The Fall of Orthodox England

The Spiritual Roots of the Norman Conquest, 1043-1087

by Vladimir Moss (schismatic)

The Introduction is printed below.  Access the full paper here:

https://www.academia.edu/16164275/THE_FALL_OF_ORTHODOX_ENGLAND

CONTENTS
FOREWORD 4
INTRODUCTION: ENGLAND AND THE CONTINENT 6
The Beginning of the End 6
The Rise of the Heretical Papacy 7
The Growth of Feudalism 10
The English Monarchy 13
Rome and the Holy Roman Empire 17
The Papal Reform Movement 21
The Rise of the Normans 24
The Challenge Facing the English 26
1. SAINT EDWARD THE CONFESSOR (1043-1066) 27
Early Years 27
Years in Exile 29
Edward the King 31
Edward the Miracle-Worker 33
The Rebellion of Earl Godwin 35
The Affair of Archbishop Stigand 38
The Papal Embassy 40
The Question of the Succession 42
The Rebellion of Earl Tostig 45
The Prophetic Moses 46
2. MARTYR-KING HAROLD AND THE NORMAN CONQUEST (1066-1070) 53
The Wages of Sin 53
The Embassy to Rome 55
Harold the King 58
The Battle of Stamford Bridge 60
The Battle of Hastings 62
The Burial of King Harold 65
William the King 66
The Harrowing of the North 68
The Last Stand of the English 71
3. DOOMSDAY (1070-1087) 74
The Papist Reformation of the English Church 74
The Gregorian Revolution 81
The King and the Church 86
The English Diaspora 88
The Death of the Tyrant 95
CONCLUSION. THE HOPE OF RESURRECTION 98
The Anglican Reformation 99
The Non-Jurors 102
“He that Restraineth” 106
The Return of the Branch 108
APPENDIX 1. ST. DAVID OF WALES, THE CELTIC CHURCHES AND EASTERN ORTHODOXY 111
APPENDIX 2: KING ALFRED THE GREAT, THE ENGLISH DAVID 131
APPENDIX 3. WHEN DID THE WEST FALL AWAY FROM HOLY ORTHODOXY? 142
APPENDIX 4: A SERVICE TO ALL SAINTS OF THE BRITISH ISLES 149
APPENDIX 5. SERMON IN PRAISE OF THE BRITISH SAINTS 166

INTRODUCTION: ENGLAND AND THE CONTINENT

The Beginning of the End

     The ancient Celtic Churches of the British Isles had never had much to do with Rome – not out of antipathy, but because of the geographical distance to Rome and, especially, a long period in the fifth and sixth centuries during which the Celts had been cut off from the Church on the continent by the pagan invasions. In any case, Celtic Christianity owed as much to Eastern, especially Coptic Christianity, as it did to Rome. By contrast, after the English were converted to Orthodoxy in the seventh century, they became perhaps the most fervent “Romanists” of all the peoples of Western Europe. 

This devotion sprang from the fact that it was to Rome, and specifically to Pope St. Gregory the Great and his disciples, that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes of Southern England owed their conversion to the Faith in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. From that time English men and women of all classes and conditions poured across the Channel in a well-beaten path to the tombs of the Apostles in Rome, and a whole quarter of the city was called “Il Borgo Saxono” because of the large number of English pilgrims it accomodated. English missionaries such as St. Boniface of Germany carried out their work as the legates of the Roman Popes. And the voluntary tax known as “Peter’s Pence” which the English offered to the Roman see was paid even in the difficult times of the Viking invasions, when it was the English themselves who were in need of alms.

However, the “Romanity” to which the English were so devoted was not the Franco-Latin, Roman Catholicism of the later Middle Ages. Rather, it was the Greco-Roman Romanitas or  of Orthodox Catholicism. And the spiritual and political capital of Romanitas until the middle of the fifteenth century was not Old Rome in Italy, but the New Rome of Constantinople. Thus when King Ethelbert of Kent was baptized by St. Augustine in 597, “he had entered,” as Fr. Andrew Phillips writes, “Romanitas, Romanity, the universe of Roman Christendom, becoming one of those numerous kings who owed allegiance, albeit formal, to the Emperor in New Rome…” Indeed, as late as the tenth century the cultural links between England and Constantinople remained strong.

We may tentatively point to the murder of King Edward the Martyr in 979 as the beginning of the end of Orthodox England. “No worse deed for the English was ever done than this,” said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. And while it was said that there was “great rejoicing” at the coronation of St. Edward’s half-brother, Ethelred “the Unready”, St. Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, sorrowfully prophesied great woes for the nation in the coming reign.

He was right; for not only were the English defeated by the Danish pagan invaders and forced to pay ever larger sums in “Danegeld”, but the king himself, betrayed by his leading men and weighed down by his own personal failures, was forced to flee abroad in 1013. The next year he was recalled by the English leaders, both spiritual and lay, who declared that “no lord was dearer to them than their rightful lord, if only he would govern his kingdom more justly than he had done in the past.”  But the revival was illusory; further defeats followed, and in 1017, after the deaths both of King Ethelred and of his son Edmund Ironside, the Danish Canute was made king of all the English. Canute converted to the faith of his new Christian subjects; and the period of the Danish kings (1017-1042) created less of a disruption in the nation’s spiritual life than might have been expected. 

Nevertheless, it must have seemed that God’s mercy had at last returned to His people when, in 1043, the Old English dynasty of Alfred the Great was restored in the person of King Ethelred’s son Edward, known to later generations as “the Confessor”. 

It is with the life of King Edward that our narrative begins. 

However, in order to understand the world of King Edward it is necessary briefly to review cultural and ecclesiastical developments on the continent of Europe, which began to influence England precisely in his reign. These included the rise of the heretical papacy, the growth of feudalism and the rise of the Normans.