Late Anglo-Saxon Christianity

The Viking wars nearly killed English Christianity. Monasteries were destroyed, whole dioceses lapsed, and when Alfred of Wessex set out to rebuild he complained that he could hardly find a priest south of the Thames able to translate a Latin letter. His answer was a translation programme — Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care and other essential books put into English so that clergy could read them at all. And the Chronicle begun in his reign is the first sustained history written in English. A century later a second rebuilding, led by the bishops Dunstan, Æthelwold and Oswald, refounded the monasteries on the Benedictine rule and produced an agreed customary for the whole country. The vernacular stayed central throughout: Ælfric wrote well over a hundred sermons in English so that ordinary congregations could hear careful teaching in their own tongue, and Archbishop Wulfstan, preaching in 1014 as the Danish invasions closed in, told the English that their own sins had brought the calamity on them. The Norman Conquest of 1066 ended the church's independent development.