Vertiginous cliffs at Birling Gap in Sussex. In his ‘History of England’, Edmund Burke retold this same story as an illustration of how the Christians brought civilisation and freedom to a society that did not understand either of them. He did not hesitate to lay the blame for the South Saxons’ desperate plight squarely on their pagan religion, which made them afraid of the sea and everything that lived in it.
WHEN Wilfrid came to Sussex in 681, he found that the region had been suffering three years of continuous drought. Though they lived by the coast, the locals could do no more than snare a few eels in the muddy rivers, and sometimes forty or fifty would link arms and leap from a cliff-top, preferring to drown in the sea rather than starve.*
Wilfrid and his monks hastily went through the villages borrowing eel-nets, and then showed the villagers how to cast them in the sea. In no time, the Christians had three hundred fish on the sands. Some they put by for themselves, some they used to pay for the nets, and the rest they served to the starving.
The South Saxons began to look more kindly on this strange faith, that brought life out of a sea that had meant only death. Indeed, many came forward to be baptised; and on the very day they did, a soft, refreshing rain began falling.*
Rudyard Kipling refers to this tale in his short story ‘The Conversion of St Wilfrid’ (part of ‘Rewards and Faeries’), and states that the Saxons called this suicide ‘going to Wotan’, the pagan god of death (among other things) also known as Odin. He adds that their pagan fatalism meant that they often did so when a little Christian hope would have shown them that it was well worth staying alive.
Bede does not mention it, but he must have expected his readers to connect the episode to the miraculous catch of the fishermen Peter and Andrew in Luke 5:1-10. “And Jesus said unto Simon, Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men.”
Précis
In the seventh century, St Wilfrid found the people of Sussex starving to death from a long drought – their heathen superstitions prevented them from fishing in the sea. Wilfrid dispelled their fears and taught them to fish for a living, and was rewarded with many converts, while the Saxons were rewarded with the first rain for three years. (59 / 60 words)
