It was thus that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengist became yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine.  But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a reversal and undoing of the first.  “Strangers from Rome” was the title with which the missionaries first fronted the English King.  The march of the monks as they chanted their solemn litany was in one sense a return of the Roman legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric.  It was to the tongue and the thought not of Gregory only, but of the men whom his Jutish fathers had slaughtered or driven out that Ethelbert listened in the preaching of Augustine.

Canterbury, the earliest royal city of German England, became a centre of Latin influence.  The Roman tongue became again one of the tongues of Britain, the language of its worship, its correspondence, its literature.  But more than the tongue of Rome returned with Augustine.  Practically his landing renewed that union with the western world which the landing of Hengist had destroyed.  The new England was admitted into the older commonwealth of nations.  The civilization, art, letters, which had fled before the sword of the English conquerors returned with the Christian faith.  The great fabric of the Roman law indeed never took root in England, but it is impossible not to recognize the result of the influence of the Roman missionaries in the fact that codes of the customary English law began to be put in writing soon after their arrival.

A year passed before Ethelbert yielded to the preaching of Augustine.  But from the moment of his conversion the new faith advanced rapidly and the Kentish men crowded to baptism in the train of their King.  The new religion was carried beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy which Ethelbert wielded over the neighboring kingdoms.  Sebert, king of the East Saxons, received a bishop sent from Kent, and suffered him to build up again a Christian church in what was now his subject city of London, while the East Anglian king Redwald resolved to serve Christ and the older gods together.

FOOTNOTES: 

[43] Translated by King Alfred the Great.

[44] That is, with their near kinsfolk.

[45] A brother is here styled “his brotherliness,” as a pope “his holiness.”

[46] The remainder of this is not translated here.

[47] “Sir” in English (Schir, Scottish) equal to Dominus, Latin, was five or six centuries ago prefixed to the name of every ordained priest.

[48] See introduction to Augustine’s Missionary Work in England.

THE HEGIRA

CAREER OF MAHOMET:  THE KORAN:  AND MAHOMETAN CREED

A.D. 622

IRVING OCKLEY