Anglican Commemoration
First Archbishop of Canterbury & Apostle to the English
May 26 · d. 605
also known as Augustine of Canterbury, Austin
Augustine, a Roman monk sent by Pope Gregory the Great, landed in Kent in 597 and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. He baptized King Æthelberht, founded the see and the monastery outside Canterbury's walls, and failed to reconcile the older British church to Roman practice. He died on 26 May, in 604 or 605, having already consecrated his successor.
Augustine was a monk in Rome, prior of a monastery on the Caelian Hill that Pope Gregory had founded himself. He had never been a missionary. Then Gregory chose him to take the faith to the English, a people at the far edge of the known world, across a sea, in a country Rome had abandoned.
The party set out, nearly forty men, and lost their nerve in Gaul. They had heard what waited for them. Augustine turned back and rode all the way to Rome to ask Gregory to release them. Gregory would not. He sent Augustine back with a letter, dated in his own hand on the twenty-third of July, 596, and it is one of the few things from this whole story we still have in the words of a man who was there: "Since it would have been better not to have begun a good work than to turn back from it once begun, you must, most beloved sons, bring to completion the good work which with the Lord's help you have begun." He made Augustine their abbot in the same letter, so that the man who had asked to be let go now carried the others.
They crossed the Channel the next summer and came ashore on the Isle of Thanet, in Kent. King Æthelberht had been warned they might be sorcerers, so he would meet them only in the open air, where he thought their magic could not hold. His wife, Queen Bertha, was already a Christian, a Frankish princess who had married him on the condition that she keep her faith and her bishop; there was an old Roman church at Canterbury, St Martin's, where she had been praying for years. So the ground was not as bare as it looked.
The king heard them out and gave an answer that was neither yes nor no. "Your words and promises are fair, but because they are new to us, and of uncertain import, I cannot consent to them so far as to forsake that which I have so long observed with the whole English nation," he said, and then: "we desire not to harm you, but will give you favourable entertainment... nor do we forbid you to preach and gain as many as you can to your religion." He gave them lodging in Canterbury and the use of Bertha's church. He did not compel anyone. In time he believed and was baptized himself, and after that, Bede writes, greater numbers began daily to flock together.
Rome sent more men in 601, with the pallium that made Augustine an archbishop, and with vessels, vestments, relics and books. The mission held.
What did not hold was Britain. There had been Christians in these islands for centuries already, with their own bishops, their own reckoning of Easter, their own way of baptizing, and Augustine went to meet them at a place the English called Augustine's Oak. He asked them to keep Easter at the Roman date, to use the Roman baptismal rite, and to preach with him to the English; everything else, he said, he would gladly suffer. When talk failed the first time, he proposed a test. A blind Englishman was brought forward. The British clergy prayed and nothing happened. Augustine knelt and prayed, and the man saw.
Even that did not settle it. At the second meeting the British had been advised by a hermit to watch whether Augustine rose from his chair to greet them. He stayed seated. They read it as pride, refused everything he asked, and would not have him as archbishop. Augustine warned them that if they would not have peace with their brethren they would have war from their enemies. Years later, after Augustine was dead, a pagan king slaughtered twelve hundred praying monks at Chester, and Bede, writing a century afterward, set that down as the prophecy come true. That is Bede's reading of it, and it is a hard one; the war had its own causes, and Augustine was in his grave.
He died on the twenty-sixth of May. Before he died he did a quiet thing: he consecrated Laurentius as his successor while he was still alive, so that the church, as Bede puts it, should not falter even for one hour once he was gone. They buried him outside the unfinished church of Peter and Paul, and moved him inside when it was finished. His epitaph said he had ended the days of his office in peace.
The man who had once begged to be let out of the work stayed in it to the last hour, and left it standing.
You may know the feeling of having said yes to something and then, some distance in, wanting very much to be let out of it. Augustine got as far as Gaul before he turned around and rode back to Rome to ask. What is worth noticing is that nothing in him changed; Gregory simply refused, and handed him the work again with more responsibility attached than he had left with. The mission that followed was not carried by a brave man. It was carried by a frightened one who went anyway, and who at the end was still thinking ahead, ordaining his successor so the work would not stall for an hour after he was gone. Where has your nerve failed, and who is holding you to the good thing you began?
Almost everything narratable about Augustine comes from one source: Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, finished in 731, more than a century after the events, written in Northumbria about Kent. Bede was careful by the standards of his age and worked from documents copied for him out of the Roman archive, but he was not a witness, and for some episodes, including both conferences at Augustine's Oak, he is the only source there is. The one contemporary stream is Gregory the Great's own correspondence, the Registrum epistularum, written by a direct actor between 596 and 604. Where a date can be checked against something outside the tradition, it is usually Gregory's.
The two streams do not always agree, and the differences are worth stating rather than smoothing. Bede says Augustine was ordained bishop by Ætherius, whom he calls archbishop of Arles; Ætherius was in fact bishop of Lyons. A letter of Gregory's says the consecration was performed by bishops of the German lands. And Gregory's letters of September 597 already address Augustine as a bishop, which is why R. A. Markus argued in the twentieth century that the consecration happened before the party ever reached Britain, though he held the evidence does not fix where. Vergilius of Arles, named in many accounts, is a modern reconstruction and not what Bede says.
Two familiar details need correcting. The baptism of Æthelberht has no date in Bede at all; the Whit Sunday, 2 June 597 date comes from the chronicle of Thomas Elmham in the fifteenth century, more than eight hundred years later. And the famous figure of more than ten thousand baptized at Christmas 597 is not Bede's either: it comes from Gregory's letter of 598 to the patriarch Eulogius of Alexandria, relaying Augustine's own report of his success. Bede gives no number.
The year of Augustine's death is genuinely open. The epitaph Bede transcribes gives the day, 26 May, and no year, and Bede's own chronological recapitulation has no entry for his death at all. Modern reference works mostly give 604, with 605 standing as the older alternative. The reason to hesitate over Bede here is precise: his recapitulation states that Gregory died in 605, and standard papal chronology puts Gregory's death on 12 March 604. At the one point where his summary chronology can be checked against independent evidence, it is a year out.
Of Augustine himself before the mission, nothing is known but the priorate. No parents, no birth year, no birthplace, no description of his character. The Catholic Encyclopedia's "a Roman of the better class" is an inference from his rank, not a record.
Augustine is shown with the pallium, cope and mitre of an archbishop, and with a pastoral staff and a book of the Gospels as a missionary; some modern icon painters add an oak branch or acorn for the meeting under Augustine's Oak. He is commemorated on 26 May in the Church of England and in Eastern Orthodox usage, on 27 May in the modern Roman calendar, and on 28 May in the pre-1970 Roman calendar outside Great Britain. He was never formally canonized; he lived centuries before the papal process existed, and his veneration rests on immemorial local recognition.
The devotion that grew up around him did not survive intact. His shrine at St Augustine's Abbey was destroyed at the dissolution in 1538 and the relics lost; the abbey, surrendered on 30 July 1538, is a ruin today, inscribed by UNESCO in 1988 alongside Canterbury Cathedral and St Martin's Church. A small bone fragment is venerated at Ramsgate, near the traditional landing place, though no chain of custody is disclosed for it anywhere.
One thing did survive. The St Augustine Gospels, a sixth-century Italian manuscript traditionally said to have come with the mission, was at Canterbury by the tenth century, passed to Archbishop Matthew Parker after the dissolution, and was given by him to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1575, where it remains. Archbishops of Canterbury have sworn their enthronement oath on it since the practice was restored in 1945, and it was carried in the coronation procession of King Charles III in 2023, open at the portrait of St Luke.
The single indispensable source is Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, completed in 731; the standard modern edition and translation is Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Oxford Medieval Texts (Clarendon Press, 1969), the first edition to draw on the mid-eighth-century Leningrad manuscript alongside the earlier Moore Bede. The English quoted on this page is A. M. Sellar's 1907 revision of J. A. Giles, freely available online: Æthelberht's reply and the message sent to him at Book I, chapter 25 (https://ccel.org/ccel/bede/history.v.i.xxiv.html); Augustine's proposal of the healing and his three conditions to the British bishops, both at Book II, chapter 2 (https://www.ccel.org/ccel/bede/history.v.ii.ii.html); the epitaph and burial at Book II, chapter 3 (https://ccel.org/ccel/bede/history.v.ii.iii.html); the consecration of Laurentius at Book II, chapter 4. The Latin of the epitaph may be read at the Latin Library (https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/bede/bede2.shtml). Note that CCEL's chapter slugs run one behind the chapter numbers.
Gregory the Great's letter of 23 July 596, sending the faltering party onward and appointing Augustine their abbot, is Registrum epistularum VI.51, quoted here in the translation at Roman Letters (https://romanletters.org/letters/gregory_great/6051/); the page's own header misdates it to 595, but the letter dates itself. Gregory's 601 letter to Mellitus on the reuse of pagan places of worship is at Fordham's Medieval Sourcebook (https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/greg1-mellitus.txt). Gregory's replies to Augustine's nine pastoral questions survive as the Libellus responsionum, quoted whole by Bede at Book I, chapter 27 (https://ccel.org/ccel/bede/history.v.i.xxvi.html); the celebrated line that things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things, is Gregory's answer and not Augustine's, though it sits under Augustine's name in the chapter heading and is constantly misattributed. For the later history, see the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia article at New Advent (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02081a.htm) and, for the abbey's dissolution and World Heritage inscription, the UNESCO listing (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/496/).
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Augustine of Canterbury to preach the Gospel to the English people: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/; Northumbria /nɔːrˈθʌmbriə/
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11