The Christian bishop became the defender of the conquered Italian or Gaul against his Gothic and Lombard conqueror, the mediator between the German and his subjects, the one bulwark against barbaric violence and oppression.

To the barbarian, on the other hand, he was the representative of all that was venerable in the past, the living record of law, of letters, and of art.

But in Britain the priesthood and the people had been driven out together.

When Theodore came to organize the Church of England, the very memory of the older Christian Church which existed in Roman Britain had passed away.

The first missionaries to the Englishmen, strangers in a heathen land, attached themselves necessarily to the courts of the kings, who were their earliest converts, and whose conversion was generally followed by that of their people.