Who introduced Christianity to Anglo-Saxon Britain?

Christianity was reintroduced to Anglo-Saxon Britain in 597 AD, when Saint Augustine of Canterbury landed in Kent at the head of a mission sent from Rome by Pope Gregory I.

Christianity had first reached the British Isles during the Roman occupation, from the second century onwards, and was well established in Roman Britain by the time Roman rule ended around 410 AD. The Anglo-Saxon migrations that followed brought pagan Germanic peoples, and much of the organised church in what is now England faded. Christianity survived in the Celtic west and north, particularly in Ireland, where it had taken root through the work of Saint Patrick in the fifth century, and from there it spread to Scotland through Saint Columba's mission to Iona in 563.

Pope Gregory I, known as Gregory the Great, decided to send a new mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons of southern England. According to Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Gregory was moved by the sight of fair-haired Anglo-Saxon slaves in a Roman market and resolved to bring the Gospel to their people. He chose Augustine, the prior of a Benedictine monastery in Rome, to lead the mission. Augustine and around forty companions landed at Ebbsfleet on the Isle of Thanet in 597.

They were received by King Ethelbert of Kent, the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kings at the time, whose wife Bertha was already a Christian from the Frankish royal family. Ethelbert was baptised within a few years, and with his support Augustine established his church at Canterbury, which has remained the seat of the senior bishop in England to this day. The Archbishop of Canterbury is still the head of the Church of England.

Conversion spread outwards from Kent. Paulinus took the mission north to Northumbria, where King Edwin was baptised in 627. In parallel, the Celtic tradition of Christianity was spreading south from Iona, particularly through Saint Aidan and the monastery at Lindisfarne founded in 635. Differences between the Roman and Celtic traditions, especially over the date of Easter and the form of the monastic tonsure, were resolved in favour of the Roman practice at the Synod of Whitby in 664.

By the end of the seventh century, Anglo-Saxon England was largely Christian, and the pattern of dioceses and parishes that Augustine's mission laid down underlies the Church of England's structure today.