CHAPTER THREE
“The Gallic tribes as a whole are slaves of superstition”
—JULIUS CAESAR
Of the many objects in the Staffordshire Hoard, the only items that appear to be clearly non-martial are two gold crosses and a strip of gold inscribed with a biblical verse. One of the crosses, a pendant, may have been a part of ecclesiastic dress. The larger cross, “suited for use as an altar or processional cross,” according to the preliminary report, had been crumpled and folded in the same manner as the mutilated military equipment. Also folded—bent almost in two—is the strip of gold bearing a belligerent, and misspelled, inscription from the Latin Bible, Numbers 10:35: “surge d[omi]ne [et] disepentur inimici tui et fugent qui oderunt te a facie tua” (“Rise up, O Lord, and may Thy enemies be scattered and those who hate Thee flee from Thy face”).
How or why did these religious icons come to be gathered into a martial assemblage? In one respect, their presence amid the pagan iconography and images is appropriate, being emblematic of the jumble of religious beliefs that characterized this formative and transforming age. Christianity had first come to Britain during the Roman occupation, then faded as the Roman presence faded, and eventually was reintroduced by missionaries from the Continent and Ireland—the Irish Church in particular being a vigorous center of missionary activity. At the same time pagan beliefs of different peoples still survived. The Romans had imported the Greco-Roman pantheon as well as Christianity, and the Saxons brought with them their own northern gods—all of which were underlain by the very ancient worship and beliefs of the native Britons. Viewed from the safe distance of many centuries, the early Anglo-Saxon age, when the Staffordshire Hoard was buried, can be seen as a time of momentous change as Roman Christianity replaced both paganism and Celtic Christianity; and yet this mystical age also left relics of its older faiths in words and practices still in use today.
A survey of England’s competing and often intermingling faiths casts some light on the composition and possible ritual character of the hoard. The beliefs of the people who inhabited the island first, however—namely, the native Britons or Celts—are the least known, and such records as there are were often written by hostile outsiders. Magic, enchantresses, and nature worship waft seductively through these accounts, along with ritual deposition and human sacrifice, but the piecemeal testimonies make it difficult to reconstruct a coherent belief system.
“The Gallic tribes as a whole are slaves of superstition,” wrote Caesar. He was referring specifically to the Druids, the mysterious priestly caste whom he encountered in Gaul, but whose institution, or doctrine (disciplina) was “supposed to have been devised in Britain, and to have been brought over from it into Gaul; and now those who desire to gain a more accurate knowledge of that system generally proceed thither for the purpose of studying it.”
As Caesar indicates, Druids were made, not born, and women as well as men trained in Britain to learn the “profession,” which, according to Caesar, entailed learning “by heart a great number of verses; accordingly some remain in the course of training twenty years. Nor do they regard it lawful to commit these to writing.” Caesar attributed the taboo against writing to a desire for secrecy and the concern that disciples might “devote themselves the less to the efforts of memory … since it generally occurs to most men, that, in their dependence on writing, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly, and their employment of the memory.” This determination to rely on oral instruction accounts in great part for the frustrating lack of documentation of this fascinating and mysterious sect. Today, the Druids are probably the most famous, if misrepresented, relic of native British religion. Popularly regarded as standing somewhere between priests and wizards, they were most likely an elite and learned class of British society, venerated as judges and scholars as well as priests.
From such varied evidence as Roman testimonies, comparison with other Celtic traditions, and British archaeological remains and place-names linked to old deities, it is possible to glimpse the spiritual world enjoyed by the Britons before the coming of Romans or Saxons. According to Caesar, a central belief was that “souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valor, the fear of death being disregarded.” Caesar attributes the belief in immortality specifically to the Druids, but this was a broader Celtic concept—and possibly the earliest manifestation in Europe—and we can assume it was also held by Celts in Britain.
Similarly, the Britons, like Celts on the Continent, made use of timber structures set within ditched enclosures but conducted most worship outside. According to Roman sources, the Druids venerated groves of trees—particularly oak—and the word Druid is thought to mean “knowledge of the oak.” Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century A.D., states that the Druids performed “none of their religious acts without employing branches of” this sacred tree, as they believed that anything growing on the oak had been “sent immediately from heaven”—hence their veneration for the oak-borne mistletoe. These pleasing pastoral images of shadowy groves, however, are cast in a more sinister light by Roman accounts, from Caesar to the poetry of Lucan, quoted below:
A grove there was, untouched by men’s hands
from ancient times, whose interlacing boughs enclosed
a space of darkness and cold shade, and banished the
sunlight far above. No rural Pan dwelt there, no
Silvanus, ruler of the woods, no Nymphs; but gods
were worshipped there with savage rites, the altars
were heaped with hideous offerings, and every tree
was sprinkled with human gore. On those boughs
—if antiquity, reverential of the gods, deserves any
credit—birds feared to perch; in those coverts wild
beasts would not lie down; no wind ever bore down
upon that wood, nor thunderbolt hurled from black
clouds; the trees, even when they spread their
leaves to no breeze, rustled of themselves. Water,
also, fell there in abundance from dark springs.
The images of the gods, grim and rude, were uncouth
blocks formed of felled tree-trunks. Their mere
antiquity and the ghastly hue of their rotten timber
struck terror; men feel less awe of deities worshipped
under familiar forms; so much does it increase
their sense of fear, not to know the gods whom
they dread.
Lucan’s poetic account is deliberately atmospheric, but that Druids performed sacrifices of human beings is not in doubt; skeletal remains found at the bottoms of pits, in bogs, and even in granaries offer compelling evidence. The famous Lindow Man, whose body was found preserved in a bog in Cheshire, is thought to have been the victim of ritual killing in the first or second century A.D. With his manicured nails and neatly trimmed moustache and beard, he was a man of some status, but he had been struck on the head, had had a rib broken by a blow, had been strangled, and had had his throat cut before being consigned to the bog.
The Druids venerated not only groves, but also springs, lakes, and water in all forms. In Britain, as well as on the Continent, archaeologists have found the remains of ancient wooden piers or jetties that extended over water and led to deposits of domestic objects and war gear. A number of conspicuously high-quality weapons, such as the exquisite Battersea Shield, have been dredged from the Thames and other English rivers such as the Trent and Witham. This Celtic practice may be reflected in one of the most famous stories in the legend of King Arthur—the dramatic return of Arthur’s sword Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake as he lay dying; having served its warrior owner well, the magic sword was ritually retired to the water. (As a fascinating footnote, in recent times the Thames has yielded numerous Hindu votive offerings, placed in the river by Indian immigrants, perhaps with the hope that their gifts would be borne to a place where the river’s waters mingle with the sacred Ganges.)
Offerings were not only made in water. According to Caesar, following a victory the Celts would sacrifice to the god of battle “whatever captured animals may have survived the conflict, and collect the other things into one place. In many states you may see piles of these things heaped up in their consecrated spots; nor does it often happen that any one, disregarding the sanctity of the case, dares either to secrete in his house things captured, or take away those deposited; and the most severe punishment, with torture, has been established for such a deed.” We will return to such ritual hoards in Chapter Five.
Rome seized on the dark stories of human sacrifice as an excuse to persecute the politically as well as spiritually powerful Druids—who, not incidentally, had been associated with native British rebellions against Roman rule. By the time the Saxons arrived, Druidism appears to have been all but dead in Britain, save for a possible relic that survived briefly amid the Picts in Scotland. But some British beliefs and practices may have survived in different degrees, and indeed the Romans strategically supported local native cults by linking native gods with the classical pantheon and adding architecture and altars of their own at important sites. Famously, the Roman resort of Bath, for example, built on hot springs held sacred by the British, was dedicated to “Sulis Minerva,” a neat combination of an ancient Celtic water goddess with Rome’s own Minerva.
Following the edict of Milan in A.D. 313, which proclaimed religious tolerance, the Roman Empire became increasingly Christian, and by the end of the fourth century the British population too was Christian. When the Romans departed Britain, they left their churches and towns to partial and then total abandonment. The Anglo-Saxon newcomers generally chose to build their settlements anew in fresh sites rather than attempting to renovate the rubble of buildings left by the Romans. Over time these neglected ruins were seen, through poetic eyes at least, to be dignified and melancholy reminders of the forgotten Roman age:
Wondrous is its wall-stone, laid waste by the fates.
The burg-steads are burst, broken the work of the giants.
The roofs are in ruins, rotted away the towers.
The specific subject of this elegiac poem, “The Ruin,” composed in the eighth century, is believed to be the ruins of Bath, but such nostalgic wonderment undoubtedly extended to other ruined town and cityscapes. The Germanic newcomers were no strangers to Roman customs or religion—many had served in the Roman army, after all—but confrontation with such haunting physical evidence of collapse must have been sobering.
Little unambiguous physical evidence remains of the Anglo-Saxons’ own sites of worship, although later Christian writers, such as Bede, make reference to pagan altars and temples that were presumably built in perishable wood. King Raedwald, for example (whose burial, it is thought, was found at Sutton Hoo), torn as he was between Christianity and his ancestral faith, had in the same temple “one altar for the Christian sacrifice and another small altar on which to offer victims to devils.”
The earliest description of Germanic worship indicates that, like that of the Celts, it was conducted in the outdoors. Tacitus, in his account of Germanic tribes on the Continent, writes that they do not “deem it consistent with the divine majesty to imprison their gods within walls or represent them with anything like human features. They consecrate woods and groves, and they call by the names of gods the hidden presence that they see only by the eye of reverence.” Anglo-Saxon terms embedded in English place-names still in use today suggest that the earliest English continued their traditional rites in the open; leah or ley, a grove or clearing, for example, appears as a suffi x of many names, such as Thundersley, in Essex, from punres leah—grove or clearing of Thunor (Thor); or Whiligh, in Sussex; Weeley, in Essex; and Willey, in Surrey—all meaning the grove of the wig or wih, the Anglo-Saxon word for “idol.”
According to Tacitus, white horses believed to be prophetic by virtue of their closeness to the gods were kept in sacred groves “at public expense” (publice aluntur). Elsewhere he describes how a priest may on a “public occasion” (si publice consuletur) read omens made from strips of a branch of wood (there is no mention of priestesses, but according to Tacitus, “they believe that there resides in women something holy and prophetic”). Such scattered references—to publicly maintained holy sites, priests in public assembly, altars, and temples—indicate a formal, structured religion, even if it has left no physical trace.
As in other heroic societies, the Germanic tribes placed great emphasis on the survival of a warrior’s reputation after death, achieved by his memorable feats in his lifetime and society’s safeguarding of his memory through passing generations. For this reason scholars believe that the Anglo-Saxons, particularly with their strong sense of kinship, would have venerated their ancestors—and possibly elevated them over time to the status of gods. Such a heroic outlook is generally intent on deeds of this world, with little confidence in much occurring in the next. In a famous passage, Bede recounts a parable spoken by a counselor to the Northumbrian king who was considering converting to Christianity: While winter rages without, the court enjoys the warmth and light of the fire inside their lighted hall, “and a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters at one door and quickly flies out through the other … it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again. So this life of man appears but for a moment; what follows or indeed what went before, we know not at all.”
The point of the parable, in Bede’s presentation, was that Christianity could provide “more certain information” about the dark spaces that bracket human life. This implies that survival of the soul was a novel concept to the heathen king and courtiers. Did the early English, then, have no conception of an afterlife—or was this a Christian misattribution to heathen “limitations”? Without texts or documents for guidance, one must look to the archaeological record. In the roughly 1,200 Anglo-Saxon cemeteries that have been found, grave goods are common; their purpose, however, is often unclear. The many weapons found in Anglo-Saxon graves seem to have been tokens of the deceased’s status, not implements to be carried into the afterlife. But a miscellany of small burial items, such as animal teeth, cowrie shells, rock crystals, Roman coins, and even sea urchins, would appear to consist of amulets of some kind. We do not know how these functioned, however, or whether their purpose was to protect survivors from magic associated with death or the deceased on his journey.
The magnificent ship burial at Sutton Hoo appears designed to take its occupant on a momentous final voyage; yet this is uncertain, and it is possible the ceremonial ships served some other purpose. Later northern traditions tell of “ghosts,” not as insubstantial will-o’-the-wisp apparitions, but as the reanimated dead. Scholars speculate that Anglo-Saxons may have held a similar kind of belief—a limited survival of sort after death, but not involving the separation, let alone freeing, of the soul from the body.
While it is impossible to determine what the Anglo-Saxons believed about life after death or the nature of the soul before the influence of Christianity, it is possible to glean threads of their more mundane preoccupations. Old riddles, medical works, poems, Christian writings, words, place-names, and archaeological finds all preserve shards of early English superstitious beliefs. A medley of four, now bizarre, elements characterized Germanic medical remedies—flying venoms, the number nine, the worm, and elves. “If a horse or other cattle is shot, take dock seed and Scottish wax and let a man sing twelve masses over them,” advises Bald’s Leechbook, a medical compilation dating from around 950. “Elf-shot,” the invisible arrows launched by evil-minded elves (not all were bad), was of particular concern, to judge by the many remedies to counteract its harm to man, animals, and even fields.
Typically the clearly Germanic elements of these charms and herbal remedies appear amid a tangle of biblical or Christian imagery, as in the case of an incantation, undoubtedly older than the A.D. 1000 manuscript in which it was preserved:
A serpent came crawling (but) it destroyed no one
When Woden took nine twigs of glory
(and) then struck the adder so that it flew into nine (pieces).
There achieved apple and poison
That it never would re-enter the house.
Chervil and Fennel, very powerful pair …
The old Germanic gods, known from later Scandinavian mythology, can also be located in the English landscape and language: Tiw, a god of rules and order in both government and battle; Woden (Germanic Wotan, Viking Odin), the warrior and hunter; Thunor (the Vikings’ Thor), whom the Romans equated with Jove, associated with thunder and the stone hammer and a symbol for whom was the swastika, which possibly represented lightning; and Frija, the goddess of sexual love, also cognate with freo, as in freond, or “friend.” The first four deities are memorialized in the days of the week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Eostre, a goddess of the dawn, according to Bede, gave her name to Easter. Not all deities remained potent. Nerthus, the great earth mother and a fertility goddess singled out by Tacitus, left no discernable mark, although there are many references in spells and Christian texts to what were clearly old fertility rites.
The persistence of belief in the old gods is often revealed in disapproving testimony of the church. Bishop Ælfric, writing as late as the late tenth century, for example, decries the manner in which his Christian flock still celebrates the new year: “Now foolish men practice manifold sorceries on this day, with great error, after heathen custom, against their Christianity, as if it may lengthen their life, or their health, when [thus] they provoke the Almighty Creator. Also many are taken with as great an error, when they order their lives by the moon, and their deeds according to days.”
The most effective way to combat the old heathen ways was to allow them to meld with Christian practices, as in a previous age the Romans had redirected aspects of Celtic faith by combining local gods with the classical pantheon. Local saints and relics came to fulfill the roles of pagan shrines and amulets. Indeed, the farsighted Pope Gregory advised early missionaries in England to convert heathen places of worship into churches, “in order that the people may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.”
In a famous story that according to Bede had “come down to us as a tradition of our forefathers,” Gregory had been at a marketplace in Rome where among “other merchandise he saw some boys put up for sale, with fair complexions, handsome faces, and lovely hair. On seeing them he asked, so it is said, from what region or land they had been brought. He was told that they came from the island of Britain, whose inhabitants were like that in appearance.” On learning the inhabitants were also heathens, Gregory had sighed, “and asked for the name of the race. He was told that they were Angli. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘they have the faces of angels, and such men should be fellow-heirs of the angels in heaven.’ ”
In 597, which, as Bede notes, was “about 150 years after the coming of the Angles to Britain,” Gregory dispatched Augustine (not to be confused with St. Augustine, the fifth-century bishop of Hippo) and some 40 other men of God to Britain as missionaries. En route, the delegation, overwhelmed by sudden awareness of the enormity of their task, “began to contemplate returning home rather than going to a barbarous, fierce and unbelieving nation whose language they did not even understand.” Encouraged by Gregory, however, they persevered and landed in Kent, which was ruled by King Æthelberht, whose Frankish wife, Bertha, was a practicing Christian. The meeting between missionary and monarch took place, at Æthelberht’s insistence, outside rather than in a building, lest the newcomers practice magic, which could at least be dissipated in the open air. Although he was not immediately converted, Æthelberht allowed Augustine and his companions to stay and pursue their mission, and granted them a base in Canterbury.
Although the English were heathen, many Britons had practiced Christianity under Roman rule, and their faith was safeguarded in British strongholds such as Wales, Cumbria, Cornwall, and Devon, as well as in Ireland. Nor was the Christian religion entirely unknown to the heathen: Not only was the wife of the king of Kent a Christian, but the religion would have been encountered by English who ventured abroad, or who came in contact with continentals, or who heard stories from others, both at home and abroad. This familiarity, however tenuous, was undoubtedly useful to the missionaries, as was an often-receptive curiosity on the part of the heathens, at least as reported by the Christian chroniclers. The missionaries were quick to target the high and mighty. The bond between Germanic lord and retainer was such that if a lord converted, those under him would follow. The concept of Christ the Lord, to whom one pledged one’s life in fealty, was also straightforward to the Germanic heathen.
Greatly aided by the zealousness of the monastic-based missionaries of the Celtic church in Ireland, Christianity spread steadily in the north of Britain, and although enduring setbacks, progressed, remarkably, without the necessity of making a single martyr. By the mid-eighth century, England was sending missionaries of its own into the world. Indeed, the greatest battle for the new church was not with the unconverted heathen, but was an internal struggle between the Celtic and Roman churches. This conflict had important political and geographical implications, as the south of England had mostly been converted by missionaries from Rome, while the north, and especially Northumbria, had been converted in large part by missionaries from Ireland, where Christianity had developed outside the scope of Roman rule. The ostensible issue, incredible as it will seem today, concerned differences of opinion regarding calculation of the date for Easter, a moveable feast. The issue was debated and decided in favor of Rome in 664 at the Council of Whitby, in North Yorkshire. Thereafter, great Celtic monasteries, such as Lindisfarne, which had served as powerful centers of missionary activity and learning, were placed under the control of abbots obedient to Rome. At stake had been not so much a dispute over Easter, as the central authority of the increasingly powerful Church of Rome. The resolution, in any case, forced the unification of the English Church.
Several critical factors contributed to the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons—the rewiring of an entire population’s spiritual and even intellectual culture. The replacement of Germanic beliefs, such as charms, amulets, and herbal spells, with Christian counterparts, such as holy water and the symbol of the cross, ensured that local people retained a level of comfort with new practices. At higher political levels, however, a key fact, as scholar Karen Jolly has put it, was that “the predominant theme … is the perception of the conversion event as a spiritual battle”—in other words, warfare, which was something the Germanic heathen understood. Actual battles, and more particularly victorious battles, had figured dramatically in the history of Christianity. Constantine, the first Christian emperor of ancient Rome, famously had converted following his victory at Milvian Bridge, having been “directed in a dream to cause the heavenly sign [the Chi Rho, a symbol of Christ] to be delineated on the shields of his soldiers.” A tradition in Britain tells of the “battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights, and the Britons were the victors.” And Bede relates the story of the Northumbrian king Oswald, who before the Battle of Heavenfield against the Welsh in 634, “set up the sign of the holy cross, and on bended knees, prayed God to send heavenly aid to His worshippers in their dire need,” following which he and his men “gained the victory that their faith merited.”
The Christian writers, who by default are the chroniclers of this era, have left many testimonies concerning Christian members of their flocks turning superstitiously to heathen rites; but the opposite surely happened too, namely that Christian objects were turned to heathen use in heathen hands. This survey of faiths began with the question of why damaged Christian objects were included with Germanic-style military equipment in the Staffordshire Hoard. One explanation is that the objects have no particular significance at all, and are simply part of the spoils that an opportunistic looter grabbed from treasure close at hand. But it is at least possible that their presence may have something to do with the reputation of Christian icons for potency in battle; in other words, the crosses were weapons of a sort, and along with swords and helmets, they were best neutralized by ritual burial in the ground.
CONVERSIONS
As pagan Anglo-Saxons moved into Britain after the Romans, Celtic Christians retreated westward or were absorbed into the invaders’ Germanic culture. It was only with the advent of Christian missionaries, primarily monks from Ireland and the Continent, that the heart of England became Christian again. Thanks to the efforts of a number of strong and enlightened churchmen, many of whom were sainted, the island was converted peacefully.
St. Patrick was born about 387 to a Roman Christian family in Britain, but as a teen he was carried off to Ireland as a slave. Eventually he escaped and made his way to France, where he became a priest. Patrick returned to Britain to fight heresy and in 433 received the blessing of the pope in Rome to go to Ireland to convert the pagans. His arrival was marked by miracles, but the Irish did not begin to convert until an Easter fire that Patrick lit near the royal hill of Tara could not be extinguished.
Since Ireland converted before Anglo-Saxon England, Irish missionaries were instrumental in many English conversions. St. Aidan was an Irish bishop who went to Iona as a monk around 630. In 635 the king of Northumbria summoned Aidan to the island of Lindisfarne, where he established a monastery similar to Iona. Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, educated religious men, produced bishops and missionaries, and founded churches across northern England.
St. Theodore of Tarsus from Asia Minor was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 668 at the age of 66. When he arrived in England for the first time a year later, he changed the English Church forever. Theodore’s genius was management and teaching. He toured the English dioceses and redistricted them or founded new ones based on what served the religious population best. He consecrated more bishops and established a school in Canterbury—the King’s School, now the oldest in England—that taught Christians of both Roman and Celtic traditions. Much of his redistricting remains intact to this day. 
THE PAGAN CALENDAR
We know little of Anglo-Saxon paganism but, oddly, relics of it survive in the calendar. Some of the days of the week are named after Germanic gods: Tuesday (Tiw’s Day), Wednesday (Woden’s Day), Thursday (Thunor’s Day), Friday (Frija’s Day). The nature of these gods has been forgotten over the centuries, but accounts recorded much later in Iceland provide an idea of them. Bede, who had an interest in the calendar, tells us the names of some of the pagan festivals: the feasts of the goddesses Hreda and Eostre took place in March (Hredmonath) and April (Eosturmonath, which gives us the name for Easter). This spring festival followed a period of fasting and culminated in the rebirth of vegetation and hope.
In February (Solmonath), as Bede tells us, cakes were offered to the gods. September was the Halegmonath, the holy month, and October to November was the Blodmonath, or blood month, when the Anglo-Saxons dedicated to the gods the animals to be culled in preparation for the fodder shortage of winter. Around midwinter came Modranect—mothers’ night—an important period in the year when the days start to lengthen, a time of hope. It is no coincidence that this was the time chosen to celebrate the birth of Christ—the replacement of a pagan festival with a joyful Christian celebration. Anglo-Saxon paganism has left marks on the English landscape in the form of place-names. In Staffordshire, where the hoard was found, Wednesbury and Wednesfield were both named after the god Woden, the ancient sky god, and just down the road from the find spot is Weeford, a name that comes from weoh, the Old English name for a pagan shrine. Finally, what is the meaning of the strange animals and birds on the objects in the hoard itself? It is highly unlikely that they represent art for art’s sake; these creatures carried meanings that are now lost to us, but we can still sense something of their power and mystery.
PILGRIMAGES
The tradition of pilgrimage and religious exile arose very early in the Celtic church. Not long after the fall of Rome, Irish Christian monks were already heading out on pilgrimages “in the wilderness,” often seeking penitence and sanctuary on islands (sometimes founding monasteries, such as St. Columba at Iona off Scotland in 653), but also preaching salvation among the pagans. It was considered a penance to leave the safety of one’s own people to wander in the unknown.
Once the Anglo-Saxons converted, they too began pilgrimages to see relics of the saints in Rome and elsewhere, and they even went as far as Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Monks and nuns were frequent travelers, but laymen and women also traveled (though women were discouraged). Many English kings also journeyed to Rome, including Kings Caedwalla and Ine of Wessex, who voyaged in 688 and 728, respectively, and both died there.
It could take 12 weeks to travel between the English Channel and Rome, and throughout the arduous journey, monasteries and cathedral towns across what are now France, Switzerland, and Italy welcomed pilgrims. Many of these were holy destinations, such as Tours, Limoges, Conques, and Lucca. “Hospitals” arose to serve the needs of penitent pilgrims as well as the local poor, and other businesses benefited from the passing pilgrim trade.
A number of English holy men made the journey multiple times, often obtaining illustrated manuscripts and saintly relics for their monasteries. St. Benedict Biscop, born to a noble Anglo-Saxon family around 628, made five pilgrimages to Rome, where he collected books and relics for the monasteries he founded in 674 and 682: Wearmouth and Jarrow (home to Bede). Without Benedict’s great libraries, Bede would not have been the finest scholar of his time. St. Wilfred, Bishop of York and a friend of Charlemagne’s, traveled to Rome three times. His advocacy of Roman practice at the synod of Whitby in 664 helped it to prevail in the English Church.