ABSTRACT
IT is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. By a curious chance, it is to the first great recorded outbreak in Europe of the bubonic plague that England owes the name most famous in the history of its early schools, that of the Greek Archbishop, Theodore of Tarsus; just as to the second and third great outbreaks, the Black Death and the Secunda Pestis of 1349 and 1361, it owes its most famous “Public” School, Winchester College. After the death of Archbishop Deusdedit, the first native English archbishop, in 664, Wighard, “a good man and a fit priest,” was nominated by the Kings of Kent and Northumberland as his successor and sent to Rome for consecration. There the plague caught and carried off him and all his party. So the Pope first offered the vacant post to Hadrian, an African, a monk in the Niridane monastery near Naples, “brought up alike in monastic and ecclesiastical learning”—a distinction all important in the early history of schools—“and of the greatest skill in both the Greek and Latin tongues”. Greek was no doubt still the vernacular of the towns of Southern Italy. Hadrian modestly declined the office, and suggested first a monk of a neighbouring monastery, who proved to be too fat, and then “a native of Tarsus in Cilicia, named Theodorus, a man instructed both in secular and divine literature, Greek and Latin, and of venerable age”—he was already sixty-six years old—who accepted the office. By an odd coincidence of name, this Greek Deusdedit, this foreigner, who would nowadays be superannuated from the Civil Service and from the mastership of any public school, proved one of the most active archbishops who ever sat on the throne of Canterbury. Theodore being a Greek, the Pope was rather suspicious of his orthodoxy and insisted on Hadrian's going to look after him “lest after the manner of Greeks he should introduce something against the true faith in the Church over which he was to preside”. Theodore arrived at Canterbury on 27 May, 669, with the English Benedict Biscop, whom he made Abbot of St. Paul's, afterwards known as St. Augustine's monastery, close to the cathedral but outside the walls of the city. Hadrian arrived a year later and took over this abbey from Benedict, who became a monastic founder in the North. “Soon afterwards,” runs one of the most famous passages in Bede's History, Theodore “travelled through the whole island wherever the English races were settled, and spread abroad the right rule of life, the canonical mode of celebrating Easter, Hadrian going with him and working with him in everything. And he was the first archbishop whom the whole English Church consented to obey…. And because both were abundantly learned in sacred and profane literature, they collected crowds of disciples, and streams of saving knowledge daily flowed from them to irrigate their hearts, as together with holy writ they gave to their hearers instruction both in the arts of metre and astronomy and ecclesiastical arithmetic. The proof is that even to this day,” Bede wrote about 731, “some of their pupils survive, who know Latin and Greek as well as their own language in which they were born”. Bede descants on the happiness of those times, when “Christian kings were a terror to barbarians,” and “whoever wanted to be instructed in holy lessons had masters at hand to teach them”. Further, “they spread the knowledge of the tones of musical singing in Church, which till then they had known only in Kent,” a Kentish precentor Edsi being imported by Wilfrid to Northumbria to teach it. This is a lapse on Bede's part, as he had previously told us that Deacon James had taught it forty years before.
