Anglo-Saxon Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Anglo-Saxon Era’
An English monk warned of a flaw in the world’s most widely-used calendar.
Until 1752, the British Isles used the Julian Calendar brought here by the Romans in the first century AD. It had its problems, as even vocal champion St Bede acknowledged; but when Rome updated it in 1582 they trampled needlessly on ancient Church rules, offending the Greeks and Russians, and the Reformation was in full swing, which meant the English were in no mood to comply either.
The chapel of Bede’s monastery in Sunderland was full of the colours and sounds of the far-off Mediterranean world.
In 678, the new Pope, a Sicilian Greek named Agatho, decided to continue a recent trend of introducing Greek elements into Roman worship. St Benedict Biscop, an English abbot who visited Rome for the fifth and final time the following year, brought the sights and sounds of the eastern Mediterranean back home.
Hild founded an abbey that poured out a stream of priests and bishops for the revitalised English Church.
Hild or Hilda was a seventh-century Northumbrian princess who at the age of thirty-three became a nun. Taught by St Aidan, she was one of the early English Church’s most respected figures and was given the care of a monastery for men and women at Hartlepool, moving to Whitby in about 657. There she trained clergy to preach the gospel and lead church services for Christians all over the kingdoms of the English.