400 years after the birth of Jesus, when the Roman empire collapsed,
a new chapter began in the history of these islands.
What happened then was more significant
than the Battle of Hastings, the Magna Carta,
and the Reformation combined.
This film will tell the story
of the creation of the Britain we live in today.
It's a story about the immigration of new people -
pagans who created a new politics in these islands.
This is our land and this is our kingdom.
Our dead are still a physical presence in that kingdom.
But it's also a story about saints and mystics,
and the difficult struggle to create a Christian community.
The mission came extremely close to total failure.
And most important, it's the story of how Christianity
created a new vision of nationhood for England and for Britain.
It's the story of what made us who we are today.
It's a dangerous place out there.
Your faith can be radical and transforming.
Whether you're a Christian or not,
whether you feel completely British or not, I believe that even today
this ancient history has some important lessons to teach us
about who we are, because 1,500 years ago
Britain underwent a religious revolution
that transformed warring pagan tribes into one nation,
under one religion -
Christianity.
My name is Robert Beckford.
For most of my life, I have studied religion and politics,
wondering whether religion can help unite us
or just further fragment our society.
As a child of Jamaican immigrants, I've had to constantly reclaim
and rethink British history in order to challenge prejudice,
ignorance and discrimination.
Here is a classic symbol of political discrimination -
Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland.
It's about exclusion and inclusion.
Who's in? Who's out?
Who has the right to call themselves a citizen?
Who belongs?
It was 1,500 years ago,
just as the Roman Empire was collapsing,
that these questions first began to be asked,
of who the British were and what did it mean to be British,
and at the very heart of it was religion.
But what would it mean for one religion to unite a whole country?
Would it create boundaries as sharply-defined as this one,
or something more welcoming, more inclusive, more all-encompassing.
History tells us that Christianity first arrived in Britain
from the Mediterranean during the Roman occupation.
It was an import, like the roads, the army,
the drainage and everything else.
And its focus was in the cities.
This was once the third-largest city in Britain.
By 300 AD, it very likely even had a bishop.
But Christianity certainly wasn't a majority faith here.
Right to the end, the pagan temples were in use.
So when the empire collapsed, Christianity was vulnerable.
Within a few decades, towns like Verulamium
had been abandoned and in most of the country
most of the basic things vanished, like coinage and even writing.
And along with the Roman Empire,
Christianity had largely disappeared.
It only managed to survive in a few isolated pockets,
and this is one of them - not here, in the Roman town,
but over there.
This great abbey is dedicated to one of the only Christian martyrs
we know from Roman times -
St Alban.
He was beheaded in the third century.
He's the first British martyr.
First one to die for the Christian faith
that we know of anyway, in this country.
So that makes him hugely important.
People have worshipped on this spot for probably 1,750 years.
That's an extraordinary length of time and there is something
about the focus of prayer and devotion on this one spot
over the ages that really does seem to make it holy.
The memory of St Alban survived. But in most of England,
Christianity almost completely disappeared.
Only in the West and in Ireland did it remain a real force.
Ireland had never been part of the Roman empire,
but just as the empire was collapsing,
Christian missionaries arrived under the leadership of St Patrick.
And here, Christianity took a radically different form.
It was devoted to austerity and mysticism.
At Glendalough, a hermit called St Kevin
built his cell high on a hill
overlooking the lake, close to nature and the elements.
He was emulating the desert fathers of early Christian Egypt and Syria.
According to the Bible, the desert's a holy place that people
should go to experience God directly,
like Moses and the prophets.
It's in the desert too, that Jesus faces his temptations.
Irish mysticism was just as hard core.
But here it was the weather and the wilderness that drew the hermits.
To concentrate his mind, Kevin would immerse himself
up to his waist in the lake.
This was not a centrally heated lake. It was a very cold mountain lake,
and, Kevin in order to mortify himself, to do penance
and therefore to grow in self-denial, he goes into the lake to pray.
Hermits like Kevin became famous.
Whole communities grew up around them.
I mean, these hermits eventually, although they lived
in their own little hermitages, became a kind of community.
Kevin moves down the valley to the other end,
where the land is flatter
and fairly quickly, a monastic settlement grew up which
had hundreds of people in it as monks and lots of other people who became
part of its, if you like, its economy and its survival structure.
It became the seat of a Bishop who became the spiritual leader
of the wider Christian community.
Celtic Christianity took off in a spectacular way,
all over the Western British isles, creating a network of monasteries,
which stretched from Iona in the North to the bay of Biscay.
These Celtic monks had links with the Mediterranean
and the deserts of Coptic Egypt.
Against a background of traditional Celtic culture,
learning and literature flourished.
What's more, these Celtic monasteries sent out missionaries
back onto the mainland of Britain.
Westminster politicians are often accused of seeing Ireland, Scotland
and Wales as backwaters today, on the fringes of modern British life,
but 1,500 years ago,
they were the dynamos of the Christian conversion of Britain.
But conversion was never going to be an easy process,
Christianity would have to struggle to re-assert itself
over what had become largely a pagan island.
After the collapse of Rome, Britain had been overwhelmed
by immigrants from Europe.
Pagans, who followed a gospel of violence.
In the years after 400 AD the Roman Empire collapsed.
Into the vacuum came a large number of immigrants from overseas.
Most of them were Germans from outside the Roman Empire -
pagan Angles, Saxons and Jutes.
They created an ethnic divide in the island, between Celts in the West,
and Anglo-Saxons in the East, which has continued to this day.
They carved out new kingdoms for themselves in Britain,
some of whose names we still remember.
Eventually these people would create the nation we live in.
This was the real beginning of our multi-ethnic world.
And these Anglo-Saxons brought with them their own pagan gods.
Gods who, in a sense, are still with us.
So what did they believe in?
Well, they were a pre-literate culture.
No-one was writing anything, so we don't have a direct knowledge
of what they believed.
What we have surviving is the archaeology
and the days of the week, named after the pagan gods of the Anglo-Saxons.
Tuesday named after Tiw, Woden's day, Wednesday,
and Tunor's day, Thor's day, Thursday.
So, we have names but we don't know how,
what people thought about these gods and how they worshipped in detail.
Sutton Hoo is the most spectacular Anglo-Saxon cemetery in the country.
It was probably the burial ground for the kings of East Anglia.
The biggest barrow included a whole ship
and produced grave goods of barbaric splendour.
They provide a dramatic insight into their pagan beliefs.
We're looking at a military orientation to the religious beliefs,
a focus on the power of kings.
But the overall statement
was perhaps of the dead person going off to an afterlife in their ship,
but also of the dead person residing intheir ship within the mound.
As holy defenders of their peoples,
these kings had total confidence in their pagan faith.
The statement was, "This is our land and this is our kingdom.
"Our dead are still a physical presence in that kingdom."
So these mounds are bigger and better than everyone else,
reflecting the status of the individuals buried here
but also perhaps a sense that their gods are better than everyone else,
and their ancestors are superior.
This was going to be a tough nut for Christianity to crack.
The Celtic Christianity which had survived
in the Western part of the British Isles,
was beginning to send out missionaries.
But here it came up against a hugely rejuvenated paganism,
backed by powerful immigrant Anglo-Saxon kings.
And into this finely balanced situation came a third force,
a Christian mission from Rome.
This was a dramatic new development.
In 597, the Pope himself sent a party of Italian monks,
led by a man called Augustine,
to try and convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons.
In particular the King of Kent, called Aethelberht.
Aethelberht already had a Christian wife,
a Merovingian princess from France.
He had given her this church in Canterbury to worship in.
But tolerating his wife's faith was one thing.
Actually taking it up was another.
Amazingly, Aethelberht agreed.
Augustine's conversion of Aethelberht was a major coup.
Now it's a big deal when anybody changes their religion.
But for a king, in this situation, it was even more important.
It would have major political consequences
which if he got wrong would destroy his rule.
Aethelberht's gods had served him well.
He was the most powerful monarch in Britain.
And yet he decided to abandon them.
Well, I think Aethelberht's big problem
was that the French Merovingian kings were very powerful.
Now, if you want the support of the Merovingian Kings,
you might do well to share their religion
and they are Catholics.
So I think Aethelberht was interested in securing that support
and in making his mark as a king in England.
So the King converts,
and we've got records of at least 10,000 people following.
Yes, that's right,
and in some senses Augustine was very, very successful.
But of course it's not a process where you can be sure
that people know what Christianity is,
in any form that we would recognise.
the, the pre-existing Anglo-Saxon religion is not exclusive,
so it's only Christianity that thinks conversion's a big deal,
the pagan community would simply think,
"Oh, well, this is another rite, this is another god,
"we'll have a go at this one as well."
And for Aethelberht, there were tangible benefits.
As well as a church where the cathedral now stands,
Augustine founded a new monastery outside the city
where Aethelberht and his successors would be buried in style.
And Augustine's monks began working for Aethelberht as clerks,
even drawing up a law code for him,
which is the oldest document in the English language,
the beginning of our common law.
But the Celtic Christians in the West
rejected Augustine's Roman authority.
He really tried to almost bully them,
persuasion is not really quite a strong enough word, I think,
in this particular case.
And they eventually said, "No, you are not a sufficiently humble man
"for us to accept as our leader."
They rejected it.
The mission came extremely close to total failure,
only 20 years after it had been established.
The problem with Augustine's Roman Christianity
was that it was an alien force imposed on the people of Britain.
It was rejected by the people he had come to convert,
and even by the Celtic Christians in Wales and the West.
But the Pope didn't give in.
Instead he made an historic and vital decision
which revolutionised English Christianity.
He decided to compromise.
Courageously, the Pope told his missionaries
not to smash the pagan temples.
Now the order was to turn them into Christian churches.
CHURCH BELL CHIMES
Pagan rites would not be demonised, butadapted into Christian ritual.
And that's what happened here.
In Old English the word Harrow meant pagan temple.
A place of blood and sacrifice.
But on the top of the hill now, there's a church.
What the Church is trying to do with these beliefs we're not exactly sure.
They're probably suffering some, adapting others,
mixing and matching.
It's when Christianity beds in to the agricultural cycle,
into the daily life of the traditional rural folk,
that we can get a sense of that adaptation.
So, for example, the only source we have
to tell us the name of one of the pagan gods, Eostre,
is because it's preserved in our name for Easter.
The Christians adapt that name into the Christian festival
so it becomes adapted into the Christian Church.
But this revolutionary compromise could only work
where the Christians were in control.
And in many places they weren't.
The missionaries back then, remember,
they faced an incredibly hostile environment,
chronic, endemic warfare, as these tiny little kingdoms within Britain,
pagan and Christians, fought for power.
For half a century after Aethelberht died in 616,
the religious future of Britain was in the balance.
Armies marched the length of Britain
and each of them called on its own god of battles in search of victory.
Even though Christianity was a gospel of peace,
success in battle proved that your god was a more powerful one.
And by the mid 630s,
the most powerful king in Britain
was the Christian King of Northumbria.
And here in the North,
he made a major contribution to creation of a Christian nation.
His capital was the stronghold of Bamburgh in Northumberland.
He was baptised not by Augustine's Roman church,
but by Celtic monks from Iona.
He invited them to set up a monastery
to consolidate the faith in his Kingdom,
just across the water from his castle,
at Lindisfarne, the Holy Island.
Whether you're a Christian or not,
Lindisfarne is one of the most important places in our history.
Then as now, it's cut off from the mainland at high tide.
Like the Celtic monasteries it provided the right mystical setting
for Christianity to flourish,
where monks could study and pray and the faithful come to honour them.
At high tide it was the perfect safe haven,
at low tide evangelists could set off to spread the gospel.
I think there is a sense of the numinous here,
of awe of the saints, which people do pick up,
and they sort of say... they go in the church,
and they say, "There's something here I can feel.
"I feel it's easier to pray."
You've got the tradition, you've got prayer clinging to the walls,
you've got all the health, you know,
which a secular world, generally, is very bare of.
Lindisfarne became a powerhouse of Celtic Christianity,
driven by the engines of austerity and mysticism.
Its early leaders used to come here to this small island to pray.
The most famous was St Cuthbert.
Who, although he became a bishop, followed the traditions of St Kevin.
He would have a regime whereby he could stand up to his neck in water
for part of the night, to actually cleanse himself,
but also he's a gifted preacher and teacher,
he's a canny politico, and not afraid
of telling how it is to the kings of the day.
This is really quite a complex picture then,
because Cuthbert isn't just somebody who's separated from the world,
he sees himself as really very much engaged in the world as well.
Very much so.
You can imagine that when the king out there in his castle in Bamburgh
looked out and saw the cell of St Cuthbert,
this emaciated, vulnerable, Ghandi-like figure,
fasting at his gates, reminding him, as the ruler,
that there are other things than wealth and power.
But he seems to really have upped the stakes,
he seems to be really doing all kinds of spiritual activity
to fight big time evil that he sees out there.
Yeah, absolutely. Although he wouldn't have espoused warfare,
somebody like Cuthbert becomes a spiritual warrior
and that sort of spills over,
so you're taking the best of the honour code of the old barbarian pagan system,
and actually turning that at the service
of a new set of Christian values and virtues.
Lift up your hearts.
(CONGREGATION) We lift them to the Lord.
In the process, the pagan, warrior culture of the Angles and Saxons
blended with the Christianity of the Celts and Rome,
to create a brilliant fusion in literature and the arts.
Anglo-Saxon poetry even portrayed the crucifixion
as a Dark Age battle in which a warrior Jesus
triumphs over his enemies.
And by 660, after a last titanic battle,
almost all of Britain was under Christian rule.
Christianity had triumphed.
There's no arguing with the fact that for a Dark Age king,
Christianity was a fantastic force in creating a kingdom.
Christianity brought writing,
so you could have legal codes and documents,
and begin to create a bureaucracy.
More important than that, to be a Christian king
was to be part of a universal community
that spread across Europe to Rome and beyond.
So there were the added benefits of trade and also cultural exchange.
To be a member of the Christian club brought enormous benefits.
But even so there was still no such thing as a united church in Britain.
Up here in the North, the Celtic tradition was stronger.
But further south, Augustine's Roman church was powerful.
There had to be a showdown.
What kind of church, what kind of Christianity, what kind of nation,
would emerge from the clash?
By 660 AD,
Christianity had established itself across the whole of Britain.
But it was divided.
To the south, the Roman church claimed its authority from St Peter.
In the north and west the Celtic church remained loyal
to the traditions of its indigenous holy men.
One was urban in outlook, one rural.
The two had different cultures, different rituals.
And when you think that what divided them most was the question of when
to celebrate Easter, the holiest day in the Christian calendar,
you expect it all to end badly, with bloodshed, torture, and burnings.
But this Dark Age wasn't as dark as you might think.
That's not what happened.
Instead, in 664, the issue was settled here in Whitby,
in debate before the King of Northumbria, his sister St Hilda,
the Abbess of Whitby, and his assembled nobles.
What was at stake was a vital issue - would the church in England
continue to exist by itself on the edge of things out in northern
Christendom, or would it join the mainstream of the Western tradition.
The outcome wasn't just a church issue.
But about the future of England itself.
These are real issues for people at the time.
If you can't actually agree about the
date of the main focal festival of your religious year, it shows
you've got things that are separating you.
And how are they resolved, what's the outcome?
Essentially the King makes the final call and says, well much as I respect
the Irish saints, when I get to the pearly gates, it's gonna be St Peter,
a successor of Christ, who's holding the keys.
He's decided to go European, to go mainstream with all the benefits
that that brings.
So that swings it.That swings it.
So why does it matter today?
I think because it marks the turning-point
in how we cite ourselves - being English
in the future is going to be part of Europe, the mainstream.
It is a turning-point at which you recognise you can't
do your own thing in your neck of the woods,
you've got to be part of something bigger and more universal.
From now on, English Christians
would look to Rome, rather than the Celtic west.
And this kicked off a huge expansion of church-building.
That must have transformed the landscape. And society too.
Because all these minsters, as they were called,
were learned communities of monks and nuns.
In 678, a Northumbrian aristocrat
founded the minster at Jarrow on the Tyne.
It became an important centre not only of Christianity, but of trade,
literature and scholarship.
And it was to be the birthplace
of a whole new vision of national identity too.
One crucial point about monasteries like this is that they were
permanent institutions, which meant they were
able to maintain a continuity of purpose over generations.
And that meant that they could act as cultural powerhouses,
places where cultural identities were forged and preserved.
And nowhere more so than here at Jarrow, the home of one of the most
important people in English history, without whom there might never have
been an entity known as England.
And his name was the Venerable Bede.
We're so proud, because let's remember, Bede,
he went into Wearmouth when he was what, seven, he came here between the
ages of nine and twelve, he was here when they laid that foundation stone.
He rose no higher than a common monk
and yet by the time he was 42, he was considered
the most intelligent man in Europe.
And basically when you think about it, he's so
important in our British way of life, because he's the base of all history.
Writing in the monastery at Jarrow,
Bede was the first historian of our nation.
His history of the church in England
is the oldest historical text we possess.
But his approach to the subject makes it even more significant.
Like all historians, Bede had an agenda.
But in this case, that agenda has been vitally important.
Bede's book is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
And what's revolutionary about it is that for the first time he
describes the English as a people, the 'Gens Anglorum' in the Latin.
And crucially, they were also a Christian people.
In page after page of his history,
Bede proclaims the Christian unity of the English people.
There was still no political unity at all.
England was a patchwork of warring kingdoms.
But Bede persists in calling them all English.
That Bede invented the idea of a Christian English people
is one thing.
But what does Bede's Englishness consist of?
What does it mean to us in Britain today?
It's a question I've been asking all of my life.
The answer was given over a thousand years ago right here on Holy Island.
Bede collaborated with the
monks here to produce a manifesto of what they meant by Englishness.
But it's not a political manifesto.
It's a Christian work of art.
The Lindisfarne gospel is a Latin gospel book
illuminated on Holy Island, probably for use in the cult of St Cuthbert.
The painting and calligraphy
were the work of one lone genius, Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne.
And these pages deliberately include elements from all the traditions,
from Rome, the Celtic world and beyond, which went to make up
this new Christian English identity.
The Lindisfarne Gospels was probably the single-most symbolic
visual statement of what they were trying to say.
This would have been the most-seen book of its day.
You're probably not going to be able to read, you're gonna come
to the high altar to see the tomb of St Cuthbert, to see the book,
and there'll be strange Latin letters,
there's even Greek, but there are also
Germanic runic-style letters and Irish ogham.
And then when you look at the way in which these words just explode
across the page and become an icon, an image in their own right,
and as your eye penetrates into the ornament,
you'd see something that welcomed you
and spoke of your family, your ancestry, your culture.
This is a period when people declare who they are, what they believe,
by what they wear and so it's personal display.
The animal ornament that you see on the letters might be like the belt
buckle your great grand-daddy had when in the Roman Army,
with his Germanic, wild, barbarian ornament on it.
The swirls of the sea and the air might speak to another woman
of the brooch that her Irish grandmother gave to her.
And so there would be something for everybody there
and even beyond your own experience.
If you look at these incredible carpet pages
which preface the four Gospels.
My research has shown we were actually using carpets as prayer mats
here at the time that this was made.
You've got something that's part of the shared ritual
of the churches of the Middle East,
of Islam, that we're participating in.
A book like this becomes a symbolic statement of a harmony
that extends throughout the whole world, from
the watery wildernesses of the west to the deserts of Syria and Egypt.
So just visually they get a sense that the faith that they have
isn't just national but it's international,
it connects them with other parts of the globe.
It's universal, it's multi-cultural, and it's eternal...
you're part of the bigger picture.
I'm getting carried away, all of this talk of inclusion,
but there was so much violence and bloodshed associated with people
taking on the Gospels. What's going on?
That's why the message is so real, it's a dangerous place out
there, and your faith can be radical and transforming, and this is an age
where kings would give up their wealth and their power
and become simple, humble servants in the world.
If anyone needs evidence to disprove the idea of a Dark Age,
it's here in Lindisfarne and it's gleaming with civilization.
But there's more to it than that.
The Lindisfarne Gospels make an extraordinary statement
about multi-culture.
In an age when much is being made of an inevitable clash between East and
West, that Christianity and Islam are supposed to be at war,
it's amazing, it's actually a blessing,
to see how much we actually share.
I've discovered another way of seeing England, as a more inclusive,
more welcoming all-encompassing culture
that's willing to borrow and adapt ideas from the rest of the world.
This early English church
wasn't small-minded, but the epitome of diversity.
(HORN SOUNDS)
In the 8th century, this English golden age became
a beacon which shone not just in these islands but across Europe too.
English missionaries masterminded the Christian expansion
into what was then pagan Austria and Germany.
When this imperial chapel was begun in the 780s,
it was to be the centrepiece of a new capital
for a new empire which extended from Spain to Denmark and Hungary.
The ruler who ordered it was called Charlemagne, Charles the Great.
Charlemagne wanted to revive the glory days of the Roman empire.
The Holy Roman empire was the result -
a new Christian empire
that would rule on the continent of Europe for a thousand years.
This church is almost a direct copy of the one at
the former Roman imperial capital at Ravenna in Italy.
It was the centrepiece of Charlemagne's empire.
And at its heart?
An Englishman from York called Alcuin.
'Alcuin was fundamentally important to all this.'
The important thing was that he was a spiritual guide.
It was a kind of combination, if you like,
of life in the world and the monastic life.
So when Charlemagne said things like
the real question for us is are we really Christian?
He actually asked that question, he wanted his court,
his people to address that question. Alcuin was behind it.
What about Bede's idea of a
Christian pluralism,
does Alcuin bring those ideas here to Charlemagne?
Yes, I think he does.
Alcuin gave a great boost to this notion that it wasn't just
a unified empire, it wasn't an imperialist empire,
it's an association of Christian peoples and what unites them
is their Christianity, I think that's the message,
and it's a message which has a resonance for Europe today,
the idea of a confederation rather than an empire.
So it's a kind of Christian EU, before the EU.
I think one could put it that way.
It's amazing to think, less than 200 years after their conversion,
English Christians had achieved so much and wielded such a power
and influence over European affairs.
But then, at the very height of their success, disaster struck.
Thousands of pagan Viking raiders from Scandinavia began attacking
the Christian English kingdoms.
Even Lindisfarne was sacked.
By the 870s, only the Kingdom of Wessex survived.
It was ruled by a man who would become a national hero.
His name was Alfred.
There seems no doubt that for Alfred, this wasn't just your
usual Dark Age squabble.
It was an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and
the forces of evil, a battle for the very survival of Christian England.
By 878, pagan Viking armies had almost destroyed
the Christian English kingdoms.
In Wessex King Alfred the Great was on the run,
hiding out in the marshes of Somerset.
Fortified by his Christian faith
he summoned his people and finally brought the pagan Danish army
to battle at a place called Ethandun here in Wiltshire.
The result was a victory for Christianity over the pagan Vikings.
After the battle at Ethandun, Alfred became a national hero.
The forces of evil were defeated.
In the aftermath of the battle, the Viking leader,
a vicious character called Guthrum,
became a Christian, and Alfred his godfather.
But the battle achieved something else too.
It started the process of the political unification of England.
The Christian unity of the English people that Bede had celebrated
at Jarrow was now a political reality.
What was a religious and cultural community now became one nation,
with one religion at its heart.
Astonishingly
Alfred's thoughts on creating this new nation still survive
because he wrote them down himself.
St Gregory's Pastoral Care is 1400 years old.
It's a manual for Christian government, and Alfred himself
translated it into early English.
He then sent copies to the great men in his kingdom,
with a preface in English explaining why.
In the process, he was turning Bede's idea of Englishness
into an English nation -
England.
That notion of Engelond, which is a territory -
they may be Danish, they may be Welsh,
they may be Bretons, they may be Franks -
if they come and accept his lordship and accept Christianity
they can be part of that kingdom, for which he's proscribing
this wisdom coming from Gregory's Pastoral Care.
For Alfred, anyone can join the Angles and Saxons
in a new community, united not just by religion but language too.
This is a new nation.
Some historians, in recent decades, I think, have made quite a lot
of the nation idea, that this is a kind of early form of nationalism,
and I think there's an element of that obviously,
because Alfred prioritizes the language,
the translating into his language,
and talks about the English-kind in several of his works,
He uses that word, it's a new coinage.
And if you like, you can see that
as prefiguring some kind of national unity.
But is this religion being used ideologically?
Is it a way in which they're beating other people into submission?
Is that one way we could read this?
It's possible to see it that way.
It's not the way that most historians see it.
It's not the way that the sources make it sound.
You can be a Dane and you can have your own Danish law
for secular things, but if you live in England in the 10th century
you're a Christian and you're endowing churches.
I think it's very hard to present it too much in terms
of knocking your... knocking people over the head.
I think people are buying in...
This is quite revolutionary for me,
and quite profound, because as somebody who's African-Caribbean,
my understanding of Englishness has been rather fixed and narrow.
To see that very birth of the nation,
you get this sense of fluidity in terms of identity
and drawing people in
but the sense that you can be both-and, rather than either-or.
So it's not a fixed, exclusive ideology, it's inclusive
and it's flexible, and it's therefore very attractive and I think it works.
The proof of the pudding, if you like, is in these books
that we see in front of us.
These are the ideas that created not just England,
but the nation we know today.
Our links to Alfred's kingdom are deep -
we owe to it not just the monarchy and the church but the jury system,
the common law, even the counties we live in today.
As a political entity, Hampshire is older than France.
The saints of Lindisfarne were finally buried
in the cathedral at Durham.
But 1,200 years later how much of their inclusiveness
remains in Britain?
Churches today, Anglicans, Catholics, Pentecostals
and the rest, often seem divided along ethnic and cultural lines.
I've called it Sunday morning apartheid.
I'm not sure that the Lindisfarne message of Bede, Alfred and Cuthbert
has survived as well as these relics.
There is radical evil out there and it's got to be faced and dealt with
in the power of the cross of Jesus.
People have found it difficult to do those two things.
Cuthbert held them together, the celebration of the goodness of God
and the overthrow of the power of evil
and we need to follow that for all it's worth.
The legacy of Cuthbert inspires me because I see him
attempting to build a church community that is inclusive.
When I look at the established Church
it seems quite homogeneous to me,
Is that really a good example of Cuthbert's legacy?
Clearly, Cuthbert was there for everybody and with everybody
and the Church does its best to be that today.
I'm not saying we're perfect cos we're not.
We'll put up our hands and say, "We're getting this wrong,
"Let's do it better", but we are there for everybody.
That's quite clear.
It's about trying to speak a word of justice and mercy into a society
that is in danger of forgetting both
I think Cuthbert would be a real help in getting us to do that.
In the centuries since the time of Cuthbert,
the English went on to subjugate the other peoples of the British isles
and to colonise the world.
But that Lindisfarne message didn't die.
It lay behind the antislavery movement,
the Victorian missions to the poor
and the Christian socialist movement.
But it has to be struggled for.
Today, in a world where asylum-seekers are vilified,
where racism, Homophobia and social exclusion are still common,
where Islamic extremists and Christians who are angry,
vie for the headlines,
I believe the message of Lindisfarne is needed now more than ever.
It has revolutionary potential, because it teaches us that identity
is never fixed or given but always changing
and that the most creative times
are when these identities are open to others.
But even more important, those Dark Ages gave us
a sense of national identity -
one state, one language, and, until recently, one religion.
You don't find that in many countries but you do in Britain.
Because of what happened all those years ago,
when out of the chaos and violence which followed the collapse
of the Roman Empire,
the peoples of Britain created a new idea of themselves -
a Christian identity which has made us what we are today.
That's why I believe that the Dark Ages
are the most important in our history.
Not only because they show us who we were but also who we might be.
It's amazing to think that that world of Bede and Cuthbert,
the world of over 1,000 years ago, can still speak to us in this way,
but it's true.
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