4 - Early influences on the church

Summary

THE FOUNDATION OF THE EPISCOPAL SEES

When Theodore of Tarsus arrived in England as archbishop of Canterbury in 669 the Hwicce and Magonsætan were presumably under the nominal authority of the bishop of Lichfield, as were their Mercian overlords and the peoples of Middle Anglia and Lindsey. Such provision was obviously inadequate, especially since Bishop Chad insisted on travelling round his diocese on foot, following Irish custom. The impatient Greek is said to have lifted him bodily onto a horse. More conventionally, after Chad's death Theodore summoned a synod at Hertford in 672 and 673 which recognized in principle the need for more bishops; there were only the seven sees of Canterbury, Rochester, London, Dunwich, Winchester, Lichfield and York. By 679 Theodore's main reorganization may have been completed, if we may rely on Canterbury's record of a papal council, which decreed, apparently in response to a dispute between Theodore and his bishops over the division of dioceses, that there should be an archbishop and twelve bishops. To make up this number we should have to include the dioceses of the Hwicce and Magonsætan, and indeed their bishops, Bosel and Putta, attest an authentic charter already in 680, alongside their spiritual and temporal overlords, Theodore and Æthelred of Mercia. According to the episcopal lists for the two sees, Bosel and Putta were their first bishops ‘after Seaxwulf’, the bishop of the great Mercian diocese whom Theodore had consecrated in place of Bishop Wynfrith, Chad's successor, whom he had deposed in 675 or a little earlier, for ‘some act of disobedience’, perhaps opposition to Theodore's plan to divide his diocese.