Honorius

Honorius, the fifth Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Roman by birth and a monk associated with the monastery of Saint Andrew on the Caelian Hill in Rome, the community from which Pope Gregory the Great launched the mission to the English. He belonged to the Gregorian mission that established the Roman Church in the Kingdom of Kent at the end of the sixth century. Surviving sources do not record the year of his birth, nor do they state with certainty whether he crossed to Britain with Augustine in 597 or arrived with the second group of missionaries sent by Gregory in 601, a party that included Mellitus, Justus, Paulinus, and Rufinianus. In either case he spent many years in Kent before his elevation to the archbishopric, and he was among the last of the original Roman missionaries still active in England in the mid-seventh century.

After the death of Archbishop Justus, Honorius was chosen to succeed him. No bishop remained in the southern kingdoms who could perform the consecration, so Honorius journeyed to Lincoln and was consecrated by Paulinus, Bishop of York, an event generally dated to 627. Pope Honorius I afterwards sent him the pallium, the liturgical vestment that confirmed his metropolitan authority, and at Honorius’s request the same pope also granted a pallium to Paulinus, thereby recognizing York as a second metropolitan see. In 634 the pope wrote to Honorius and to King Edwin of Northumbria, urging the English Church to follow the Roman computation of Easter and warning against the Celtic dating still used in Ireland and among some northern communities. When Edwin was slain in 633 and the Northumbrian church temporarily collapsed, Paulinus fled south with Queen Æthelburh and her children. Honorius received the exiled bishop and appointed him to the vacant see of Rochester, thus retaining Paulinus’s experience within the Kentish hierarchy.

Honorius’s long tenure, lasting until 653, was marked by the gradual extension of diocesan organization beyond Kent and by the first appointments of native clergy to the episcopate. He gave Felix, a missionary from Burgundy, a see at Dommoc (Dunwich) for the kingdom of the East Angles, and after Felix’s death he consecrated Thomas and subsequently Berhtgils (also called Boniface) to that bishopric. At Rochester, after Paulinus’s death, Honorius consecrated Ithamar, a man of Kentish birth, the first Englishman to be made a bishop in the church founded by Augustine. These acts did not create a fully native hierarchy—Honorius himself remained a Roman—but they prepared the way for his successor. Throughout his archiepiscopate Canterbury remained the principal centre of teaching and of Roman liturgical practice in southern England. Bede, writing some eighty years later, presents Honorius as a faithful guardian of the traditions of Augustine and Gregory, though he records few personal anecdotes and no miracle collection attached to the archbishop in his lifetime.

Honorius died on 30 September 653 and was buried in the church of the Apostles Peter and Paul at Canterbury, the monastic church later known as Saint Augustine’s Abbey, where Augustine, Laurence, Mellitus, and Justus already lay. A vacancy of more than a year followed; in 655 Deusdedit, also known as Frithona, was consecrated as the first archbishop of Anglo-Saxon birth. Honorius has been honoured as a saint since the early Middle Ages, with his feast observed on 30 September. No medieval vita of any length survives, and knowledge of his career rests almost entirely on Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, a handful of papal letters, and the later commemorative traditions of Canterbury. He is not the patron of particular places, trades, or causes in the developed sense, but he is remembered as the last Roman-born archbishop of the Gregorian line and as the prelate who first placed an Englishman on an episcopal throne in England.