The ancient (Roman) British Church, and its surviving remnants

Everything we know, and most of the legends, about the Ancient British Church can fit into just a few pages (in this case, slightly over five).

Earliest notices

Both Tertullian and Origen wrote of there being Christians in Britannia around 200 CE, which means that Christianity arrived on Great Britain some time in the mid-to-late 2nd century.

According to St. Hippolytus of Rome, St. Aristobolus of Britannia, Apostle to the Britons in the first century was one of the Seventy and brother to Barnabas the Apostle who was occasional companion to St. Paul.

Legendary founders

In the High Middle Ages, a legend grew up that St. Joseph of Arimathea had accompanied St. Mary to Britain, bringing with him the Holy Grail, the cup Jesus Christ used at the Last Supper.

Folk legend holds that a thousand Christians were martyred by Roman soldiers at Lichfield in 304 CE during the Diocletian Persection, known as the Lichfield Martyrs.

St. Alban was martyred at Verulamium in the mid-3rd century.  Sts. Aaron and Julius were also martyredin the mid-3rd century but at Carleon.  The much less well-known St. Sextus was martyred in Canticum (Kent) around the same time.

St. Augulus, Bishop of Augusta (Isca Silurum), is another purported martyr of the British Church in the Diocletian Persecution.

Regional councils

Three British bishops were present at the Council of Arles to condemn Donatism in 314:  Eborious of York (capital of Maxima Caesariensis), Restitutus of London (capital of Britannia Prima), and Adelphius of Isca Augusta Silurum (Caerleon-upon-Usk, capital of Britannia Segunda).

There were also British bishops present at the Council of Serdica in 343 and the Council of Ariminium in 359. 

The mid-4th century governor of the town Rutupitae (Richborough) that had grown up around the Roman fort, Flavius Sanctus, was noted as a Christian in surviving correspondence of the time.

Several Church Fathers (St. Athanasius, St. John Chrysostom, St. Jerome, others) and Popes referred to the churches in Britannia.

St. Pelagius

At the beginning of the 5th century, an ascetic British monk named Pelagius living in Rome began to teach against the doctrines of predestination and of original sin espoused by Augustine of Hippo, a town near Carthage in North Africa.  Instead, Pelagius taught free will and the innate ability of humans to choose between right and wrong; he was also appalled at what he saw as the lax morals and discipline of the Continental church.

When Atilla and the Huns sacked Rome in 410, he and his chief assistant Celestius fled to Carthage, where he actually met his ideological opponent.  Not long after, the two moved once again, this time to Palaestina.  During the short time the two were in North Africa, Pelagianism took hold and spread rapidly, especially in the vicinity of Carthage, the seat of the Roman province of Africa, which is the main reason Augustine opposed it so fiercely.

By contrast, though Pelagius and Celestius (whose views were more heterodox) found in Palestine an opponent in the theologian Jerome, the Synod of Diospolis (aka Lydda, now Lod) called by the bishop of Jerusalem in 415 absolved Pelagius of any heresy and declared him orthodox.

Three years later the Council of Carthage called at the behest of Augustine condemned Pelagius, Celestius, and their writings and followers, a judgment subsequently affirmed by Pope Zozimus at Rome.  At the Third Ecumenical Council held at Ephesus in 431, primarily to condemn Nestorianism (which led to the secession of the Churches of Persia and Mesopotamia), the church leaders reiterated the decision at Carthage. 

Decisions of faraway theologians and church leaders meeting in the eastern end of the empire meant little to Christians in its far western reaches, and Pelagianism remained widely popular in Gaul, where Rome’s control was tenuous at best, and in Britain, from which the empire had withdrawn in 410 (though evidence suggests return of some imperial presence around the year 417), as well as among Christians in Ireland.

St. Germanus & Co.

In 429, a synod in Gaul sent two of its bishops, St. Germanus of Auxerre and St. Lupus of Troyes, to Britain to preach against Pelagianism, which had been spread widely there by one Agricola, said to be the son of a Pelagian bishop named Severianus.

While the two were there, Germanus, who had previously been a military man, led the Christian Britons in battle against the (probably) pagan Irish and their Pictish allies who at the time controlled near all of modern northern Wales.  The battle near the Welsh border (traditionally identified as Mold, Flintshire) was a lop-sided victory for the army led by the Gaulish bishop.

The two Romano-Gauls stayed in Britain about a year before returning.

St. Germanus came back around 447 with another bishop in Gaul, St. Severus of Trier.  Germanus was called into service as a soldier once again, this time recovering the territory called Paganes that became Powys.

St. Patrick

Born Patricius in the village of ‘Bannavem Taburniae’ in Britanniae ‘near the western sea’, he was the son of a decurion and deacon named Calpurnius and grandson of a Christian priest named Potitus.  The location on the coast of the village has been a topic of debate for centuries, with most suggesting it was in Cumbria or on the River Clyde, both of which place his original home in the Hen Ogledd (‘Old North’).

Collapse

Just as Romanized society lasted into the early 6th century (some rulers still used the titles Tribune, Protector, and Dux), so too did the British Church, but both began crumbling as the century progressed, and they both eventually disintegrated completely.  The society transformed from part of the Roman Empire into the native British kingdoms in North Wales, West Wales, and the Old North, while its church was resurrected largely by Irish missionaries, then with natives of the kingdoms educated in Ireland.

In the above paragraph, North Wales equals most of the former province of Britannia Segunda (i.e. Cymru or modern Wales), West Wales equals Dumnonia (Cornwall, Devon, Somerset), the Old North equals the kingdoms in the later Yorkshire north to the Antonine Wall (Deifr, Caer Ebrauc, Bryneich, Goddodin, Din Eidyn, Manaw, Alt Clut, Rheged, Argoed, Peak, Dunoting, Elmet, Novant, Craven).  The first two names come from the Anglo-Saxons, the third from the Welsh.

British Diaspora

The invasions of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, and Franks beginning in the mid-5th century prompted Britons, especially of the southwest, to emigrate to the Continent.  In the beginning of this period, the imperial remnant known as the Domain of Soissons existed in the north, including the parts bordering the Oceanus Britannicus.

Brittany

The northwest of France was called Armorica before and during the Roman Empire, a name which included western Normandy as well as what we known today as Brittany.  First applied in the 5th century when masses of Britons began to immigrate from the southwest of Britanniae (“the Britains”, plural because of the five provinces therein), the name Brittany derives from Britannia Minor, or Lesser Britain, the designation distinguishing it from Britannia Major, or Great Britain.

The name is Bretagne in French, Breizh in Breton, Bertaeyn in Gallo, and Brittany in English.  During the Middle Ages, writers often referred to the region as Litavia.

The eastern tribes of Roman Brittany were the Redones and the Namnetes, who gave their names to Rennes and Nantes.  The westermost tribe was the Osisimii, in between the Veneti occupied the south and the Curiosolites the north, while the ancient forest of Argoat took up the center.  The Paimpont (Brocélien or Brec’Helean) and Huelgoat forests are all that remains).

In the later 4th and early 5th centuries, Britons of the Dumnonii, Cornovii, and other tribes in the south of Great Britain began migrating to the Lesser Britain seeking relief on the Continent from the raids and invasions of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, and Franks.

The threat of the Bretons to the Frankish west had grown so great by the late 7th-early 8th century that the Merovingian kings created the Breton March, from the territories of Rennes and Nantes.

By the late 5th or early 6th century, three kingdoms had coalesced on the peninsula:  Kerne (Cornuaille) in the west, roughly the same territory as the Osisimii; Dumnonea, over the Curiosolites; and Gwened (Venetia, also Bro Erech and Bro Waroch), based on the territory of the Veneti and also subordinating the Namnetes and the Redones to some extent.

The three smaller kingdoms came together after the death of Charlemagne, Emperor of the Romans, in 814 and declared a chieftain named Morman King of Brittany.  Four years later, Louis the Pious, King of the Franks and Emperor of the Romans, invaded Brittany, put down the kingdom, and suppressed its Celtic Rite, making it part of his kingdom.

In 837, Louis appointed Breton noble Nominee as imperial emissary, who after his death in 845 rebelled against his son and successor Charles the Bald, and secured the autonomy of Brittany.

In 851, Charles invaded Brittany and was defeated by Erispoe, son of Nominee, at the Battle of Jengland, after which the new Kingdom of Brittany gained Rennes, Nantes, and Pays de Retz south of the River Loire, carved out of Poitiou.  Another treaty in 863 brought the Entre-deux-Eaux district from Anjou.  In 867, Saloman, King of Brittany, won Cotentin, home to the descendants of the Unelli, and Avranchin, home to the descendants of the Abrincatui just south of it.

The kingdom lost Cotentin and Avranchin to the Duchy of Normandy in 937, and submitted to the Louis IV of West Francia as Duke of Brittany in 939.  It remained virtually autonomous, however, until 1532, when by vote of the Estates of Brittany its ducal crown was united with the French crown.  The region still maintained its own laws and organization until the Revolution.

Channel Islands

Called the Lenur Islands by the Romans.

While technically belonging to the Unelli of Cotenin, the sparsely-populated islands in many ways have more affinity with their Breton neighbors.  From 939 until 1204, they remained part of the Duchy of Normandy, after which they became possessions of the Crown of England.  But it was not until 1569 that its churches were transferred from the French Diocese of Coutances to the English Diocese of Winchester as the Deanery of Jersey and the Deanery of Guernsey (Guernsey, Alderney, Sark, Harm).

The two religious deaneries mirror the islands’ administrative division into the Bailiwick of Jersey and the Bailiwick of Guernsey with four separate parliaments, one for Jersey, and one each for Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark, with Harm included in Guernsey’s.

Britonia

In the first half of the 6th century, Romano-British exiles established a colony on the north shore of the Suebi Kingdom of Galicia on the Iberian Peninsula.  Though its unique Celtic Rite was suppressed in 633 by the Visigothic king whose realm had conquered the Suebi in 585, the district itself retained enough of its character that as late as the early 10th century, the incumbent of the diocese whose see had been moved to Mondoñedo several decades before was still called “Bishop of Britonia”.  The region in Latin is called Britannia Nova.