Restitutus

Restitutus is the earliest bishop of London whose name survives in a contemporary historical source. He is recorded among the bishops who attended the Council of Arles in 314, a gathering summoned in southern Gaul under the emperor Constantine. In the list of signatories he appears as bishop of the church of London, travelling with two other prelates from Britain, Eborius of York and Adelphius, whose see has been variously identified by modern scholars as Lincoln or as a legionary city in western Britain. A priest and a deacon from Britain are also named in some recensions of the list. Their attendance is the chief documentary evidence that episcopal churches already existed in the principal towns of Roman Britain within a few years of Constantine’s grant of toleration to Christianity.

No ancient author preserves any further biographical detail. The year and place of Restitutus’s birth, his family, his education, and the date and circumstances of his death are all unknown. He is not mentioned by Bede, whose information on the Romano-British church before the late sixth century was scant. Later antiquarian writers sometimes described him as the first bishop of London, but that title overstates what the evidence will bear: he is only the first bishop of the see whose name is recorded, and the London Christian community may have had earlier, unnamed leaders. Whether he was a native of Britain, a cleric from Gaul, or a man of another origin cannot be determined. The Latin cognomen Restitutus, meaning restored, was widely used in the later Roman Empire and does not by itself indicate rank or ethnicity.

The Council of Arles was concerned chiefly with the Donatist schism in North Africa and with related questions of church order, including the dating of Easter and rules of clerical discipline. The British bishops are not recorded as taking a distinctive part in the African dispute, and no speech, letter, or canon is attributed to Restitutus personally. His historical importance is therefore representative rather than individual. He stands for a British church already in communion with the wider Latin episcopate, organized on the urban pattern of one bishop to a city, and able to send delegates across the Channel. After 314 the documentary record for the London bishopric lapses for a long period, until the Gregorian mission and the consecration of Mellitus in the early seventh century.

Because so little can be verified, Restitutus has not acquired a stable cult or a universally observed feast day. Some modern enumerations of early British saints include him by reason of his office and antiquity, but no early passio, no account of a translation of relics, and no medieval liturgical office can be securely attached to his name. Attempts to identify this Restitutus with other late antique Christians who bore the same common name, including African martyrs, a fourth-century bishop of Carthage active in the Homoean synods, or the legendary evangelist associated with the Tricastin in Gaul, rest on the coincidence of the name rather than on any reliable source.