Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of York & Missionary to Northumbria
October 10 · d. 644
Paulinus was the Roman missionary bishop who carried the gospel into the north of England and baptized Edwin, king of Northumbria, at York in 627. Sent from Rome as part of Pope Gregory's mission and made the first bishop of York, he taught and baptized across the northern kingdom, and after the king fell in battle he served out his life as bishop of Rochester. His feast is October 10.
Paulinus was a monk of Rome, sent to England by Pope Gregory's mission to win the English to Christ. He had laboured in Kent many years when, in 625, he was made a bishop and sent on a harder errand: to travel to the pagan kingdom of Northumbria, in the north of England, as chaplain to a Christian princess, Æthelburh of Kent, who was to marry its king. The king was Edwin, a hard and powerful man who ruled more of Britain than any English king before him. He had promised Æthelburh she might keep her faith. Whether he would take it himself was another matter, for a king who changed his gods changed the gods of his whole people, and no one knew how the great men of the north would answer.
Edwin would not be hurried. He weighed the new teaching, and at last he called his chief men together and asked each what he thought. It is that council that the church has never forgotten.
Coifi, the chief priest of the old gods, spoke first, and to everyone's surprise he spoke against the very religion he served. No man, he said, had honoured the gods more faithfully than he, and no man had less to show for it; if the gods were worth anything they would have rewarded their most diligent servant, and they had not. Then another of the king's men rose and spoke the words that have outlived the kingdom. In the translation of L. C. Jane, hosted at the Fordham Medieval Sourcebook, he told the king that our life is like the flight of a sparrow through a warm hall in winter:
The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.
The bird comes in out of the dark and goes back into the dark, and of all that lies before and after we know nothing. If the new teaching could tell them anything sure about that darkness, it deserved to be followed. The other elders agreed. Then Coifi asked to hear Paulinus again, and when he had, he declared, in the same translation, "I have long since been sensible that there was nothing in that which we worshipped; because the more diligently I sought after truth in that worship, the less I found it."
And Coifi did more than agree. He asked who should be the first to profane the old altars, and answered himself: who better to pull down what he had once served? He asked the king for arms and a stallion, though his office had forbidden him to bear either, and rode out to the great temple at Godmundingham. The crowd thought he had gone mad. He hurled his spear into the shrine he had tended all his life, and had it burned to the ground.
At Easter in 627 Edwin was baptized at York, in a little wooden church he had raised for the purpose, and Paulinus was set over the see of that city. Then the north came to the water. Paulinus went through the kingdom preaching and baptizing; at one royal seat he stayed thirty-six days, teaching from morning to night, and led the people down to be washed in the river Glen, and elsewhere baptized in the river Swale. The faith that Edwin's fall would soon scatter had reached the common people of the north. Paulinus had opened a door in that far country, and though the north would suffer and the faith would seem to be driven out, the seed he had sown in the river-water took root and grew.
How we know Paulinus is, almost entirely, how the church knows the whole conversion of the north: through Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished at the monastery of Jarrow around 731, is the near-contemporary source, written roughly a century after the events it describes but drawing on the living memory of Canterbury and the Northumbrian church, on documents fetched from Rome, and on named informants. It is Bede who preserves the council of Edwin, the sparrow speech, Coifi and his ride to Godmundingham, and the labour at the rivers; and Bede who even records the man's face, from someone who had seen those who knew him: Paulinus was tall and a little stooping, with black hair, a thin face, a slender aquiline nose, and a bearing at once venerable and majestic.
The outward frame of the life is secure. Paulinus was a monk sent from Rome in 601, in the second party dispatched to reinforce Augustine's mission to Kent, and he had worked in the south some twenty years when Justus, archbishop of Canterbury, consecrated him bishop on 21 July 625 to accompany Æthelburh north. Edwin's baptism on Easter Day, 12 April 627, Bede dates to the eleventh year of the king's reign. The mission lasted only six years: in 633 Edwin was killed at the battle of Hatfield Chase, fighting an alliance of the British king Cadwallon and the pagan Mercian Penda, and the young Christian kingdom fell into confusion. Paulinus took ship with the widowed queen and the royal children and returned to Kent, where the see of Rochester lay vacant; he held it until his death on 10 October 644 and was buried there. A pallium, the woollen band that marks an archbishop, was sent him by Pope Honorius in 634, but it arrived after he had left York, so the office it conferred he never exercised in the north.
Bede wrote as a churchman recording the mighty acts of God among his own people, and his history has its providential shape; he tells the sparrow council as a scene of grace breaking upon a people in darkness. That shape is no reason to distrust the facts within it. Bede names his sources, and stands close enough to the events that a man baptized by Paulinus himself was still remembered and described to those who told Bede of him. Where later legend gathered around other saints of the age, Paulinus is unusually well served: the hall, the priest, and the river-baptisms come to us not as centuries-old folklore but as the reported history of a church that had not yet forgotten the men who converted it.
Paulinus is kept on October 10, the day of his death, at Rochester and in the calendar of the Church of England. In art he is shown as a bishop, and English tradition, following Bede's portrait, gives him his tall, spare, stooping frame and his dark hair. He is remembered as the apostle of Northumbria and the first bishop of York, the founder of that see whose stone minster Edwin began and Oswald finished. His relics were kept at Rochester, where in the eleventh century they were translated to a silver shrine. Old dedications and holy wells across the north of England still carry his name, marking the places where the church long believed the Roman bishop once preached and baptized.
Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book II(Latin, c. 731)
The near-contemporary source (c. 731) for the whole of Paulinus's mission: the council of Edwin, the sparrow speech, Coifi at Godmundingham, the baptism at York, the river-baptisms, and the flight to Rochester. Public domain in L. C. Jane's translation.
Public domain: Book II at the Fordham Medieval Sourcebook (L. C. Jane tr.), Complete work at CCEL
The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England(English, 1991)
Recommended: Henry Mayr-Harting (3rd edn., 1991)
The classic believing history of the Anglo-Saxon conversion, sober on the evidence and generous to the faith; the book to give a reader who wants the world Edwin's baptism opened. In print from Pennsylvania State University Press.
Primary sources. Everything of substance about Paulinus comes from Bede, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c. 731), Book II, which records the council of Edwin, the sparrow speech, Coifi's conversion and the profaning of the temple, the York baptism, the river-baptisms, and the flight to Rochester. It is free in L. C. Jane's 1903 Temple Classics translation at the Fordham Medieval Sourcebook and at CCEL; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle supplies the bare dates of Edwin's reign.
Principal study. Peter Hunter Blair's The World of Bede (Cambridge, 1970; reissued 1990) is the standard readable guide to Bede and the Northumbria he wrote about, the best single approach to the sources behind Paulinus; borrowable at the Internet Archive.
Recommended modern biography. Henry Mayr-Harting's The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (3rd edn., Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991) is the classic believing history of the conversion in which Paulinus stands, sober about the evidence and generous to the faith, and still in print: the book for a reader who wants the world that Edwin's baptism opened.
Further reading. The Catholic Encyclopedia's article on Paulinus gives a compact scholarly summary; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill's Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1988) annotates the Northumbrian chapters for the reader who wants the text in depth.
Online resources. The full Ecclesiastical History is at the Fordham Medieval Sourcebook and at CCEL; Book II, chapters XIII to XX, carries the whole Northumbrian story.
British (Received Pronunciation): Paulinus /pɔːˈlaɪnəs/; Cadwallon /kædˈwɒl.ən/; Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Paulinus to preach the Gospel to the people of Northumbria: 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.