The first boats arrived as sunlight was starting to pierce the early morning cloud. A mass of men, after clambering onto dry land, walked up from the river and approached the camp. Then, abruptly, the glint of swords. A charge. Screams. Boniface came out of his tent. Already it was too late. The pirates were in the camp. Desperately, Boniface’s attendants fought back. Not the old man himself, though. Christ, when he was arrested, had ordered Peter to put up his sword; and now Boniface, following his Lord’s example, commanded his followers to lay down their weapons. A tall man, he gathered his fellow priests around him, and urged them to be thankful for the hour of their release. Felled by a pirate’s sword, he was cut to pieces. So violently did the blows rain down that twice a book he had in his hands was hacked through. Found long afterwards at the scene of his murder, it would be treasured ever after as a witness to his martyrdom.
‘Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.’2 So Christ himself had commanded. Augustine, insisting that the Church was for all humanity, had drawn on Genesis to emphasise his point. There, the story was told of how God had sent a flood that covered the entire world; but also of how a righteous man named Noah, forewarned of what was to happen, had built a great ark, in which two of every living creature had found a refuge. The mission of Christians was to build an ark that could shelter all the world. ‘The Heavenly City calls out to citizens from every nation, and thereby collects a society of aliens, speaking every language.’3 Yet Augustine, true to the missionary spirit of Paul though he was, had been the exception that proved the rule. Most of his contemporaries, schooled in a deep contempt for barbarians, had regarded Christianity as far too precious to be shared with the savages who lurked beyond the limits of Roman power. Those few missions that did venture past the frontier had been sent not to convert the natives, but to minister to Christian captives. In 340, for instance, the priest Ulfilas – the descendant of Cappadocians enslaved a century previously by Gothic raiders – had been appointed ‘bishop of the Christians who live among the Goths’. Despite ministering beyond the Danube for seven years, he had not hesitated, when faced with a sudden bout of persecution, to lead his flock to Roman soil. That, after all, was where Christians properly belonged. Even centuries on, long after the collapse of the empire in the West, such attitudes died hard. The division between kingdoms that had once been Roman and the world beyond was one that even the most outward-looking bishops still tended to take for granted. Gregory, when he sent his mission to Kent, had been motivated in part by his awareness that Britain had once been an imperial province. The paganism of its new rulers had offended him not merely as a Christian, but as a Roman.
To Angles and Saxons, however, such considerations meant nothing. Grateful though they were to Gregory for his role in bringing them to Christ, their loyalty to the papacy implied no devotion to any long-vanished Roman imperial order. For Anglo-Saxon monks, the pagan darkness that loured over the eastern reaches of Germany, from the North Sea coast to the great forests of the interior, spoke not of an invincible savagery, not of a barbarism best left alone, but of a pressing need for light. All the world was theirs to illumine with the blaze of Christ. It was not the inheritance of Roman imperialism that inspired them, but the example of Patrick and Columbanus. To experience hardship was the very point. Fearsome stories were told of what missionaries might face. Woden, king of the demons worshipped by the Germans as gods, was darkly rumoured to demand a tithe of human lives. In the Low Countries, prisoners were drowned beneath rising tides; in Saxony, hung from trees, and run through with spears. Runes were dyed in Christian blood. Or so it was reported. Such rumours, far from intimidating Anglo-Saxon monks, only confirmed them in their sense of purpose: to banish the rule of demons from lands that properly belonged to Christ.
As vividly as anyone, they understood what it was to be born again. ‘The old has gone, the new has come!’4 The tone of revolution in Paul’s cry, the sense that an entire order had been judged and found wanting, still retained a freshness for men like Boniface in a way that it did not in more venerable reaches of the Christian world. So august a presence was the Church in Rome or Constantinople that people there might struggle to imagine that it had ever been something insurgent. Yet still, fissile within its scriptures and rituals, the portrayal of change as a force for good, as a process to be embraced, as a road capable of leading humanity to a brighter future, continued to radiate. Boniface, as a West Saxon, a man whose people had only lately been brought to Christ, stood in awe of it. He suffered no anxiety in contemplating the world turned upside down. Quite the opposite. Taking to the roads, he felt himself called to serve just as Paul had once served: as an agent of disruption.
To banish the past, to overturn custom: here was a fearsome project, barely comprehensible to the peoples of other places, other times. The vast mass of humanity had always taken for granted that novelty was to be mistrusted. Boniface’s own countrymen had been no different. Many among the Angles and the Saxons had been afraid to let go of the past: kings who prided themselves on their descent from Woden; peasants who resented monks for ‘abolishing the old ways of worship’.5 Now, though, time itself was being transfigured. Barely a decade after Boniface’s arrival in the Low Countries, missionaries had begun to calculate dates in the manner of Bede: anno Domini, in the year of their Lord. The old order, which to pagans had seemed eternal, could now more firmly be put where it properly belonged: in the distant reaches of a Christian calendar. While the figure of Woden bestowed far too much prestige on kings ever to be erased altogether from their lineages, monks did not hesitate to demote him from his divine status and confine him to the remote beginnings of things. The rhythms of life and death, and of the cycle of the year, proved no less adaptable to the purposes of the Anglo-Saxon Church. So it was that hel, the pagan underworld, where all the dead were believed to dwell, became, in the writings of monks, the abode of the damned; and so it was too that Eostre, the festival of the spring, which Bede had speculated might derive from a goddess, gave its name to the holiest Christian feast-day of all. Hell and Easter: the garbing of the Church’s teachings in Anglo-Saxon robes did not signal a surrender to the pagan past, but rather its rout. Only because the gods had been toppled from their thrones, melted utterly by the light of Christ, or else banished to where monsters stalked, in fens or on lonely hills, could their allure safely be put to Christian ends. The victory of the new was adorned with the trophies of the old.
It was Boniface who had demonstrated this most ringingly. In 722, he had been consecrated a bishop by the pope in Rome, and given a formal commission to convert the pagans east of the Rhine. Arriving in central Germany, he had headed for the furthermost limits of the Christian world. At Geisner, where Thuringia joined with the lands of the pagan Saxons, there stood a great oak, sacred to Thunor, a particularly mighty and fearsome god, whose hammer-blows could split mountains, and whose goat-drawn chariot made the whole earth shake. Boniface chopped it down. Then, with its timbers, he built a church. The woodman’s axe had long served to humble demons. In Utrecht, a fortress on the north bank of the Rhine that had provided Anglo-Saxon monks with the base for their mission to the Frisians, an axe made of polished stone was confidently identified as having once belonged to Martin. Stories were told of how, to demonstrate the power of Christ’s name, the saint had stood in the path of a falling tree, and lived to tell the tale. Boniface, by chopping down Thunor’s oak, had shown courage of a similar order. That he had not been struck by lightning, nor slain for his temerity by outraged locals, was widely noted. The bare stump of the oak served as a proof of what the missionary had been claiming. Christ had triumphed over Thunor. Pilgrims still travelled to Geisner; but now, when they did so, it was to worship in an oratory made from freshly sawn oaken planks.