Why Were There No Martyrs in the Early English Church?

Description

Stories about the heroic deeds of the first apostles, and about later Roman martyrs, together with copies of their passions, may have reached England as early as the late sixth and early seventh century, brought by the first missionaries who came to preach to the pagan Germanic peoples settled in the lowland areas of the former Roman province of Britain.Yet that was not the experience of those who worked as evangelists among the Anglo-Saxons. No one died in order to make the English Christian - apart, of course, from Jesus himself. No missionaries suffered death as a direct result of their actions in converting the pagan English. Or, at least, if any apostles did lose their lives in that endeavour, none of their literate contemporaries, or their successors, made any record of their sacrifice for the faith that now survives, nor did they preserve their relics in shrines where the faithful might show their devotion. Why the conversion of the English was achieved without martyrs, when the same is true of few if any other missionary endeavours across cultures, except in the case of the slightly earlier conversion of the early medieval Irish, is a question that I have long pondered. The invitation to give this lecture gave me an ideal opportunity to try to wrestle with this problem, even though I was aware of the faint irony in my choice of topic.