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The new inhabitants practiced Anglo-Saxon paganism, a polytheistic religion in which multiple gods were worshipped, among them Woden, Thor, and Tiw. Woden was the king of the gods, and early English kings traced their ancestry back to him (see Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies). [8] Christianity survived in the Brittonic kingdoms of the west and north.
The last Anglo-Saxon king to adhere to the traditional religion was Arwald of Wihtwara, who was killed in battle in 686, at which point Sussex and Wessex had already adopted Christianity. During the Viking Age , circa 800–1050, settlers from Scandinavia reintroduced paganism to eastern and northern England.
The right half of the front panel of the 7th-century Franks Casket, depicting the Anglo-Saxon (and wider Germanic) legend of Wayland the Smith. Anglo-Saxon paganism, sometimes termed Anglo-Saxon heathenism, Anglo-Saxon pre-Christian religion, Anglo-Saxon traditional religion, or Anglo-Saxon polytheism refers to the religious beliefs and practices followed by the Anglo-Saxons between the 5th ...
The Saxon invasions of Britain destroyed most of the formal church structures in the east of Britain as they progressed, replacing Christianity with a form of Germanic polytheism. There seems to have been a lull in the Saxon westward expansion traditionally attributed to the Battle of Badon but, with the Yellow Plague of Rhos caused by the ...
There is a possibility that some of these British Christian communities survived the Anglo-Saxon occupation: Richard Fletcher mentions Much Wenlock [1] as a possible candidate. The first kings of Mercia were pagans, and they resisted the encroachment of Christianity longer than those of other kingdoms in the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy.
John Blair put forward a description of the early Anglo-Saxon Christian church in England in a number of publications. [2] He believed that the organisation of the early church was based around minsters staffed by a community of clerics and providing spiritual services within a defined area (known as a parochia).
It was against this background that Pope Gregory I decided to send a mission, often called the Gregorian mission, to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity in 595. [13] [14] The Kingdom of Kent was ruled by Æthelberht, who had married a Christian princess named Bertha before 588, [15] and perhaps earlier than 560. [16]
During the prolonged period of Viking incursions and settlement of Anglo-Saxon England pagan ideas and religious rites made something of a comeback, mainly in the Danelaw during the 9th century and particularly in the Kingdom of Northumbria, whose last king to rule it as an independent state was Eric Bloodaxe, a Viking, probably pagan and ruler ...