Christianised Sites - Britain and Northern Europe

Britain and Northern Europe

In Britain, the legendary King Lucius, was reported by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the often unreliable Christian chronicler, to have deliberately converted all the old temples to churches. The historical actuality is nowhere more forthrightly discussed than in the famous letter from Pope Gregory I to Mellitus, about to join Augustine of Kent among the Anglo-Saxons:

So when almighty God has led you to the most reverend man our brother Bishop Augustine, tell him what I have long gone over in my mind concerning the matter of the English: that is, that the shrines of idols amongst that people should be destroyed as little as possible, but that the idols themselves that are inside them should be destroyed. Let blessed water be made and sprinkled in these shrines, let altars be constructed and relics placed there: since if the shrines are well built it is necessary that they should be converted from the worship of demons to the service of the true God, so that as long as that people do not see their very shrines being destroyed they may put out error from their hearts and in knowledge and adoration of the true God they may gather at their accustomed places more readily.

Though such openness about the history of church locations was often expressed, such claims about more significant church locations were often more controversial. The Notre-Dame du Taur (Our Lady of the Bull), cathedral church of Toulouse, which according to Christian tradition was founded where a bull stopped running, and is famous for the Encierro festival of running bulls, is thought by archaeologists to possibly be a converted temple of Mithras, whose myth focused on the tauroctony, the probably-astrological killing of a sacred bull.

The British Isles and other areas of northern Europe that were formerly druidic are still densely punctuated by holy wells and holy springs that are now attributed to some saint, often a highly local saint unknown elsewhere. These water sources have always been guarded by supernatural forces in the European imagination. An example of the pre-Christian water spirit is the melusina. As the official Catholic Church expanded its requirements for Christian baptisteries in the 5th and 6th centuries, sacred pagan springs presented natural opportunities. Historically some bath houses and pagan springs were forcibly seized. Cassiodorus, the courtly secretary to the Ostrogoth Theodoric the Great, described in a letter written in A.D. 527, a fair held at a former pagan shrine of Leucothea, in the still culturally Greek region of south Italy, which had been Christianized by converting it to a baptistery (Variae 8.33). In a paper read in 1999, Samuel J. Barnish drew further examples of the transition from miraculous springs to baptisteries from Gregory of Tours (died c. 594) and Maximus, Bishop of Turin (died c. 466).

The great Abbey of Luxeuil founded by Saint Columban had its origins in a Gallo-Roman villa that had been ravaged by Attila in 451, and was now buried in the dense overgrown woodland that had filled the abandoned site over more than a century. However, the place still had the advantage of the thermal baths "constructed with unusual skill", as Columban's early biographer, Jonas of Bobbio reported. He further added that, down in the valley, which still gives the town its name Luxeuil-les-Bains, "stone images crowded the nearby woods, which were honored in the miserable cult and profane former rites in the time of the pagans," the monk Jonas records. (Ibi imaginum lapidearum densitas vicina saltus densabat, quas cultu miserabili rituque profano vetusta Paganorum tempora honorabant) . With a grant from an officer of the palace at Childebert's court, an abbey church was built with a sense of triumph within the heathen site and its spectral haunts (ut, ubi olim prophano ritu veteres coluerunt fana, ibi Christi figerentur arae et erigerentur vexilla, habitaculum Deo militantium, quo adversus aërias potestates dimicarent superni Regis tirones).

In Britain and many other parts of Europe trees were also sometimes seen as sacred or the home of tree spirits. When Britain was Christianised this resulted in a change of the landscape. In some instances sacred groves were destroyed to discourage belief in tree spirits. One of the most famous of these was the Irminsul, whose ancient location is no longer known (though it may have been located at Externsteine), was obliterated by Charlemagne. Another major ancient holy tree was Thor's Oak, which was deliberately desecrated and destroyed by a Christian missionary named Winfrid (later canonised as Saint Boniface).