

Here archaeology is no help because the dating is not precise enough but we are not in the realms of pre-history in the 7^thcentury and documents give us the answer.

In 668 AD the distinguished Greek monk Theodore of Tarsus was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Vitalian. Theodore was well-versed in the disciplines of astronomy and ecclesiastical arithmetic and lectured basing his knowledge of the calendar on the movement of the

planets in the Ptolemaic universe, one in which the earth was at the centre of the solar system and the planets, including the sun, moved around it.

 In my biography Columbanus: Poet, Preacher, Statesman, Saint I describe how Columbanus fought tooth and nail against the church adopting this fallacious argument which was in part designed to support the political claim that the earth was the centre of the universe, the Emperor in Byzantium the centre of the earth and therefore God’s representative on earth and as such the sole possessor of absolute power.  Columbanus was arguing strenuously for the paramount importance of rationality and empirical truth not to mention the political independence of western Europe and by inference the individual. 

 When Theodore was born in 602 AD the Byzantine Empire (the eastern Roman Empire as was) was under threat from Persian and Arab incursions along its eastern borders and succeeding Byzantine Emperors began to look at the potential for expanding westwards and reclaiming the old western Imperial provinces including Britannia. Theodore’s appointment should be seen in this light. He was very much the imperial choice. Pope Vitalian was still one of the five patriarchs answerable to the Emperor in Cosntantinople which was besieged by the Arab fleet in 670 AD.  Tarsus, Theodore’s home town, had been taken by the Ummayad caliphs in 661 AD so in 668 Ad he was effectively a refugee.  He brought with him not only an impressive array of Greco-Roman learning but also the icons, art-forms, silk and purple vestments, the liturgy, relics and veneration for eastern saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Theodore was no fool.  He knew he could not just impose these things on the British Church.  Instead he attempted to create a fusion between the Roman Catholic Church and the Celtic Church.  His efforts at even-handedness are witnessed by the fact that he restored the Roman Catholic Wilfred to the Bishopric of York and the Celtic/Irish saint Chad to that of Lichfield. 

 He advocated the use of the penitential developed by the Celtic Church (see Columban’s version of Finnian’s penitential) but with a few crucial differences.

Included in his rules are a few that indicate why the cemeteries ceased to be used after 650AD or thereabouts.  Theodore ordered (before 690 AD when he died) that churches may be moved without new consecration and adds that any church may be moved just with the consent of the local bishop and his chapter.  He also insisted that women were not to be allowed to offer penance (hear confession and grant absolution) which meant that effectively they could not be priests.  Monks incidentally were not priests either but the injunction is not applied to men.

  It seems therefore that moves were afoot from the 680s onwards to close down the double monasteries, move their communities off the Iron Age sites which established continuity between the new Christian church and its Druid past, and push women back into an inferior position within the church.

That this was a new development in the late seventh century we can tell from the fact that in 633AD a double minster was founded at Lyminge in Kent, not far from Canterbury, for Aethelberg, the daughter of Aethelbehrt, the King of Kent.  There is nothing in the ruins to indicate any separation between nuns and brothers in the nave.  Yet in the 670s a scandal is reported involving the double monastery at Coldingham in the far north of Bernicia (Northumberland/Scottish borders) headed by Abbess Aebbe, the sister of King Oswiu and aunt of King Ecgfrith.  Scandals did arise from time to time of course but the timing of this one is suspicious.  When the monastery was destroyed by fire in 679 AD it was deemed to by a divine judgement.  Had Aebbe resisted the attempts to close her down?

 Nevertheless it appears that the phasing out was more gradual than the dissolution of the monasteries.  As late as 704 AD Abbess Aelfled is still influential enough to attend an important synod and be asked to give her advice.

 It is at this time that the Benedictine Order , more amenable to accepting the control of the church, makes its appearance in Britain.  Most of England’s mediaeval cathedrals offer foundation dates between 690 and 710 AD and most of them were originally Benedictine monasteries which suggests that the Benedictines were able to establish themselves quite quickly by transplanting Christian Druid communities from their Iron Age locations to the sites of the new abbey churches.