Gregory the Great Sends the Mission to England

The event

According to a tradition recorded by the historian Bede over a century later, Pope Gregory the Great, before becoming pope, encountered fair-haired boys from Britain being sold as slaves in the Roman forum, and upon learning they were Angles, reportedly remarked they were "not Angles, but angels," resolving to see the pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain evangelized.

As pope, Gregory acted on this resolve in 596-597, sending a mission of about forty monks led by Augustine (later known as Augustine of Canterbury, distinct from Augustine of Hippo) to the kingdom of Kent, whose King Æthelberht had already married a Christian Frankish princess, Bertha, providing an opening for the mission.

Æthelberht received the missionaries cautiously but hospitably, allowing them to preach and eventually converting to Christianity himself, along with substantial numbers of his subjects; Augustine was consecrated the first Archbishop of Canterbury, establishing what became the primary seat of the English church.

Gregory maintained detailed correspondence with Augustine throughout the mission, offering pastoral and practical guidance — including a notably pragmatic instruction that existing pagan temples be repurposed as churches rather than destroyed, and pagan festivals adapted rather than simply suppressed, a strategy of cultural accommodation that shaped the character of the English church's early development and became an influential model, for better or worse, in later Christian missionary practice more broadly.

Other witnesses

• Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book 1
• Gregory the Great, Letters (Registrum Epistularum)

Further reading

• Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): St. Gregory the Great
• Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): The Venerable Bede — the mission's earliest narrator