ABSTRACT
In the spring of 597 a company of nearly forty monks from Pope Gregory I’s monastic foundation in the city of Rome led by their provost, Augustine, landed on the isle of Thanet in the territory of Aethelberht, king of Kent. Though they were approaching a once Christian land, formerly an integral part of the Roman Empire, and a land in which Christianity still flourished in the west among Celtic-speaking peoples, large tracts of Britain were now dominated by pagan Germanic barbarians from the continent, about whom very little was known in Rome. On their arrival in Britain, Augustine and his companions entered a post-Roman world which compared unfavourably with sub-Roman Gaul and Italy. So much disruption seems to have attended the last phase of Roman Britain and the subsequent invasion and settlement of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes that many of the principal features of the cultural and economic life of Roman Britain exercised no continuing influence. A villa agrarian system and an urban economy had disappeared; so had the diocesan structure of the Romano-British Church. In the areas of Germanic settlement the dominant religious beliefs and practices were non-Christian and there is no evidence for the survival of a class of educated Romano-Britons. There was no surviving literate tradition. There was no currency. All these factors conspired to place the Anglo-Saxons in Britain on the outer fringe of contemporary European civilization.
