St Oswald's Priory, Gloucester

As I sat in the grounds of ruined St Oswald's Priory in Gloucester last month, I pondered its age. Founded by Æthelflæd, ‘the Lady of the Mercians’ and daughter of Alfred the Great, along with her husband Æthelred, Lord of Mercia, the two lay buried somewhere in its grounds. Those big wide arches, above, are from the ninth-century Saxon construction.

As well as admiring the old masonry, I had begun reading Peter Ackroyd's The English Soul: Faith of a Nation. He includes a chapter on the Venerable Bede, an early Saxon monk from the North East who, though seldom leaving his scriptoria at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, recorded various opinions and assessments of almost everything around him.

Curiously, he saw the advent of his own people, the Angles and Saxons, as a judgement of God upon the compromised Christians of the native Romano-Britons. Although the European invaders eventually converted to Christianity, Bede laments the state of the church in his own day, commenting on the lax standards of other monastic houses and their attraction for noble-born but worldly-minded abbots. Had he lived to see the Viking incursions from 789 and the sacking of Lindisfarne in 793, he would doubtless have called it a judgement of God upon the weak and worldly Saxon Church. The Norse and Danes eventually converted to Christ themselves, the cycle beginning afresh.

In these days of mass Islamic migration to the United Kingdom, might the Venerable One ascribe to them the same status? A judgement of God upon an apostate nation and upon a weak and enfeebled church which began denying cardinal truths back in Victoria’s reign? As their population and power grows, so persecution is apt to begin. Yet it might also be true that just as the pagan Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Norse and Danes came to destroy churches and Christian witness but were themselves converted to it, might the same be said of our latest arrivals?

And now have I given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant; and the beasts of the field have I given him also to serve him. Jeremiah 27:6

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