{59} CHAPTER IX HOW ENGLAND BECAME CHRISTIAN All Europe, we may say, west and south of the Rhine and of the Danube, had become Christian before the barbarians broke through the wall. And when we say "all Europe," it includes even Ireland, out in the north-west. When the Angles and the Saxons came invading Britain and driving the Britons westward, they destroyed Christianity and brought in their own northern religion with its gods, Odin, god of War, and Thor, god of the Hammer, and the rest of them. But their invasion and their disturbance never reached as far west as Ireland. There, the Christian religion continued, while it was destroyed in England. The Anglo-Saxon conquerors were constantly fighting with each other, as well as with the Britons, in England. The three big kingdoms of these Anglo-Saxons were Northumbria, in the north; Wessex, in the south-east and stretching westward along the southern part of England; and Mercia, between the two. These fought with varying success, and somewhere about 600 came an invasion into Kent of a tribe closely allied to the Angles and the Saxons, and actually included sometimes under either of these names--the Jutes, from the northern end of that Sleswig peninsula from which they all came. They landed in Kent, and perhaps because they were so close of kin with the conquerors already there, {61} or perhaps because they came in very great force, it was a Jute king who soon became master of all the east of England from the south of Kent as far north as the Wash. And one of his first acts of importance, as king of all this country, was to ask, and to receive, as his wife, the daughter of the King of the Franks. The Franks by that time were masters of Gaul. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- {60} [Illustration: WHITBY ABBEY. _Photo by F. M. Sutcliffe. Whitby._] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Sidenote: St. Augustine] You see what the effect, of that was--to bring England and the Continent of Europe together, into close relations with each other. They had been thus close together under the Romans, but the intercourse had been severed by the barbarians. Now it was resumed; and the Pope of Rome took advantage of it at once. The Franks were Christians. The Frank king's daughter, whom the Jute king of East Anglia had married, was a Christian. The Pope sent St. Augustine into Kent to preach Christianity; and he was so successful, as a missionary, that Christianity was admitted by the East Anglian king and by his people generally. Thence it made its way again info Northumbria. So that seems entirely to contradict what I told you at the end of the last chapter, about Christianity being brought back into England, and so to some of the northern parts of Europe, not from Rome, but from Ireland.