tives for this change
those which corresponded to the naive materialistic superstition of
the time may have been the most influential, yet there were other
motives also which touched the very essence of the matter. Men wished
to belong to the great Church Communion which then in still unbroken
freedom comprehended the most distant nations.[6] They preferred the
bishops whom the kings appointed (with the authorisation of the Roman
See), to those over whom the abbot of the great monastery on the
island of Iona exercised a kind of supremacy. Here there was no
question of any agreement between the German king and the bishops of
the land, as under the Merovingians in Gaul; they even avoided
restoring the bishops' sees which had flourished in the old Roman
times in Britain. The primitive and independent element manifests
itself in the decision of the princes and their great men. In
Northumberland, Christianity was introduced by a formal resolution of
the King and his Witan: a heathen high priest girt himself with the
sword, and even with his own hand threw down his idols. The
Anglo-Saxon tribes in fact passed over from the popular religion and
mythology of the North and of Germany, which would have kept them in
barbarism, to the communion of the universal religion, to which
belonged the civilisation of the world. Never did a race show itself
more susceptible of such an influence: it presents the most remarkable
example of how the old German ideas, which had now taken living root
in this soil, and the Roman ecclesiastical culture, which was
vigorously embraced, met and became intertwined. The first German who
made the universal learning, derived from antiquity, his own, was an
Anglo-Saxon, the Venerable Beda; the first German dialect in which men
wrote history and drew up laws, was likewise the Anglo-Saxon. Despite
all their reverence for the threshold of the Apostles they admitted
foreign priests no longer than was indispensable for the foundation of
the new church: in the gradual progress of the conversion they were no
longer needed, we soon find Anglo-Saxon names everywhere in the
church: the archbishops and leading bishops are as closely related to
the royal families, as the heathen high priests had been before.

It was exactly through the co-operation of both principles, originally
so foreign to one another, that the Anglo-Saxon nature took firm and
lasting form.

The Kelts had formerly lived under a clan system which,