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. Writing his Histories in the later decades of the sixth century, however, Gregory, bishop of Tours, makes the earliest extant reference to an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, namely Kent. Moreover, the survival of copies of papal letters relating to the progress of the Gregorian mission to the Anglo-Saxons in the late sixth century and early seventh, some of them only in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, creates opportunities for testing Bede’s historical narrative concerning events at this time in Kent, which was based essentially on oral tradition, against the evidence of contemporary documentation. The political developments of the first half of the seventh century undoubtedly relegated Kent to a position of lesser importance as kings of the northern Angles created new hegemonies.
