Ethelbert

Æthelberht (commonly rendered Ethelbert or Aethelbert) was king of Kent in the late sixth and early seventh centuries and the first Anglo-Saxon ruler known to have received Christian baptism. He belonged to the Oiscingas, the Kentish royal line that claimed descent from Hengist. His father was Eormenric. The year of his birth is not recorded in any surviving source. Bede states that he reigned fifty-six years and died in 616, which would place his accession around 560, though some modern historians argue for a later date in the 580s. He married Bertha, a Christian Frankish princess, daughter of King Charibert of Paris. She came to Kent with her chaplain, Bishop Liudhard, and used a church dedicated to St Martin outside Canterbury, possibly a surviving late-Roman building, as her oratory. The marriage tied Kent to Frankish politics and brought a Christian presence to the Kentish court before the arrival of the Roman mission.

In 597 Augustine and his companions, sent by Pope Gregory the Great, landed in Kent. According to Bede, Æthelberht received them in the open air, wary of magic, then allowed them to preach and to reside in Canterbury. He was himself baptized; the exact day is not given by contemporary writers, though the event is traditionally associated with 597. He did not force conversion on his people. He supported a bishop’s see at Canterbury, granted land for a monastery dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul (later St Augustine’s Abbey), and is associated with the foundation of a church at Rochester for Bishop Justus. Pope Gregory wrote to both Æthelberht and Bertha in 601, urging the king to work for the conversion of his nation. Æthelberht’s law code, the earliest substantial text in Old English, includes clauses protecting church property and the clergy, showing the new legal standing of the Church in Kent.

Bede describes Æthelberht as exercising an imperium, or overlordship, over other English kingdoms south of the Humber. Kent’s wealth and its contacts with Francia help explain that pre-eminence. After Augustine’s death the mission continued under Laurence, Mellitus, and Justus. Æthelberht’s son Eadbald remained a pagan during his father’s life. The king died on 24 February 616 and was buried in the church of Saints Peter and Paul at Canterbury, near Queen Bertha and close to Augustine’s tomb. Eadbald’s accession brought a short pagan reaction before his own later conversion.

Æthelberht was honoured as a saint from an early period, without a recorded formal canonization of the later medieval type. His feast is kept on 24 February, the date Bede gives for his death; some calendars use 25 February. His lasting importance is the peaceful reception of the Gregorian mission, which made Kent the first English kingdom to adopt Christianity and fixed Canterbury as the centre of the English Church.