Читать книгу The Abbeys of Great Britain - H. Claiborne Dixon - Страница 13

THE precise date of the introduction of Christianity into Lancashire is not known, but it is an established historical fact that the Christians in Britain were persecuted at the beginning of the 4th century by the Emperor Diocletian and that the death of the first recorded martyr, St Alban, took place in 304 near the city which now bears his name. In 311 Constantine the Great was converted to Christianity and this illustrious Emperor exercised a powerful influence over the spiritual affairs of Lancashire. In 627, Edwin, King of Northumbria, became converted through the agency of his wife Ethelburga. This conversion led to war between Edwin and the King of Mercia, when the King of Northumbria was killed at the battle of Hatfield. By the end of the 7th century, Northumbria had become a Christian and powerful kingdom and the “literary centre of the Christian world in Western Europe. The whole learning of the age seemed to be summed up in a Northumbrian scholar—Baeda, the Venerable Bede later time styled him.”—Green’s History of the English People.

Between the 7th and 9th centuries several monasteries are believed to have been established in Lancashire. The invasion of the Danes during the 8th and 9th centuries disturbed the existing order of things, and for many years before and after the event the ecclesiastical history of the kingdom is almost a blank. The new occupiers of Northumbria were mostly from Denmark—a great point of difference between the conquered and the conquerors being that, whilst the settlers in Britain had to a great extent adopted the new religion and devoted themselves to peaceful pursuits, the Danes continued to worship Odin and other kindred gods, and were still a lawless set of pirates, distinguished for courage, ferocity, and hatred of Christianity. Persecution followed as a natural consequence, and the religious progress of the previous two centuries was almost wholly annihilated. Between this period and the election of Edward the Confessor, Christianity made some progress, a bishop of Danish blood actually occupying the Episcopal chair of York, in which diocese Lancashire was at that time included. The Doomsday book gives positive evidence of at least a dozen churches in Lancashire.