Chapter 22

Not long afterwards, the monks of the Irish nation who lived in the Isle of Iona, together with the monasteries under their jurisdiction, were led to God’ s providence to adopt the Canonical rite of Easter and style of tonsure. For in the year 716, during which King Osred was killed and Coenred succeeded to the government of the Northumbrian kingdom, Egbert the beloved of God – a father and bishop to be mentioned with high respect, of whom I have already spoken more than once – came to them from Ireland and was welcomed with honour and great joy. Being a most persuasive teacher who most faithfully practised all that he taught, he was given a ready hearing by everyone, and by his constant devout exhortations he weaned them from the obsolete traditions of their ancestors, to whom the Apostle’s description is applicable: ‘they had a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge.’ As I have said, he taught them to observe our chief solemnity in the Catholic and Apostolic manner and to wear the symbol of an unbroken crown. This seemed to happen by a wonderful dispensation of God’s grace, in order that the nation which had willingly and ungrudgingly laboured to communicate its own knowledge of God to the English nation might later, through the same English nation, arrive at a perfect way of life which they had not hitherto possessed. In contrast the Britons, who had refused to share their own knowledge of the Christian Faith with the English, continue even now, when the English nation believes rightly, and is fully instructed in the doctrines of the Catholic Faith, to be obdurate and crippled by their errors, going about with their heads improperly tonsured, and keeping Christ’s solemnity without fellowship with the Christian Church.

Through Egbert’s teaching, the monks of Iona under Abbot Duunchad adopted Catholic ways of life about eighty years after they had sent Aidan to preach to the English nation.¹ God’s servant Egbert remained thirteen years on the island, where he restored the gracious light of unity and peace to the Church and consecrated the island anew to Christ. In the year of our Lord 729, during which our Lord’s Easter was kept on the twenty-fourth of April, Egbert celebrated the solemnity of the Mass in honour of our Lord’s Resurrection and departed to him the same day. So he began his enjoyment of the greatest of all festivals with the brethren whom he had won to the grace of unity, and ended it with our Lord, the Apostles, and all the citizens of heaven, where he now enjoys it for ever. And by a wonderful dispensation of divine providence, the venerable Egbert passed from this world to the Father not only on Easter Day, but when Easter was being kept on a day when it had never been kept before in those parts. So the brethren had the joy of a sure and Catholic knowledge of the time of Easter, and rejoiced in the protection of their father departed to our Lord, by whom they had been converted. Egbert himself showed great joy that he had been permitted to live until he saw his disciples accept and keep with him the Easter day that they had previously always rejected. So the most reverend father was assured of their conversion. He rejoiced to see the Lord’s Day: he saw it, and was glad.