Paulinus of York

Paulinus of York was a Roman monk of the late sixth and early seventh centuries, sent from Rome in the second company of the Gregorian mission to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Pope Gregory the Great dispatched that group, which included Mellitus and Justus, about the year 601, with books, relics, vestments, and a pallium for Augustine of Canterbury. Paulinus spent more than twenty years in Kent before he appears clearly in the surviving record. On 21 July 625 Justus, Archbishop of Canterbury, consecrated him bishop so that he might accompany Æthelburg, sister of King Eadbald of Kent, to her marriage with Edwin of Northumbria. The marriage agreement allowed the princess to remain Christian and provided that her chaplain would go with her, in the hope that the Northumbrian king might himself be converted.

In Northumbria Paulinus preached at court and among the people. Bede reports that Edwin hesitated, taking counsel and recalling an earlier promise associated with a stranger’s prophecy. After an assassination attempt at Eastertide and the birth of his daughter Eanflæd, whom he permitted to be baptized, Edwin finally accepted the faith. On Easter Day, 12 April 627, Paulinus baptized the king at York in a wooden church dedicated to St Peter that Edwin had built for the occasion. Many of the nobility and common people were baptized with him. Paulinus then conducted a wide missionary circuit: Bede says he remained thirty-six days at the royal township of Yeavering in Bernicia, instructing crowds and baptizing them in the River Glen; he baptized many in the River Swale near Catterick in Deira; and in Lindsey he converted Blecca, reeve of Lincoln, and built a stone church there, in which he later consecrated Honorius as Archbishop of Canterbury. These acts made him the first bishop of York and the founder of an organized Christian ministry across the northern English kingdoms.

That Northumbrian church collapsed after Edwin was killed at Hatfield Chase in 633, in battle against Penda of Mercia and Cadwallon of Gwynedd. Paulinus withdrew by sea to Kent with Queen Æthelburg, her children Eanflæd and Uscfrea, Edwin’s grandson Yffi, and a portion of the church treasure. James the Deacon stayed in the north and continued to teach, especially liturgical chant, in the neighbourhood of Catterick. In Kent the see of Rochester stood vacant, and Paulinus was appointed its bishop. Pope Honorius I sent him a pallium in recognition of metropolitan status at York, but the grant reached him only after he had left the north, and he never returned to exercise that office there. He remained bishop of Rochester until his death on 10 October 644. He was buried in the sacristy of the church of St Andrew, which King Æthelberht had founded. Bede, relying on men who had known him, described Paulinus as tall, slightly stooping, with black hair, a thin face, and an aquiline nose, of venerable and imposing presence.

Later generations in both Kent and Northumbria honoured him as a saint, and his feast is kept on 10 October. Alcuin and other northern writers remembered him as the apostle who first planted the church among the Northumbrians, even though the durable conversion of the north owed much to the Irish mission of Aidan of Lindisfarne after Paulinus’s departure. The timber church at York was rebuilt in stone under King Oswald and his successors; York Minster stands on the site of that foundation. Relics associated with Paulinus were kept at Rochester. He was not the subject of a later medieval papal canonization; his cult belongs to the age of local episcopal and popular recognition. Almost everything that can be said of his life with confidence derives from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, composed in the early eighth century, which remains the principal near-contemporary narrative source.