Salvation How the Celts Saved Britain

Around 1,500 years ago, a group of 12 monks set sail from the north of Ireland.

They were leaving behind a place of safety and civilisation...

..and sailing towards a foreign land that was unstable, dangerous and hostile...

..Britain.

It was a journey that would radically alter the course of British history

because those 12 Irish monks triggered a revolution

that would change Britain from an illiterate and backward place to a land of culture and learning.

It is the middle of the 6th century AD.

The Roman Empire, once powerful, rich, civilised and Christian,

had collapsed a century before.

Years of chaos and war in Europe had ensued.

In the old Roman province of Britannia,

Germanic tribes had invaded, driving out Christianity and what remained of Roman civilisation.

They now controlled much of Britain and their pagan gods ruled in the darkness.

But in Ireland, never conquered by Rome, missionaries had transformed a once barbarian land

through Christianity,

the one legacy of the Classical world that had survived Rome's collapse.

Monasteries had sprung up across the land, fostering literacy, technology and a new civilisation.

As they landed on the west coast of Scotland in 563AD,

no doubt on a day as grey as this one,

the 12 Irish priests would have been in no doubt

as to the dangers of foreign travel.

These were unstable times, strangers in a distant land risked imprisonment or death.

But as the priests marched up the beach, they weren't as concerned as you might think.

And the reason for that was that they weren't really in hostile foreign territory.

They were in effect still in Ireland.

For generations, Irish territory had been expanding,

and now the Irish Kingdom of Dalriada straddled both sides of the Irish Sea.

Its people were known as Gaels or Scotti.

They would later give their name to a new nation - Scotland.

Dalriada is long gone, its heartlands are now Argyll,

but the modern name betrays its ancient origins.

"Ar-gyll" means "Coast of the Gaels".

For me, Argyll is familiar territory.

It was the home of my ancestors

and the scene of many of my childhood summer holidays, spent mainly in the rain!

The 12 Irish monks made their way up to the hillfort of Dunadd, seat of the King of Dalriada.

They would have passed through heavily defended stockades and walls as they went.

At their head was a man who was already a rising star of the Irish church.

He was Colum Cille...

..known also by the Latin version of his name, Columba.

Columba and the King of Dalriada could look at each other as equals, both were powerful men.

Columba in fact was descended from the High Kings of Ireland,

so he could have chosen a career as a chieftain wielding political power,

but instead he opted to join the Church.

He was a hugely charismatic man in his early forties,

and his confidence, his aristocratic background would certainly come in useful,

because in this mission diplomatic skills would be just as important as faith.

This was more than just a courtesy call.

Columba needed the King's permission to operate in his lands, and he needed his protection too.

Dalriada controlled just a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea.

Beyond the mountains was enemy territory.

As well as permission and protection,

Columba wanted one more thing - a plot of land to build a church on.

That request was granted.

He was given a small island forty miles that way, right on the edge

of Dalriadan territory and that island will forever be associated with Columba and his monks.

Its name was Iona.

Nowadays, coming to Iona feels a little bit like you're reaching the edge of the Earth.

It's taken me four hours and three different ferry crossings to travel here from Dunadd.

Back then, it was right at the centre of things.

Just a few years after Columba and his followers had established this settlement, it was thriving.

So busy in fact that a regular ferry service needed to be established across the sound here to Mull.

It was nothing less than one of the most dynamic engines of Christianity in the world.

As they crossed the sound to Iona,

the Irish Monks brought with them not just the Christian faith but the seeds of a new civilisation.

So, Cormac, they land, then what's their sort of first priority on landing?

They had to establish where they were going to settle

to find the best spot on the island

and it appears they picked this location.

They perhaps were using tents at first,

then building a church which was their main priority,

because the work of prayer had to begin just as soon as the work of subsistence began.

Then this community that was to grow so large, I mean, it was based in this area here, was it?

Yeah, we think that this has always been the core of the monastery

and that the church stood on the same site as the Abbey Church stands today,

but a substantially smaller structure and of course made of wood.

All these early buildings would have been timber buildings.

As you're describing this, I keep getting images of a much later kind of colonisation,

the Elizabethans discovering the New World and building settlements there.

Yeah, to some extent they were, they were frontiers people,

they were pushing out the boundaries really of their own... They were sort of testing themselves to the limit.

They were making a settlement of a kind which had never existed here before,

so it was entirely new and a new settlement footprint on Iona,

such as the place had never seen before.

Iona becomes a focal point for people who can come here

and mix in the common environment that the Church provided,

because the Church was the great umbrella at this period

in the context of ethnic and political differences.

They church was the great unifier.

What is it about Columba himself that draws all these extra people,

why does it become such a big community?

It has to come down ultimately to his personal charisma at some level.

People came here seeking his advice, they came here seeking his judgement, they came here seeking to spend time,

but not necessarily to profess themselves as monks.

And other people came to join the community.

People automatically took to him, he was a magnet to people who sought

him out on Iona in what looks to us like a remote location, but it became

a central location within the Christian and intellectual life of the early Middle Ages.

With the monastic community now thriving, Columba looks beyond Iona's shores.

In the late 560s, he set out on a journey to take

the power of Christianity into new, dangerous territory.

His voyage took him inland, but boats were still the best option.

The thick forest that covered much of the landscape made the overland route almost impassable.

And he had far to go...

..through Loch Ness and the Great Glen to his destination on the other side of Scotland - Inverness.

It's around 100 miles from Iona to Inverness.

70 of those miles are up the great lochs of the Great Glen

that runs like a highway up through the middle of Scotland,

perfect for travelling up in small boats like this one here that I'm paddling.

Columba would also have made this journey by water,

partly because there were no roads in this barren landscape and it was really the only way,

but also for security. He was way beyond the safety of Dalriada now.

He was in a foreign country with a foreign language, but he had

translators for that, so speaking was the least of his problems.

Security was the issue here, because this was enemy territory, this was Pictland.

The Picts dominated the north and east of Scotland.

To Columba they would have seemed like a primitive, barbarous people.

Where the Irish had literature, the Picts had strange, pictorial stones that dotted their lands.

Where Ireland had monasteries as centres of civilisation, Pictland was still in the Iron Age.

Columba's biography by a monk called Adomnan is full of miraculous tales

illustrating the superiority of Christianity over Pictish paganism.

One of the many miracles Adomnan relates

is nothing less than the world's first-ever reference to the Loch Ness monster.

The locals complained of a monster that had been attacking people.

So Columba sent one of his men into the loch and the monster appeared.

Columba ordered it to stop and leave the man alone, whereupon the monster returned to the depths of Loch Ness.

The locals apparently were very impressed with the power of this new Christian God.

Adomnan tells us about this miracle and many others.

It's not strictly history.

It's a mix of history and legend called "hagiography",

trying to create a myth around the new heroes of the age, the Christian saints.

But nobody needed to exaggerate the dangers of Columba's journey here through Pictland,

nor the hazards of trying to bring Christianity with him.

Columba's perilous mission reached its climax at Inverness,

where he faced his most dangerous challenge yet...

Bridei, the pagan king of Pictland.

This is Craig Phadrig hillfort, one of the strongholds of the Pictish king Bridei.

Now he'd recently waged war on the Irish of Dalriada,

so coming here was a bit like walking into the lion's den.

As Columba approached, the king had the gates barred against him.

But Columba, it's said, made the sign of the cross...

and the gates swung open.

This display of powerful magic, we're told, won him the king's respect.

These miraculous tales can't be taken literally of course. What matters here is the symbolism.

He's certainly trying to establish power over the Picts.

The power over the King of Kings is greater than the power

of the king of the Picts and he's trying to establish this.

a sort of scene that he creates, of breaking into the fortress

is very much a kind of military one, almost a...winning a siege.

That's the most important thing that's really being conveyed there,

that Columba and the Christian God have established their power over the Picts

and the Picts have recognised that power and have accepted that power.

So, to use your military parallel, perhaps it's more of a kind

of a first incursion rather than a conquest.

Yes, it's sort of a combination really.

It's that moment where the greater of the two kings as it were,

the King of Kings, is being brought to bear against the king of the Picts.

And there's only gonna be one winner in that kind of a confrontation.

The Pictish king is presented with this much more

powerful force outside his gates and has no real opportunity to do anything except to submit to it.

Do you think the Picts start to convert, and eventually convert en masse,

because they're just exposed to this greater magic, if you like, of Christianity?

I think there's something to that. I think that there's an obvious power here, which the Picts must recognise,

they must recognise that this divinity has got some real power and some real force.

People like the Picts don't live in a bubble.

They have connections with the wider world, including Christians from the wider world.

They know about the Roman Empire probably to some extent.

It was a Christian phenomenon by the time it ended.

So, there was a really strong sense this is a powerful religion, this is a powerful God,

the people who worship this God are powerful people, they're rich, prosperous people.

That kind of message is a hard one to resist, I think.

The big new idea did have its enemies.

There are a group of men in Pictish society

who had too much invested in the old pagan ways to give way lightly.

Adomnan describes them as wizards. We'd probably call them druids.

He also describes one particular confrontation between Columba

and one of these wizards called Broichan.

He refused to release an Irish slave girl at Columba's request,

so Columba used magic on him and forced him to do so.

This proved two things - one is that Columba is resolutely opposed to slavery.

And, two, Christian magic is much more powerful than that of the druids.

To an Iron Age people like the Picts,

the magic power of Christianity lay in what it brought with it...

..modernity, greater prosperity, civilisation.

140 miles south of Inverness, Pictish art offers tantalising

clues as to how the new faith began to replace age-old Pagan beliefs.

The change in Pictish society is illustrated

in this set of fantastic standing stones at Aberlemno in Angus on the east coast of Scotland.

Those two down there are pre-Christian.

All the symbols on them are pre-Christian as is this side of this one.

Look, the so called Z rod there, geometric shapes,

a hunting scene and various other motifs from the natural world.

But then look at the other side.

Here you have a giant symbol of a dominant new religion.

Look at that,

a cross stretching right from the top to the bottom,

flanked on either side by angels here.

This illustrates that it was a time of enormous transition for Pictish society,

not just in their religious beliefs, but in their politics and even in their identity too.

Christianity transformed the Picts into a new people.

Their language faded away and they became Gaelic speakers,

just like the Irish monks who'd brought them the new religion from Iona.

In time, they would even lose their name and become, along with the Gaels of Dalriada, Scots.

Thanks to Columba's conversion of Pictland,

the whole area that we now know of as Scotland looked here to Iona as its Mother Church.

Christianity provided cohesion for those lands,

and it was that cohesion that underpinned the eventual formation of the kingdom of Scotland.

As a result, Scotland owes its foundation to Columba and the Irish.

Iona became the Westminster Abbey of early medieval Scotland, a place

where religious and political power were joined together.

And that close relationship between Church and State has its roots in Columba's time.

Not far from this very spot, Columba performed a ritual on a distinguished guest.

And that ritual was very important to the lands around here,

but also had significance right across Europe.

The guest was none less than the new king of Dalriada, Aedan mac Gabrain.

The holy man sailed to Iona,

where Aedan had already arrived,

and he ordained him King.

As he was performing the ordination,

St Columba also prophesied the future of Aedan's line,

then he laid his hand on Aedan's head in ordination, and blessed him.

It was a revolution in the idea of kingship.

Previously Dalriadan rulers had sought pagan blessings.

Now they looked to Christians for approval.

Over the centuries, every European monarchy would follow suit,

as Christianity and power became ever more inextricably linked.

For Columba himself, this was a triumph. It vastly increased his prestige and his influence.

It wasn't only in the realm of politics that the increasing power

and importance of Columba and his church manifested itself.

Iona is forever linked to one of the great achievements of Western art...

..the Book Of Kells.

The original Book Of Kells is here in the Trinity College Library in Dublin.

Unfortunately it's too delicate for me to touch.

In fact we're not even allowed to film it.

So it's lucky that someone has produced a facsimile,

and this gives you a great sense of the weight and size of the book itself.

It was designed to impress. In fact it was one of the largest books in the world at the time.

Now, opening it up, it's plain to see this could only have been produced by the monasteries.

Only they had the money, the determination

and the technical support to allow teams of expert scribes to work on this for years on end.

It's also easy to see why one medieval historian described it

as the work not of men, but of angels.

The book is an illustrated copy of the four Gospels, written and painted on calfskin or vellum.

It was made long after Columba's death, probably at Iona.

With its intricate interlacing and geometric detail, each page would have taken many weeks to produce.

The whole book, over 300 pages, probably took years.

In fact it remains unfinished.

The portrait of St John, with his stylised feather quill,

ink pot and manuscript in hand,

is a homage to the men who did the work, the scribes.

And who better than a modern scribe to tell me how it was done?

It's a phenomenal piece of work, it's so all-encompassing and huge and exciting.

The scale of the organisation required to produce something like this is unimaginable, isn't it?

It's an immense task,

just the complexity of getting the vellum.

You know you need 150 sheets...skins of vellum,

because you can only really get two leaves of vellum...per skin.

So they used...what?

140, 150 calfskins, which is...

That's like you know...

That's like a herd! It's like two herds of calves.

Then the slaughtering needs to take place and the skinning, and the soaking and the cleaning

and the scraping of the flesh on the flesh side and the scraping of the hair on the hair side.

And this is 150 skins. This is a lot of work.

What about these colours, how do you achieve those?

Well, the yellow is probably the most interesting colour.

And that comes from a really toxic substance.

In fact it's probably the most toxic pigment that they've used in this manuscript...

..which is here.

And this is orpiment,

these are sulphides of arsenic,

so not pleasant to work with.

It might be that in the monastery,

only the illustrators were dying, because they were using these pigments.

And of course as they started to test them, they probably realised that they were quite toxic.

There are a few different shades of blue used in the Book Of Kells,

most notably the ultramarine blue, which comes from lapis lazuli.

Now, at this point in time, there was only one mine in Afghanistan that it would be coming from.

So somebody needed to get in touch with somebody who could procure this material.

It would require quite an astonishing network of connections.

From the scale of what you're talking about,

it does seem like this would have been one of the most complex and impressive processes

going on anywhere in the world at the time.

As a piece of art, as a book and as an organisational skill,

as an organisational thing, this is just magnificent.

When Columba died in 597, his remains were interred at Iona.

Pagan Pictland was already on the way to becoming

part of Christian Scotland, with all the benefits that came with it.

But what about the rest of Britain?

Running for over 70 miles across the north of England,

Hadrian's Wall had once symbolised all the might of Roman Britain.

It had been built to keep the barbarian Picts out of civilised, Christian, Britannia.

Now, it marked a very different kind of boundary, and a dramatic reversal of roles.

The Romans would have been astonished at the turnaround.

Up there beyond the wall in Pictland,

it HAD been barbaric and wild,

but now Christianity was taking hold and law and literacy were following.

Down here though, had been Roman and Christian.

Now it was neither of those things.

Pockets of Christianity held out,

but the majority of the province of Roman Britannia

was now in the hands of the pagan Saxons.

The Saxons had arrived in force on the shores of Britain

around 150 years earlier.

The chronicles paint a grim picture of violent warriors,

conquering the native British with ease,

and occupying much of the old province of Britannia.

The country had been carved up into numerous Germanic kingdoms,

who, despite their common ancestry,

were engaged in a constant struggle for territory.

There's not any sense of a unified English identity at this point.

What we think of as England is a patchwork of smaller kingdoms,

peoples who shared a language, aspects of culture,

but in other aspects, were fiercely independent.

And these small competing kingdoms, what's relations between them like?

Probably fairly hostile most of the time.

One way we think larger kingdoms developed was conquering and absorbing smaller kingdoms.

It's a process, a small kingdom absorbs one next to it, gets slightly bigger, absorbs another.

So, not constant warfare,

but probably fairly frequent warfare between different peoples and kingdoms.

What's their relationship with Christianity or religion in general?

They're still pagan, but paganism itself seems to have changed,

perhaps in response to contacts with Christianity.

Firstly, we see pagan temples being built

towards the end of the 6th century.

It's changing slightly, there's some evidence that maybe they were moving towards a kind of pagan monotheism,

with increasing importance placed on Woden.

And he's the god of war, isn't he?

To some extent, yes, some people think he's the god of war.

It may be connected with the emergence of a warrior aristocracy, warrior kingship,

that takes Woden as their own personal god.

Yet, without converting to Christianity,

Anglo-Saxon England would have a permanent brake on its development.

It would reach limits, yeah, there are only certain things that you can do without literacy.

Literacy is an incredibly useful tool for a ruler, particularly ruling over a wide area,

so they would have reached a limit to how much further the kingdoms could expand,

how much more sophisticated and complex they could become.

You might think that the powerhouse of Iona would have its sights set on pagan Saxon England.

But other, more distant eyes

were looking towards the old Roman province of Britannia.

The empire had gone. But its adopted religion of Christianity survived,

with the Pope as its head, in Rome.

Where Irish monasteries were self-governing,

the Papacy was all for centralised control.

It had inherited not only Rome's bureaucracy,

but also its imperial ambitions.

It was steadily expanding its authority in Europe,

but its influence stopped short of Britain and Ireland.

A new Pope, the ambitious Gregory the Great,

was determined to change all that.

And to make it happen, he dispatched a papal mission to Britain.

The papal envoy, Augustine,

landed in Kent in 597, which was the same year that Columba died.

He held a meeting with the king of Kent, Ethelbert.

That meeting had to be outdoors, because the Saxons were terrified

the Christians would work dark magic on them if it was inside a building.

But Ethelbert wasn't entirely ignorant of Christianity.

In fact, his wife was from Gaul, and already a Christian.

So, soon he converted and brought his people with him.

The Roman mission seemed to have got off to a flying start.

Augustine, the Pope's envoy,

could be forgiven for thinking it was all going to be rather easy.

He would soon have to think again.

The mission moved north,

beyond the Kingdom of Kent, across the Thames,

into the Kingdom of Essex, with its capital in London.

A church was built, St Paul's,

on the same site as the modern cathedral.

The building of the first St Paul's

suggests that the mission was going from strength to strength,

but as the Romans moved through Kent

and tried to penetrate the rest of the country,

they found the Saxons harder and harder to convince

to embrace the new faith.

Bede, the medieval historian, tells us that the Saxons were obstinate.

They were more interested in the practical, rather than the spiritual benefits of Christianity.

He even gives the example of one new Christian Saxon priest

who desecrated his own shrine

because it had failed to bring his side success in war.

It's thanks to Bede

that we have a detailed knowledge of these times at all.

Indeed, his account is really the first history of England ever written.

In it, he describes how the Roman mission began to unravel.

A key convert, the King of the East Saxons, died.

His three sons had remained committed pagans,

and one day they burst into St Paul's

and demanded some of the communion bread they'd seen their father eat.

The Bishop said no, because they weren't Christians.

The three pagan princes were not impressed.

They threw him and his followers out of London.

Londoners cheerfully reverted to paganism.

After 20 years, the mission had only succeeded in converting Kent.

But in the north of England,

another attempt to bring Christianity to the pagan Saxons

was about to be launched.

The Kingdom of Northumbria was, at this time,

the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon territories.

Northumbria had been through stormy times.

Kings had fought their neighbours and murdered their rivals.

The flame of Christianity had flickered briefly here

but, just like London, it reverted to the darkness of paganism.

In 634, a new king, Oswald, arrived here at Bamburgh,

the impregnable fortress at the heart of his Northumbrian kingdom.

It was a day he never thought he'd see.

At age 12, his father had been killed in battle

and the young man had fled, fearing for his life.

He'd spent the next 18 years in exile.

But they were years that would change him and Britain forever.

Because he'd spent that time in Ireland and Iona.

And he'd become a Christian, and now he returned here to Northumbria

determined to change this pagan kingdom into a Christian one.

He sent to Iona for a bishop to help him do it.

One duly came, but he soon returned to Iona

reporting that the task was an impossible one,

because the English were so "uncivilised, barbarous and obstinate."

When the bishop returned here, to Iona,

an urgent council meeting was called in order to decide what to do.

It was then that one young monk ventured his opinion.

'Brother, I'm of the opinion that you were more severe to your unlearned hearers than you ought to have been

'and did not give them the milk of more easy doctrine first,

'till being by degrees nourished with the word of God,

'they should become capable of greater perfection.'

Perhaps there was a moment when everyone in the room looked at the young upstart

and wondered whether someone should put him in his place.

But his words must have impressed,

because he was made a bishop and given the job.

His name was Aidan,

and he'd be the last of the great Irish missionaries.

With Oswald's protection,

Aidan established his first church on the island of Lindisfarne,

known also as Holy Island, in 635 AD.

Lindisfarne is like a more accessible version of Iona.

Both are surrounded by water.

But at low tide, you can reach Lindisfarne from the mainland,

along the same causeway the monks used nearly 1,400 years ago.

Perched in its exposed position on the wild edge of the east coast,

it's buffeted by the kind of appalling weather

that the ascetically-minded monks no doubt delighted in far more than I do.

Just as on Iona, the first buildings here were fairly modest,

only what was required to keep the community afloat.

These magnificent ruins are from later periods.

But from humble beginnings, Lindisfarne quickly grew in importance.

It became a trading post and the nucleus from where Irish priests would go out

and spread the Christian message right across the north of England.

It benefited from its proximity to Oswald's stronghold at Bamburgh,

just a few miles that way down the coast.

This reflected the close relationship

between Oswald and Aidan.

In fact, Oswald used to translate Aidan's sermons

to the English nobility.

And it was this intense co-operation between church and state

that was to be such an important reason for Aidan's success.

As a close associate of the King, Aidan was often given gifts.

As an ascetic, he disliked the practice.

But he made use of it.

Just like Columba before him, he was opposed to slavery,

and he used the gifts to ransom and free slaves,

who often became new converts.

At the other end of the social scale,

Oswald is said to have led his pagan nobles into a key battle,

telling them he'd had a vision of Columba, who'd promised victory.

When the battle was won,

his warrior nobles are said to have converted en masse.

In missionary parlance, this was 'top-down' conversion,

with the King leading the way, and those below following.

I can see how both slaves and the elite were brought round.

But what about the mass of the population?

Escomb in County Durham

was part of the first wave of church-building

in the once-pagan nation.

How do you think Christianity changed the lives of men and women

that came to worship here in the 7th century?

Christianity had an enormous impact

on all people in Anglo-Saxon society at all levels.

But one of the appeals about Christianity was,

it does offer an answer to that eternal question -

Why are we here? Is this all there is?

Will there be anything afterwards?

It offers a promise of eternal life and salvation beyond the life in this world.

And perhaps an eternal life that's slightly more egalitarian

than the life that they're living now in the world.

And also, of course, a heavenly existence

that gets rid of social class distinctions

in a way that pagan views of the afterworld, which tend to perpetuate the idea

that the warrior elite will have a particularly enjoyable time in the afterlife.

Christianity alters that view, so I think that made it appealing.

So you think there was a genuine, genuine support for Christianity

amongst the mass of the population?

It wasn't simply imposed from above?

I think the church offers the mass of the population things that were positively useful to them.

Rites of passage that mark the coming of their children into the world

who will then be baptised and marked reborn as part of this community.

And also rituals to celebrate the passing into the other life

and so for funerals and death and burials,

and there was indeed a burial ground here at Escomb Church.

Can you give me a sense of just how revolutionary this change was from a pagan society to Christian?

It's an absolutely fundamental change.

You could argue that there is really no aspect of life

at any social level in Anglo-Saxon England

that isn't affected by the change to Christianity.

People's worship patterns change.

If they follow the teaching of the church,

then they'll start living their lives in different ways.

The church prescribes whom you may marry,

what you should do with your children,

how you should bury your dead.

It infiltrates every single aspect of daily life.

The church brings technologies unknown in England,

technologies like building in stone,

like the capacity to write on parchment.

Everything about life in England is fundamentally changed.

You could argue it was one of the most important things

that happened in the British Isles in the first millennium, the conversion to Christianity.

But English Christianity was now beginning to take its own direction,

one that would soon bring it into conflict with its Irish roots.

The Abbey of Hexham, in Northumberland

was built less than 40 years after the Irish first arrived in England.

Much of what now remains above the ground came later.

But beneath it is an extraordinary surviving treasure

from a building that was originally built entirely

from recycled Roman stone.

This was partly a practical measure.

Saxon England lacked the technology to work in stone.

But it was also symbolic.

This is the crypt.

It's hugely impressive and gives us a real sense of the building that once stood above.

At the time, it was said to be one of the most magnificent in Western Europe.

Also, down here, you get a clear idea of this recycled Roman stone

brought from a fort about three miles away up the road.

You can see much of it's engraved and it's all finely carved.

In fact, this bit here is fantastic,

this clearly once adorned some fine Roman building.

And it's just such a neat idea. This is recycled Roman stone,

going into the construction of a building

that's then used to re-introduce Roman ideas of religion and law into England.

In fact, the church at Hexham was constructed

by the man who was instrumental

in introducing written law into England.

Wilfrid of York.

Well, he's one of the people who's transforming the legal culture of Anglo-Saxon England.

The use of written documents, like charters, to prove possession of land.

We see at the same time law codes coming to existence.

The first law code is the start of the 7th century with conversion to Christianity.

We find Charters surviving from Anglo-Saxon England from the 670s and 680s and onwards.

So he's transforming the legal culture. It's becoming a culture based on the written word.

Law is written now, so you need legal documents.

Wilfrid had trained at Lindisfarne

and was one of the first Saxon churchmen ever to visit Rome,

where he'd even met the Pope.

The Roman Church, with its centralised administration

seems to have appealed to Wilfrid's legalistic mind.

Increasingly he looked to Rome for guidance

in all questions of ritual and rules.

So much so, that when he took over a former Irish monastery in Yorkshire,

the abbot was expelled because he wouldn't follow Roman customs.

As more and more English priests and nobles chose Roman over Irish ways,

tensions grew.

Things finally came to a head at Bamburgh in 663 AD

over the question of the dating

of Christianity's most important festival - Easter.

The King of Northumbria had spent time in Ireland as an exile,

where he'd learnt his Christianity from the Irish priests.

His wife the queen had been brought up in Kent,

where they adhered to Roman teachings.

Now, the two traditions disagreed on the timing of Easter.

Not the end of the world, you might think,

until you remember that in that period,

Christians were not allowed to have sex during Lent.

So when the King came here to his chapel on Easter Sunday,

he was looking forward to a fine feast

and then perhaps some private time with his wife in the royal bedchamber.

But his wife was a week behind. For her it was still Palm Sunday,

she was dressed in sackcloth,

and there was no question of marital relations for another week.

Not for the last time in British history,

a crisis was reached, thanks to the King's libido.

But beyond the royal bedchamber lay a much deeper conflict.

A power struggle was brewing

between two conflicting Christian factions...

..the Irish Church and the Church of Rome.

In 664, the Abbey of Whitby on the Yorkshire coast

was the scene of a watershed moment for European Christianity.

In order to settle the Easter question once and for all,

the Northumbrian King called a synod.

To us the word "synod" conjures up the image of a rather arcane theological debate.

But Whitby was nothing like that.

This was a major summit, a Kyoto or a G8,

with large delegations on either side

and plenty resting on the outcome.

In Rome's corner was Wilfrid.

Although a local boy, he'd come to believe

in the importance of uniformity right across the Christian Church.

In Iona's corner was Aidan's successor as the Abbott of Lindisfarne, Colman.

Now, right from Wilfrid's opening statement,

it was clear this was going to be a hostile debate.

"The only people who are stupid enough to disagree with the whole world

"are these Irish and their obstinate adherents, the Picts.

"Your fathers were holy men.

"But do you imagine that they, a few men in a corner of a remote island,

"are to be preferred before the Universal Church of Christ throughout the world?"

Things sound rather heated. Are synods always this violent?

This is one of the most violent synods

reported in the Anglo-Saxon Church,

and it certainly sounds as if tempers did get quite hot.

Wilfrid's speech sounds almost intemperate in places.

-Does that reflect the fact there's a lot at stake here?

-There's a phenomenal amount at stake here.

Making a decision about when you should celebrate the central festival of the Christian religion.

There's nothing bigger.

It's the heart of Christianity, determining the date of Easter.

It determines the date of other festivals later in the year.

And it's making a decision about whether you want to side with Iona and the church in Ireland,

or whether to join the European cultural mainstream.

After a few days of deliberation,

the King of Northumbria reached his decision.

He found for Rome.

He's clearly trying to ingratiate himself with the Pope in Rome.

There's a correspondence with the Pope,

and his decision means that he's siding permanently

on behalf of the Roman Church, and not with St Columba.

So Rome is a more attractive ally, I suppose, than the Irish?

Joining with the worship style of the Church in Rome

puts the Church in England centrally into the mainstream

of Western European Christendom.

They're not a little island at the corner of the world,

as England is sometime described as being.

It makes them part of the European mainland.

It makes the date of Easter the same all the way across Western Europe.

It's like making a decision to join a central European currency.

It's a currency of faith.

And what does this reversal mean for the Irish followers of Columba?

This is clearly, from the point of view of Colman and the monks of Lindisfarne, a major blow,

saying that their mechanisms for determining the date of Easter -

and indeed other things about their religious life, the way they cut their hair, the tonsure -

were, in inverted commas, wrong.

It's something they're just not prepared to tolerate.

They've lost and Colman and his monks pack their bags,

they pick up the relics of St Aidan from Lindisfarne,

and they take them away to Iona in a monumental huff.

As I make my own way back to Iona,

it's easy to imagine how gloomy Colman's journey must have been.

By the time he got there, he'd reached a momentous decision.

He resigned, as a politician today might,

in the face of a major policy setback.

As a result of Whitby,

the prestige of the Iona church would never be the same again.

I'm struck by the tragedy of it.

But also by the irony.

The Irish had brought the power of Christianity to England,

and the English had used that power against them.

But the worst was yet to come.

The sea, which had been such a rich conduit

of missionaries and ideas and trade,

now brought invaders from the north.

In the late 700s, the Vikings descended on the monasteries.

This one here at Iona was attacked again and again.

On one particular raid 68 monks, nearly the entire community,

were brought to this beach and slaughtered.

Ever since then it's been known as Martyrs Bay.

And this scene was replicated right across Britain and Ireland.

The great age of Irish Christianity was brought to a bloody end.

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