St. Augustine of Canterbury

The Roman monk Gregory the Great sent to Kent, and the first Archbishop of Canterbury

Augustine did not bring Christianity to Britain; it had reached the Roman province centuries before him, and the British Church lived on in the west. His mission was to the English, the pagan peoples who had settled the east of the island. Sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great, he landed in Kent in 597 with some forty companions, won the hearing of King Æthelberht, and founded at Canterbury the see from which the Church of the English kingdoms grew.

Nothing certain is known of his birth or early life. He was prior of the monastery of Saint Andrew on the Caelian Hill in Rome, which Gregory had founded in his own family house, when the pope chose him in 596 to lead a mission to the English. On the road through Gaul the monks lost heart, and Augustine went back to Rome to ask that they be excused. Gregory sent him on with a letter of encouragement, dated July 23, 596.

In 597 they landed on the Isle of Thanet. Bede, writing in the next century from Canterbury's own records, says that King Æthelberht met them in the open air, wary of any spell they might cast indoors, and that they came to him carrying a silver cross and an image of Christ painted on a board, singing the litany. The king was cautious but generous. He gave them a house in Canterbury, and they worshiped in the old church of Saint Martin, where his Frankish queen Bertha, already a Christian, used to pray.

The king was baptized within a few years; Bede gives no date, and later tradition places it at Pentecost 597. Augustine went back to Gaul to be consecrated bishop, at Arles according to Bede, and Gregory wrote to the patriarch of Alexandria that more than ten thousand English had been baptized at Christmas. In 601 new monks came from Rome with the pallium for Augustine and with Gregory's counsel: to purify the old temples rather than destroy them, and to keep what was good in English custom.

At Canterbury he restored a church built in Roman times and dedicated it to Christ, the origin of the cathedral, and founded a monastery outside the walls that would bear his name. He met the bishops of the British Church, first at a place Bede calls Augustine's Oak, but they would not accept him or Roman usage, and no union came of it. In 604 he consecrated Mellitus for the East Saxons in London and Justus for Rochester.

He died on May 26, probably in 604, and was buried beside the abbey church he had begun, its own church not yet consecrated. His relics were later brought inside, and in the eleventh century they were translated into the new Norman church. The abbey was surrendered to Henry VIII in 1538 and pulled down, and his tomb was lost with it. The ruins, the cathedral and Saint Martin's now stand together as a World Heritage Site.

Augustine's mission was small, slow and often frustrated, but it fixed the see of Canterbury and tied the English Church to Rome. Bede, who told its story, called Gregory the apostle of the English; Augustine was the man who went. The Church keeps his memorial on May 27, and in England it is a feast.