There was extensive coverage in last weekend’s media about the decision of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his partner Carrie Symonds to call their newly born son Wilfred.
As is so often the case, it’s a name of family significance, and was chosen, according to the Daily Telegraph, in memory of the Prime Minister’s grandfather, a decorated World War Two bomber pilot.
Despite this, I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow and think of another Wilfred, or Wilfrid.
It struck me as deeply ironic that the son of the champion of Brexit should carry the name of St Wilfrid (c.634-709/10), who, arguably more than any other early medieval holy man, worked to ensure that the Church, kingdoms and peoples of Anglo-Saxon England were integrated into the European mainstream.
Wilfrid lived during a turbulent time of warfare and political flux, an era when an English national identity was first being forged. It was also a period of religious conversion.
In 597 monks sent by Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) arrived in Kent on a mission to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. Under the leadership of St Augustine, they established their base at Canterbury and gradually spread the gospel across the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Simultaneously, Irish (or as is often incorrectly said, Celtic) monks from their island monastery at Iona embarked on a quite separate evangelising campaign. The two traditions – Roman and Irish – came head to head in Wilfrid’s native Northumbria.
Wilfrid’s religious career began at Lindisfarne, a monastery founded in the Irish tradition off the Northumbrian coast. However, he soon fell under the influence of nobles and churchmen who adhered to Roman practices and embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy City.
Rome’s buildings, ceremonies and holy relics had an enormous and lasting impact on the young Wilfrid. He made daily visits to the shrines of the martyrs, leaving him with an intense devotion to the apostolic brothers Peter and Andrew. While in Rome, he became au fait with the latest liturgical practices and a new method for calculating Easter – knowledge that was to prove deeply significant a few years later.
His journey back to Northumbria took him to Lyon. Here Wilfrid received the monastic tonsure and became even more attached to the traditions, ceremonies and authority of the Roman-influenced church.
Once back in his native land, Wilfrid affirmed his reforming, Continental credentials by introducing at his newly founded monastery at Ripon the Rule which St Benedict had composed for the monks at Monte Cassino in central Italy over a century earlier.
It’s therefore no surprise that Wilfrid was chosen to present the Roman case at the so-called Synod of Whitby in 664. This pivotal episode in the history of Anglo-Saxon England was called to resolve aspects of Church custom that were disputed between Irish and Roman missionaries at the Northumbrian court. The most pressing of these was the calculation of the date of Easter.
Wilfrid’s appeal to the authority of St Peter, the keeper of the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, convinced King Oswiu of Northumbria (d. 670) to decide in favour of the Roman side.
The Venerable Bede (673-735), Anglo-Saxon monk, historian and saint, is our main source for this epoch-making event. He placed into Wilfrid’s mouth an extraordinary speech. This contrasted Roman customs, observed "wherever the Church of Christ has spread", to those maintained by Irish elements in the Northumbrian Church, or as Wilfrid called them, "stupid…obstinate inhabitants of a portion of these two islands in the remote ocean."
Ouch! It’s a stinging denunciation of what could now be stigmatised as "little Englander" attitudes. Wilfrid’s comments resonate – and likely please and infuriate in equal measure – in Brexit-Britain of 2020.
Proud and obstinate, there’s no doubt that Wilfrid was a deeply divisive figure in his own lifetime (and was even driven from his own diocese). He has remained just as divisive in later centuries.
For nineteenth-century English Protestant historians, and some modern-day secular commentators, Wilfrid was a personification of the haughty, centralising, foreign Church of Rome which subjugated an independent, free-wheeling Celtic Christianity, the true ancestor of the Church of England.
But in reality, this was far from being the case. Wilfrid and his advisories shared the same fundamental religious beliefs. As is clear from the pages of Bede, there was much more that united them than divided them. Saints from both traditions were to be venerated with equal honour in the monasteries and cathedrals of medieval England.
Let’s go back to little Wilfred Johnson.
He’s been born into a Britain of crisis and political rancour. But I wonder if the events of spring 2020, not least the rallying around the NHS, the widespread adherence to lockdown regulations, the respect for physical distancing, show that just like seventh-century Northumbria, the British are more united than it often appears. When the church doors reopen, I’ll light a candle to St Wilfrid to give thanks for that.
Dr Michael Carter is a fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His research is focused on saints, relics and monasteries.
What do you think?
You can post as a subscriber user ...
User comments (0)