Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 10, 2012

The Gregorian mission was a missionary endeavour sent by Pope Gregory I (depicted) that began in 596 AD. Headed by Augustine of Canterbury, its goal was to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. Along with Irish and Frankish missionaries, they converted Britain and helped influence the Hiberno-Scottish missionaries on the continent. In the late 6th century, Pope Gregory sent a group of missionaries to Kent to convert Æthelberht, King of Kent, whose wife, Bertha, was a Frankish princess and practising Christian. Augustine was the prior of Gregory's own monastery in Rome, and Gregory prepared the way for the mission by soliciting aid from the Frankish rulers along Augustine's route. In 597, the forty missionaries arrived in Kent and were permitted by Æthelberht to preach freely in his capital of Canterbury. Soon the missionaries wrote to Gregory, telling him of their success and that conversions were taking place. A second group of monks and clergy was dispatched in 601, bearing books and other items for the new foundation. The exact date of Æthelberht's conversion is unknown, but it occurred before 601. Before Æthelberht's death in 616, a number of other bishoprics had been established. Although the missionaries could not remain in all of the places they had evangelised, by the time the last of them died in 653, they had established Christianity in Kent and the surrounding countryside and contributed a Roman tradition to the practice of Christianity in Britain. (more...)

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