Starting just 30 years after the Crucifixion, Catholic England produced remarkable figures, including lesser-known luminaries like Bishop Robert Grosseteste, who pioneered the scientific method.
In my book Faith of Our Fathers: A History of True England, I sought to present a panoramic overview of two thousand years of English history, from the first century to the 21st century. Its premise was that “true England” was the England which had remained true to Truth Himself, Jesus Christ, and to His Mystical Body, the Catholic Church.
From the arrival of the first Christian missionaries around the year 63—only 30 years after the Crucifixion—to today, the history of true England continues to inspire faith in the promise of Christ that the gates of Hell will not prevail against His Church, nor against those who remain faithful to His Church. In this sense, true England is a land of heroes. Let’s focus on four of those heroes whom every true Englishman should know.
In 735, the year in which St. Bede died in northern England, another great English scholar was born, also in the north of England. This was Alcuin, who was destined to be the most influential scholar of the eighth century. The first 40 years of his life were devoted to scholarship and to the building of the great library at York. Such was his reputation across the whole of Christendom that he was asked by Charlemagne to help spread Christian learning to the Franks. He left England in 782 and settled in Aachen, in what is now Germany.
Charlemagne bestowed three abbeys upon Alcuin, each of which became a great center of scholarship. Specifically, Alcuin set about raising the standards for the copying of manuscripts, which was such a crucial task in the days before printing, as well as increasing the amount of copying being done. Thanks to his diligence, libraries gradually grew up all over Charlemagne’s realm, laying the foundations for Christian scholarship for centuries to come.
Moving to the 13th century, we find England in a time of political crisis. It is 1215, and King John’s tyrannical rule has led to a rebellion of his own barons. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, acting as mediator between the king and his restless subjects, hearkened back to Anglo-Saxon England in the years before the Norman Conquest, and specifically to the reign of St. Edward the Confessor, as the practical political model for a just solution to the conflict.
Archbishop Langton helped to draft the Magna Carta, which limited the power of the monarchy and laid the foundations for the English legal system. When King John signed this foundational historical document, albeit very reluctantly, it was Archbishop Langton who was the first witness to sign it after him. Such was the archbishop’s pivotal role in this historic event that the political philosopher Ernest Baker described Stephen Langton as the “father of English liberty.” Furthermore, considering the importance and influence of the Magna Carta on the political thought of America’s Founding Fathers, it could be argued that this great English Catholic was also the “father of American liberty” or, in any event, that his labors were a source of significant inspiration to those who forged the founding of the United States.
Robert Grosseteste
A contemporary of Stephen Langton is Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 until his death in 1253, who was one of the greatest scholars of his age. Although his role as a statesman gained him fame and even notoriety, he deserves to be remembered primarily as a scholastic philosopher, theologian, and scientist. He lectured at Oxford on the Psalter, the Pauline epistles, Genesis, and possibly on Isaiah, Daniel, and Sirach. He disputed with his contemporaries on the theological nature of truth and the efficacy of the Mosaic Law, and wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and the first commentary in the West of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. Also significant is his work on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s Celestial Hierarchy, which he translated from Greek into Latin and on which he wrote a commentary.
It is, however, as a pioneer in the physical sciences that Robert Grosseteste should perhaps be honored most, his life and work offering further proof that modern science stands on the shoulders of Catholic scholars. He was an original thinker in the scientific method and, as such, is an instrumental figure in the history of science. He concluded, following in the tradition of Boethius, that mathematics was the highest of all sciences on the basis that every natural science ultimately depended on mathematics. He also laid the foundations for the science of optics with his groundbreaking treatises De Luce (On Light) and De Colore (On Color). The former work was the first attempt to describe the heavens in terms of a single set of physical laws, four centuries before Isaac Newton proposed gravity and seven centuries before the Catholic priest and physicist Fr. Georges Lemaître proposed the Big Bang theory.
Upon his death, Robert Grosseteste was widely revered as a saint, with miracles being reported at his shrine; but he has never been canonized.
The final words on this great and neglected Englishman should be reserved for the tribute to his legacy to be found on his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral:
He was a man of learning and an inspiration to scholars, a wise administrator whilst a true shepherd of his flock, ever concerned to lead them to Christ in whose service he strove to temper justice with mercy, hating the sin while loving the sinner, not sparing the rod though cherishing the weak.
Robert Grosseteste was an old man, in his early 80s, when he died. Almost three hundred years later, in 1539, another English hero of Christendom would die at the ripe old age of 78. Whereas Grosseteste would die peacefully in his bed, Abbot Richard Whiting and two other monks would be dragged on a hurdle to Glastonbury Tor, the hill overlooking the abbey of which he would be the last abbot. He and the two other monks were then hanged, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered.
The abbot’s head was stuck on a pike above the entrance to the abbey for all to see. The quartered remainder of his corpse was boiled in pitch and then displayed in the nearby towns of Wells, Bath, Ilchester and Bridgewater. The “crime” for which Abbot Whiting was executed in this slow and barbarous fashion was his refusal to surrender Glastonbury Abbey to the king.
The king’s henchman, Thomas Cromwell, serving as judge and jury ahead of any trial, wrote that “the Abbot of Glaston [is] to be tried at Glaston and also executed there with his accomplices.” It is not known whether any fallacy of a trial was ever actually held, but the preordained sentence was carried out as Cromwell had stipulated.
Abbot Richard Whiting was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1895. Sixty years later, in July 1955, the Marian shrine at Glastonbury was finally restored after its destruction by Henry VIII in the year of Abbot Whiting’s martyrdom more than four hundred years earlier. The apostolic delegate, Archbishop O’Hara, blessed the new statue of Our Lady of Glastonbury, which was then formally enshrined in the new church which had been built to house it.
Many of the pilgrims who attended the restoration of the Queen of Glastonbury to England’s oldest Marian shrine made the customary ascent of the Tor, the hill that dominates the surrounding landscape, to pray for the intercession of Blessed Richard Whiting. “How greatly would that holy Martyr have rejoiced to see that day,” wrote the Catholic historian H.M. Gillett, who added that “one may be sure that it is by his prayers in heaven that this restoration has been brought about.”
It is regrettable that these four forgotten English heroes are not known or recognized by their fellow countrymen. Yet, as H.M. Gillett reminds us, their praises are being sung in Heaven, the only place where any sort of praise ultimately matters. They are resting in the peace of Christ. May Christ be praised!
Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (September 2024).
This essay is part of a series, Unsung Heroes of Christendom.
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The image of Robert Grosseteste is “Bishop Robert Grosseteste, window on the South transept Westernmost. St Paul’s Parish Church, Morton, Near Gainsborough” (1896), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.