Christianity came at the pagan Anglo-Saxons from two directions. The Celtic Church, pushed back into Wales, Cornwall, and particularly Ireland. The Roman Catholic Church approached from the south, beginning with the mission of St.Augustine to Aethelbert, King of Kent, in 597.
Aethelbert was chosen because he was married to Bertha, a Frankish Christian princess, whose support was essential. King Aethelbert, unsure of the intent of the Christian magicians, chose to greet them in the open air to ensure that they couldn’t cast a spell over him.
Augustine’s original intent was to establish an archbishopric in London, but this ignored the political fact that London was in the realm of decidedly pagan religions, particularly Mithraism, so Canterbury, the capital of the Kentish kingdom, became the seat of the pre-eminent archbishop in England.
The Celtic church was empathic, fervent, monastic, and more spontaneous. Ultimately the more disciplined, structure, Roman Church prevailed.
The church was the only truly national entity tying together the different Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The early monasteries of Northumberland were vital centers of learning and the arts until they were destroyed by the Viking raids of the 9th century.
The earliest and most important writer of prose was the Venerable Bede, a contemporary of the auth or of Beowulf. Bede also spelled BAEDA, or BEDA (672/673-735), Anglo-Saxon theologian, historian, and chronologist, best known today for his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), a source vital to the history of the conversion to Christianity of the Anglo-Saxon people. He also introduced to historical works the system of dating events from the birth of Christ and did careful work in historiography.
Churches were almost the only forum for education. Under the auspices of Alfred the Great church schools were encouraged, and many Latin works were translated into English. The higher church officials also played important secular roles; advising the king, witnessing legal transactions, and administering landholdings of the church, which could be exceedingly large.
Most of the early work of spreading the Gospel was done from monasteries. The monks of the 7th and 8th centuries were not confined to a closed monastic community, but carried the responsibility of traveling, usually on foot, throughout the surrounding countryside to preach and convert in the villages.
Most church buildings were built of stone, but this was not true of domestic buildings. Even in towns, very few buildings would have had even a stone foundation. Most dwellings were wooden, with low, thatched roofs, an open hearth in a floor of earth or gravel, and walls of planks or mud and sticks (www.Britainexpress.com).
The Anglo-Saxons ruled England for almost a century. During that time they established a nation. It is true, as G. K. Chesterton argues, that the end of Roman rule meant the beginning of barbarian rule. “It seems certain that in this welter Roman Britain bought help from ruder races living about that neck of Denmark where is now the duchy of Schleswig. Having been chosen only to fight somebody they naturally fought anybody; and a century of fighting followed, under the trampling of which the Roman pavement was broken into yet smaller pieces. It isperhaps permissible to disagree with the historian Green when he says that no spot should be more sacred to modern Englishmen than the neighbourhood of Ramsgate, where the Schleswig people are supposed to have landed; or when he suggests that their appearance is the real beginning of our island story. It would be rather more true to say that it was nearly, though prematurely, the end of it.” Still, thanks mostly to Christianity, Anglo-Saxon culture emerged from barbarism, to a high culture. The Church then surely is one of the major reasons the nation of Great Britain emerged.