ned that the missionaries, who had converted the
Scots and Britons, had followed a different calendar from that which
was observed at Rome in the age when Augustine converted the Saxons.
The priests also of all the Christian churches were accustomed to
shave part of their head; but the form given to this tonsure was
different in the former from what was practised in the latter. The
Scots and Britons pleaded the antiquity of THEIR usages; the Romans,
and their disciples, the Saxons, insisted on the universality of
THEIRS. That Easter must necessarily be kept by a rule, which
comprehended both the day of the year and age of the moon, was agreed
by all; that the tonsure of a priest could not be omitted without the
utmost impiety, was a point undisputed; but the Romans and Saxons
called their antagonists schismatics, because they celebrated Easter
on the very day of the full moon in March, if that day fell on a
Sunday, instead of waiting till the Sunday following; and because they
shaved the forepart of their head from ear to ear, instead of making
that tonsure on the crown of the head, and in a circular form. In
order to render their antagonists odious, they affirmed, that once in
seven years, they concurred with the Jews in the time of celebrating
that festival [y]; and that they might recommend their own form of
tonsure, they maintained that it imitated symbolically the crown of
thorns worn by Christ in his passion, whereas the other form was
invented by Simon Magus, without any regard to that representation
[z]. These controversies had, from the beginning, excited such
animosity between the British and Romish priests, that, instead of
concurring in their endeavours to convert the idolatrous Saxons, they
refused all communion together, and each regarded his opponent as no
better than a pagan [a]. The dispute lasted more than a century, and
was at last finished, not by men's discovering the folly of it, which
would have been too great an effort for human reason to accomplish,
but by the entire prevalence of the Romish ritual over the Scotch and
British [b]. Wilfrid, Bishop of Lindisferne, acquired great merit,
both with the court of Rome and with all the Southern Saxons, by
expelling the quartodeciman schism, as it was called, from the
Northumbrian kingdom, into which the neighbourhood of the Scots had
formerly introduced it [c].
[FN [y] Bede, lib. 2. cap. 19. [z] Ibid. lib. 5. cap. 21. Eddius,
Sec. 24. [a] Bede,