The Coming of Augustine AD 597 -– ‘Not Angles, but Angels’

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The mission of Augustine from Rome to England: In the spring of A.D. 597 St Augustine of Canterbury first set foot in the south-east corner of England. There is an English Heritage cross in a field in Ebbsfleet, Kent, that marks the spot.

Augustine was commissioned by Pope Gregory I – Gregory the Great – to take the Good News of the Gospels to the pagan Anglo-Saxons, who had invaded and colonized much of Eastern Britain, and to bring a new ministry to the scattered Christian flock that survived across the country following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west.

Apart from the Invitatory, which comes from the Common of a Confessor Bishop, most of this music, of considerable originality, is taken from two rhyming offices in honour of St Gregory the Great. One is by an 11th-century Alsation Pope, St Leo IX (1002-54), the other probably by an unknown monk of Canterbury, who re-composed the antiphons, making them more directly relevant to England and to the English.