ABSTRACT
When the missionary bishop, Birinus, was sent by Pope Honorius I in the mid-630s to preach the Christian faith in the remotest Anglo-Saxon regions, he may well have journeyed up the Thames en route for the Mercians whose slaying of Eadwine, first Christian king of the northern Angles (see below, pp. 69 ff.), had probably precipitated this latest papal initiative. The people among whom he came to rest, however, were the pagan Gewisse, located among those Anglo-Saxons whose presence as a major intrusive element in the archaeological record of the upper Thames valley so impressed E.T. Leeds.1 It was to the Gewisse that Birinus preached and their king, Cynegils, he baptized, establishing his episcopal see at Dorchester-on-Thames (HE III, 7). Another Gewissian leader, Cwichelm-he may have been a king or an aetheling (that is, a prince of the royal line)—was baptized, according to the Chronicle, in 636 (ASC A, s.a. 636). Subsequently, Cenwealh, according to Bede the son and successor of Cynegils, established a second episcopal see at Winchester in Hampshire (HE III, 7).
