It had been a nasty morning. A day when nothing appears to be going right – and quite a bit flawed. One solution: retreat to a quiet place and have a look at something totally unrelated. My eyes alighted on a duplicate of Crockfords within the library. Out of mild interest I flipped through to the page listing the Bishops of Winchester – my birthplace – and counted them. At the time, some forty years ago, there have been ninety-eight and “One Hundred Bishops” struck me as a very good title for my recent book on this topic, The Winchester Powerhouse.
In the many years that followed I researched names I had heard since childhood – and plenty of I had not. I soon discovered that nobody had checked out the entire list for the reason that early 1820s when the Reverend Stephen Hyde Cassan had collated all that he could find and published in 1827. High time, due to this fact, for an up up to now appraisal.
To some, the writing of my book became an obsession, not least to members of my family. ‘Where is he?’ ‘He’s within the study – together with his bishops’ would come the just about mocking reply. I became a widely known face in county record offices, on the National Archives and, perhaps, better of all, at Lambeth Palace Library. Naivety was replaced with knowledge in depth and a growing appreciation of the vital place the Winchester prelates occupied in English history.
Early on, I discovered the numerous role that the evangelists, notably St Berin (Birinus), played within the re-introduction of Christianity into Saxon Albion throughout the seventh century – arguably simpler than St Augustine of Canterbury and the various Celtic saints within the North. The secret to the Winchester success was the symbiotic relationship forged between the Wessex kings and their spiritual advisers. Out of appreciation for the recommendation a well-educated bishop could provide and the support he could engender, the king passed large areas to episcopal ownership, not least in those parts of his realm threatened by neighbours. By the time the Danes were engulfing the very existence of Wessex, the Church had established a parochial network which may very well be used to rally forces strong enough to face down the Norse invaders. The battle of Edington in AD 878 wouldn’t have been won by Alfred the Great without this facility.
Study of St Berin’s successor, Agilbert, revealed a bishop’s frequent involvement in crucial diplomacy. The Synod of Whitby in AD 664 that united the early English Church did not only occur. In the several years before, Bishop Agilbert visited the northern petty kingdoms to influence their rulers that Roman, not Celtic, practices must be followed. The Synod merely put this stamp on the proceedings and the resulting agreement stuck.
By the tenth century, the Old Minster in Winchester had change into not only a royal mausoleum; its scriptorium was a library of ancient texts which underpinned government proceeding in each the State and the Church. The monks and secular clerks who lived there have been increasingly called on to manage the Wessex court which from Alfred’s day was normally based in Winchester. His worthy successors developed machinery of presidency wherein the chief minister, the Chancellor, was invariably the Bishop of Winchester. Well before the Norman Conquest, England had been united under the Wessex kings as a unitary state which held together though assailed by almost continuous invasion by Norsemen.
One other salient contribution. It was episcopal influence at the tip of the seventh century that raised the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 16 and introduced a humane dimension to social order. From then until the Norman Conquest law courts were presided over by the bishop and an ealdorman – a high-ranking official in Anglo-Saxon England who was appointed by the king – as equals. The king’s law and God’s law were unified, a singular and benevolent feature of Saxon England that has been too often undervalued.
Anthony Paice is the writer of The Winchester Powerhouse, out now priced £16.99.
