The Cock Profaned

Britannia was a Roman province from around 43 AD to 410 when the Romans withdrew their legions in the face of invasion, leaving the Britons to defend themselves, and with the Anglo-Saxon tribes in control. Whatever Roman institutions they retained, Christian churches and a Roman education system were not among them. However, Christianity had survived in private enclaves, in the private villas of the Romanised sections of society where ‘there seems to have been a significant connection between the profession of Christian faith and the identification with Latin as opposed to indigenous British culture’, and in ‘more humble settings in urban areas’. That said, there would have been little by way of proselytising and when St Augustine with other monks arrived from Rome in 597 to bring Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons at the behest of Pope Gregory, there were neither churches nor schools and they had to establish both. He and his successors established grammar schools to teach Latin to priests and song schools to train the ‘sons of gentlefolk’ as choristers. Augustine was consecrated a bishop by Pope Gregory and he in turn made Mellitus bishop for St Paul’s in London and Justus bishop at Rochester in Kent. A timber Church of St Peter the Apostle was built at York in 627 before being replaced by a larger and nobler one of stone under the guidance of Bishop Paulinus. Around 631, King Sigbert of East Anglia, ‘being desirous to imitate the good institutions which he had seen in Gaul’, founded a school probably in the city of Dunwich ‘where boys should be taught letters’. The monastic cathedral of Lindisfarne was founded in 635. Its first bishop, Aidan, was sent from Iona with a large number of monks at the request of King Oswald and so successful was their mission that ‘Churches were built in divers places; English children, as well as their elders, were instructed by their Scottish [Irish] teachers in study and the observance of monastic discipline’. Schools were established across the country, among them Winchester in 648, Hexham around 678, Malmesbury in Wiltshire, Lichfield, Hereford and Worcester. Beverley Grammar School in Yorkshire, established c.700 AD, is probably the oldest state-owned school in England. It did not survive the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–1541) under King Henry VIII.