Textus Roffensis origins
Dr Christopher Monk explores the origins of Ethelbert’s law-code, foundational document of the Early English Laws portion of the ‘Rochester Book’.
St Martin’s Church, Canterbury, is the oldest church in the English-speaking world. The area in blue is Saxon, c.600; the area in orange is Roman, possibly dating to the 300s. The front of the church and the roof date to the 1300s. © Christopher Monk 2016
Bede’s account of Ethelbert’s conversion reads like one of the mini dramas from The Acts of the Apostles. It is a narrative designed to show how a truly noble ruler, though a heathen, will inevitably be won over by the comforting and edifying message of Christianity.
And so it was, explains Bede, that Augustine, apostle of the English, along with forty fellow brothers in Christ, arrived in Ethelbert’s realm. Thanet, at the north-eastern tip of Kent, is the precise landing point provided by Bede. In Ethelbert’s time, it was an island separated from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel, and thus it happens to work well, for Bede’s dramatic purposes, as a metaphor for the king’s initial distrust of his visitors.
The opening of Æthelberht’s Law-Code, Textus Roffensis. Rochester Cathedral Library, MS A.3.5 (Rochester, c. 1123), f. 1r.
Find out more about the most exceptional item in the Cathedral collections comprising over 170 texts from the 8th to the 14th centuries.