Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Dorchester & Apostle of Wessex
September 4 · d. 650
also known as Birin
Birinus was an Italian bishop who sailed to England in 634 meaning to carry the gospel deeper inland than anyone had gone, to the wild pagans no missionary had reached. He got as far as Wessex, found that the West Saxons had never heard of Christ at all, and decided they needed him more than the distant interior did. He stayed and converted them. He baptized their king with Oswald of Northumbria standing as godfather, set his see at Dorchester-on-Thames, and laid, parish by quiet parish, the Christian foundation of what became the greatest of the English kingdoms.
Birinus came to England in the year 634 with a bold and simple plan: to go further than anyone before him. He was an Italian, a bishop consecrated at Genoa and sent out by the Pope himself, and he meant to push past the Christian kingdoms of the English coast into the deep inland country where no preacher had ever set foot, to carry Christ to the wildest pagans he could find. He never got there. Passing through the land of the West Saxons, in the green country of the Thames valley, he found a whole people who had never so much as heard the name of Christ, and he changed his mind. As Bede tells it, finding them all most confirmed pagans, he thought it better to preach the word of God there than to go on. The remotest mission he could have dreamed of was sitting at his feet.
So he stayed, and gave the rest of his life to the West Saxons. His great moment came when their king, Cynegils, after long instruction, came down to the water to be baptized. And standing at the font to receive him was one of the most powerful men in Britain, Oswald, the holy king of Northumbria, who happened to be in Wessex to marry Cynegils's daughter, and who now stood as the old king's godfather. Bede records the scene with delight: Oswald, the most holy and victorious king of the Northumbrians, being present, received Cynegils as he came forth from the water, and by an alliance most pleasing to God took the newborn Christian for his own son. Two kings stood together in the river, one of them just made a Christian and the other already a saint, and the mightiest kingdom of the English age was set on its road to Christ.
The two kings gave Birinus the town of Dorchester, on the Thames, for his bishop's seat, and from there he worked for some fifteen years at the patient, unglamorous labor that actually plants a church: walking the villages, teaching, baptizing, raising chapels where there had been none, ordaining priests to carry on when he was gone. He won the king's son and successor too, though that one later fell away and had to be won back. There were no dragons in Birinus's mission and no fire from heaven, only a man who had meant to be a hero in the far wilderness and instead spent himself, faithfully and without fame, on the people in front of him.
He died about the year 650 and was buried at Dorchester, and later ages carried his bones to Winchester and built him a shrine. But his real monument is a kingdom. The West Saxons he had found in total darkness became, within a few generations, the heart of Christian England; their royal house would one day give the island Alfred the Great and the line of its kings, and the church Birinus planted in the Thames valley never died. The missionary who could not reach the ends of the earth had been handed, instead, the beginning of a nation, and he took it, and was content.
Birinus is known almost entirely from BedeEcclesiastical History of the English People (Book III, on Birinus) — Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World's Classics, who tells his story in the third book of the Ecclesiastical History, written at Jarrow about 731, within a century of Birinus's death and drawing on the records of the West Saxon church. Bede reports that Birinus was consecrated bishop at Genoa by Asterius, was sent to Britain at the urging of Pope Honorius I to carry the faith into the inland regions where no teacher had yet gone, and, finding the West Saxons wholly pagan, stayed to convert them instead. He baptized King Cynegils about 635, with Oswald of Northumbria as sponsor, received Dorchester-on-Thames as his see, won over Cynegils's son Cenwalh as well, and died about 650.
Almost nothing is recorded of his life before he reached Britain, and much of what later circulated belongs to the promotion of his cult after his relics were moved to Winchester, traditionally under Bishop Haeddi about 690. The medieval Winchester Lives, composed long afterward, added the customary miracles, the discovery of his incorrupt body, and the healings at his shrine, in the ordinary manner of the genre; these stand at a great distance from the sober early notice in Bede. What is secure, and enough, is the historical core: an Italian missionary bishop who gave the West Saxons their first knowledge of Christ and the Thames valley its first organized church, and whose see at Dorchester was the seed from which the great diocese of Winchester grew.
Birinus is commemorated on 4 September, with 3 December kept in some calendars, and is honored as the Apostle of Wessex; his liturgical color is white. His relics were translated from Dorchester to the Old Minster at Winchester, where his shrine drew pilgrims through the Middle Ages, and both Dorchester Abbey and Winchester Cathedral keep his memory still, the one as the place of his labor, the other as the place of his rest.
He is patron of his own corner of England, the Thames valley and the old kingdom of Wessex, and his name is carried by churches across the region. In art he is shown as a bishop in cope and mitre, very often baptizing the kneeling King Cynegils while King Oswald looks on, the scene Bede made famous; sometimes he holds a model of a church, for the many he built. He is remembered as the founder of the see of Dorchester, later Winchester, and so as one of the fathers of the church in southern England.
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Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Book III, on Birinus)(Latin, c. 731)
Recommended: Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World's Classics
Bede is the one full source for Birinus and the conversion of Wessex; the Oxford World's Classics is the standard in-print translation, Sellar's the freely readable one.
Public domain: Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Book III
Further reading. The one essential source is Bede's account in the third book of the Ecclesiastical History, listed above; the later Winchester traditions are surveyed in the standard studies of the early West Saxon church and of Birinus's cult.
Online resources. Bede's chapter on Birinus and the baptism of Cynegils is freely readable in A. M. Sellar's translation at the Internet Sacred Text Archive and at Fordham's Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
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British (Received Pronunciation): Honorius /həˈnɔːriəs/
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Birinus to preach the Gospel to the people of Wessex: 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.