​Cædmon the Stable-hand: The Backstory

The earliest written history of Britain began with Roman invasions along the east coast of present-day England. Between AD 43 and AD 100, the Romans effectively gained control of Britain and parts of Wales and built over 8,000 miles of road. When they failed to subdue the northern tribes of present-day Scotland, they built walls to keep the feisty Picts at bay. Hadrian’s Wall, built in AD 140, stood twelve feet high. The wall ran from coast to coast, over seventy miles long. The story of Cædmon the stable-hand takes place about 75 miles south of Hadrian’s Wall around AD 670.

As the Romans settled in, new invaders appeared. Around AD 250, the Picts from Scotland renewed their assaults from the north. Pirates from Germany and Scandinavia staged raids along the east coast. Each invader–Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Romans–added their own gods and goddesses to the assortment of nature-related beings the original residents of Britain sought to pacify. Few Christians travelled to Britain during the first two centuries following Christ’s death and resurrection.

The climate of religious persecution changed dramatically after Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in AD 312. In the Roman-controlled areas of Britain,  Christian teachings and traditions gained popularity among the elite. Britain was considered “converted” by AD 396. The test for whether this first introduction to Christianity would survive came in AD 401 when Roman battalions began to withdraw to defend Rome and other areas of the Empire. After nearly 400 years of domination, the Roman legions disappeared in a space of ten years. The Church was left to its own devices without defense from the barrage of pagan invaders.

As the church in Britain faced a crisis, God raised a former slave to bring the gospel to nearby Ireland. St. Patrick was born into a Christian family in Britain during the latter part of the 4th century. His parents were either of Italian descent or Celtic with Roman influence. When he was 16, Irish pirates kidnapped him. For six years, he lived in Ireland as a slave tending sheep. Later in life, Patrick wrote about his calling to return to Ireland as a missionary. His years as a slave had strengthened his faith and trust in God. God had sent a dream to help him escape back to Britain, though he almost starved on the boat journey. As Patrick pursued training in the church, he heard the people of Ireland calling out to him in a dream. Despite his misgivings, Patrick returned to bring the gospel to the land of his captivity.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Saxon invaders destroyed most church structures. To avoid the invasions, many Britons fled to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Roman culture and urban centers gradually disappeared. Without clear leadership and with no Scriptures in the common language, communities reverted to their pagan traditions.  Saxon invaders settled the Eastern portions of the large island, intermarried, and the local dialects morphed into what is now called Anglo-Saxon or Old English.

Finally, the time had come for a fresh start for the church in Britain. Two things happened to attract the attention of Rome. In AD 588, the Anglo-Saxon king of Kent, Æthelberht, married a Frankish princess, Bertha. As a practicing Christian, she brought her chaplain, Liudhard, with her from the mainland. With the king’s permission, Liudhard and Bertha restored the church in Canterbury. Historical records show correspondence between the Anglo king’s court and Rome requesting a missionary envoy. After two hundred years, the Roman Church turned its attention to lands that were formerly part of the Roman Empire.

In AD 596, Pope Gregory the Great sent his former prior, Augustine, along with forty missionaries, to resurrect the church in Britain. They went with great trepidation to reach the Angles who had once decimated the church. Just before the Gregorian Mission started, scribes in Italy had completed an illustrated book of the Gospels in Latin, based on Jerome’s translation. Latin was still a common language.  Historians believe Augustine may have brought these Gospels with him. Today, the St. Augustine Gospels (also known as the Canterbury Gospels) are the oldest surviving copy of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation. (Jerome finished translating the Vulgate in AD 405.) The St. Augustine Gospels confirm that the early church in Britain relied on Latin as its preferred language of communication and worship.

Pope Gregory planned to establish church headquarters in both the north and south of Britain, at York and London. However, since King Æthelberht controlled Kent and lived in Canterbury on the coast outside of London, they would start there. He instructed Augustine to make contact with any other Christians in the region to ensure clear church unity and leadership.

In AD 602, Augustine met with bishops from the Celtic Church, intending to solidify his leadership. These leaders, however, refused to acknowledge Augustine’s authority. Though both groups used Latin for ecclesiastical matters, major differences had developed between the two strands of the church in the past two hundred years. This part is hard to summarize, but there were three main differences. The Celtic church leaders did not approve of Augustine’s alliance with the Anglo King Æthelberht, even though the pagan King had taken baptism. They still rejected the invaders and wanted to avoid them. The Celtic Church preferred following the monastic tradition of training believers in Abbeys, rather than dividing regions into Bishoprics. Most importantly, the churches used different ways to calculate when Easter should be celebrated. It took about 100 years for the Irish and Welsh churches to reconcile with the Gregorian date for Easter. The Irish agreed in AD 664. The Welsh finally agreed to the Gregorian calendar in AD 768. Today, we don’t even question when Easter should be celebrated.

Though reports back to Rome mentioned considerable rates of conversion, the Gregorian Mission was not as successful as had been hoped. After King Æthelberht died in AD 616, pagan opposition increased, and the bishopric in London had to be abandoned. That same year, King Æthelfrith (another Anglo ruler with a very similar name!) died in battle. Since AD 593, Æthelfrith had been consolidating the northern portions of Britain into Northumbria as its first king. His wife’s brother was King Edwin of neighboring Deira. When Æthelfrith died, Edwin took the throne, and Æthelfrith’s three sons fled to Scotland. While in Scotland, Oswald, the middle son, found refuge on the island of Iona, where he met Celtic monks and became a Christian.

Iona Abbey was founded by an Irish Monk, Columba, in AD 563, thirty years before the Gregorian Mission. Columba had once secretly made his own copy of the Gospels and then refused to return them to the monastery in Ireland where he was training. He left Scotland under difficult circumstances, but ended up settling on a tiny island off the western coast of Scotland. Monks from Iona had a huge impact in spreading the gospel to Scotland and on the formidable, war-loving Picts. However, these monks and other Celtic Christians had steadfastly refused to share the gospel with the invading Anglo-Saxons…until they met Oswald. 

In AD 625, while Oswald was on Iona, his uncle Edwin, king of Northumbria, made an alliance with Kent (located near present-day London) and married the former king of Kent, Æthelberht’s daughter. With that marriage, the struggling Gregorian Mission finally expanded to York. Edwin and various members of his household were baptized two years later. His 13-year-old great niece, Hild, was among those baptized. Much later, she would lead the Streaneshalh Abby where Cædmon lived.

When King Edwin died in a battle, just six years after his baptism, Oswald quickly gathered a force to support him and returned to Northumbria to claim the throne. In fear, Edwin’s widow, children, Hild, and Roman leaders of the fledgling church fled south to Kent.

King Oswald wanted to share his faith in Jesus with his subjects. So he invited Aidan from Iona Abbey to begin a community on Lindisfarne Island. This island on Scotland’s east coast was connected to the mainland when the tides were low, not far from Bamburg Castle.

Initially, King Oswald acted as a translator for Aidan and his fellow monks as they travelled throughout Northumbria, sharing the gospel. For sixteen years, until his death in AD 651, Bishop Aidan’s humble lifestyle and his practice of walking the countryside, praying with people, and helping the poor won the hearts of many to follow Christ.

Aidan’s call to believers to be trained in monasteries reached even to Kent, which you remember was in the south near London. Hild, now a 32-year-old woman, was about to leave Canterbury to join her sister in a Frankish monastery on the continent. Instead, she decided to return to York, the land of her birth in AD 646, where she was soon appointed as an Abbess in one of the abbeys founded by Bishop Aidan.

Finally, we come to the time of Cædmon’s hymns in Old English. In AD 658, Hild founded Streaneshalh Abby (later called Whitby Abbey). During her time as Abbess there, God sent a dream to a simple stable-hand named Cædmon. He eventually became a monk and composed the first Scripture hymns in the English language. There still exist twenty-one copies of his song, written in various dialects of Old English. Bede the historian preserved the story of Caedmon and the hymn translated into Latin.

Cædmon served in Straeneshalh Monastery under the Celtic tradition at a time when the church in this part of Britain was only about fifty years old. Church leaders welcomed and nurtured Cædmon’s gift. Today, we would call the way Cædmon served his local community ethnomusicology. This practice encourages musicians, artists, and songwriters to use the local language, rhythms, and musical forms to strengthen the church and share the gospel beyond the community of believers.

We know that even the Celtic Church used Latin because the Lindisfarne Gospels were written in Latin just a few decades later, around AD 715. Bishop Eadfrith inscribed these illuminated gospels with Latin text on the Isle of Lindisfarne. In the late 10th century, three hundred years after Cædmon, the Provost Aldred penned a word-for-word back-translation into Old English between the lines of the nearly 300-year-old Lindisfarne Gospels. From that time forward, scribes and scholars began to add back-translations to the increasingly unfamiliar Latin texts. These interlinear notes helped them teach and write commentaries.

This history records how God used a variety of unlikely individuals‒invaders and exiles, men and women, kings, scholars, and commoners‒to bring Jesus' peace to people’s hearts during the turbulent first centuries of the church in the British Isles. He used individuals who came with the invasion from Rome, a slave named Patrick, a Frankish princess named Bertha, an exiled Irish monk named Columba, Prior Augustine, and other missionaries from Rome, the exiled prince Oswald, a humble Irish monk named Aidan, an exiled young woman named Hild, and Cædmon the stable-hand. He used men and women with hearts surrendered to him. Even today, God still seeks those who will listen to him and lead others to trust in Jesus in our troubled times.