d been driven out
together. When Theodore came to organize the Church of England, the very
memory of the older Christian Church which existed in Roman Britain had
passed away. The first missionaries to the Englishmen, strangers in a
heathen land, attached themselves necessarily to the courts of the kings,
who were their earliest converts, and whose conversion was generally
followed by that of their people. The English bishops were thus at first
royal chaplains, and their diocese was naturally nothing but the kingdom.
In this way realms which are all but forgotten are commemorated in the
limits of existing sees. That of Rochester represented till of late an
obscure kingdom of West Kent, and the frontier of the original kingdom of
Mercia may be recovered by following the map of the ancient bishopric of
Lichfield. In adding many sees to those he found Theodore was careful to
make their dioceses co-extensive with existing tribal demarcations. But
he soon passed from this extension of the episcopate to its organization.
In his arrangement of dioceses, and the way in which he grouped them
round the see of Canterbury, in his national synods and ecclesiastical
canons, Theodore did unconsciously a political work. The old divisions of
kingdoms and tribes about him, divisions which had sprung for the most
part from mere accidents of the conquest, were now fast breaking down.
The smaller states were by this time practically absorbed by the three
larger ones, and of these three Mercia and Wessex were compelled to bow
to the superiority of Northumbria. The tendency to national unity which
was to characterize the new England had thus already declared itself; but
the policy of Theodore clothed with a sacred form and surrounded with
divine sanctions a unity which as yet rested on no basis but the sword.
The single throne of the one Primate at Canterbury accustomed men's minds
to the thought of a single throne for their one temporal overlord. The
regular subordination of priest to bishop, of bishop to primate, in the
administration of the Church, supplied a mould on which the civil
organization of the state quietly shaped itself. Above all, the councils
gathered by Theodore were the first of our national gatherings for
general legislation. It was at a much later time that the Wise Men of
Wessex, or Northumbria, or Mercia learned to come together in the
Witenagemot of all England. The synods which Theodore convened as
religiously representa