as the landing-place of Augustine. But the second
landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a reversal and undoing of
the first. "Strangers from Rome" was the title with which the
missionaries first fronted the English king. The march of the monks as
they chaunted their solemn litany was in one sense a return of the Roman
legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue
and the thought not of Gregory only but of the men whom his Jutish
fathers had slaughtered or driven out that AEthelberht listened in the
preaching of Augustine. Canterbury, the earliest royal city of German
England, became a centre of Latin influence. The Roman tongue became
again one of the tongues of Britain, the language of its worship, its
correspondence, its literature. But more than the tongue of Rome returned
with Augustine. Practically his landing renewed that union with the
Western world which the landing of Hengest had destroyed. The new England
was admitted into the older commonwealth of nations. The civilization,
art, letters, which had fled before the sword of the English conquerors
returned with the Christian faith. The fabric of the Roman law indeed
never took root in England, but it is impossible not to recognize the
result of the influence of the Roman missionaries in the fact that codes
of the customary English law began to be put in writing soon after their
arrival.

[Sidenote: AEthelfrith]

A year passed before AEthelberht yielded to the preaching of Augustine.
But from the moment of his conversion the new faith advanced rapidly and
the Kentish men crowded to baptism in the train of their king. The new
religion was carried beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy which
AEthelberht wielded over the neighbouring kingdoms. Saeberht, King of the
East-Saxons, received a bishop sent in 604 from Kent, and suffered him to
build up again a Christian church in what was now his subject city of
London, while soon after the East-Anglian king Raedwald resolved to serve
Christ and the older gods together. But while AEthelberht was thus
furnishing a future centre of spiritual unity in Canterbury, the see to
which Augustine was consecrated, the growth of Northumbria was pointing
it out as the coming political centre of the new England. In 593, four
years before the landing of the missionaries in Kent, AEthelric was
succeeded by his son AEthelfrith, and the new king took up the work of
conquest with a vigour greater than