Believe it or not this essay was begun with the intention of discussing anti Semitism as a direct result of Roman Catholic ignorance which aberrant religion arose as the direct result of Saul of Tarsus' ambitious attempt to build his own political power base on the ineffective Judaic sect of Christianity.
Sauls success was probably doomed to eventual failure by Rome's making a martyr of him in a futile attempt to stamp out this upstart religion they regarded as just another rebellious Jewish inspired uprising. However the new religion got a shot in the arm from Constantine Emperor of the Eastern Empire who had needed something to rally his troops in the face of the new Islamic threat.
He didn't believe a word of his own propaganda but in the end the Roman empire(s) were hoisted on their own petard by the inspired missionaries who spread the word before there was an official version of the church which is what led to the Council of Nicea where the rot really got a firm grip on the nascent religion by specifying what was and was not official canon. God help those who strayed from the true path.
Well those individual missionaries I mentioned had already established various outposts of their own, often based on all sorts of variations (newly defined as heresies) such as Gnosticism and Celtic beliefs because the remains of Druidism still held powerful and often parallel paths to original Christian beliefs whatever form they took.
Sauls tireless efforts in trying to spread his version of events had alienated quite a few churches already and some of those leaders had gone away to spread their own version of the word and done so successfully and often also brought the basic values of Roman civilisation with them.
No wattle and daub mud huts for these boys! Hey let me show you the benefits of civil engineering and agriculture. See what God has brought you poor downtrodden serfs? Well you can see for yourselves what we have wrought for ourselves and we'll be more than happy to teach you how to do likewise.
The brightest pupils get to learn reading and writing the better to perpetuate their exemplar and many still remembered the benefits brought by the Roman legions that had once ruled over their lands.
Roads, organised armies with standardised equipment, it was a bit heavy handed right enough but the benefits "what have the Romans ever done for us?" outweighed the imposition of imperial administrations ways and means when it meant you could raise a family and not expect to be regularly put to the sword by other tribes too lazy to work at farming the land themselves.
The old hunter gatherer way of life died hard, after all it was so much easier to loot and kill and besides you were going to end up in Valhalla feasting with the gods so who cared about being killed in battle?
The fledgling missionary communities of England and Scotland were ripe targets for the Viking raiders who weren't having any of this sissy new religion. Peaceful loving lives, who needs that!
Apart from the occasional, sometimes annual raids, these religious outposts prospered more or less undisturbed by the new official Church of Rome because the Pope had much bigger problems in the shape of the Muslim invasions.
ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS
Its all very well promising forgiveness of sins and eternal bliss but that don't cut it when your flock is in danger of being served up as mutton for the Arabs. You have to do something positive and that means putting backbone into your followers and their leaders by threatening to cut them off from eternal salvation if they don't fight.
You need Bishops with balls (or storm troopers like in Munster) in other words, no namby pamby bookish types but blood and steel brandished in the name of the Lord. Now they could appreciate the Roman legacy of a properly trained and equipped army but these cost money, wheres that coming from?
I'm getting ahead of myself though, lets take it back to 1066 when the Normans who were descendants of Vikings took over England. In their train they brought hard assed clergy whose job it was to get the conquered population in line, paying tithes and never mind the church already established in England, it wasn't recognized as official by the Pope.
Even I won't attempt to disentangle the good from the bad church practices after the Norman invasion. Its a fascinating field of study but there aren't many sources to draw from and the official version is a bit suspiciously kind about how the church behaved in general. However it could be argued that one legacy of the unofficial missionary churches was a tendency to be more sympathetic and mellow about the common folk in their care but thats arguable and more of a hunch than fact.
If you read between the lines it seems that Chaucer, the stories of Hereward the Wake and Robin Hood and Friar Tuck seem to indicate a ground swell of resistance mainly against the French ruling class who were bitterly resented by the Saxon elite they had supplanted.
The church and especially the monasteries were, in the main, peopled by those displaced persons mentioned. There were factions even in the church, different orders with differing values so I don't think its unreasonable for me to postulate some sort of unofficial Resistance that could only have prospered by remaining largely anonymous.
The arrogance of the Norman descendants, families like the Plantagenets for example, were so arrogant and disdainful about their conquered subjects that they probably had no idea what was being fomented amongst the churchmen and their congregations. I believe it was a sign of the rise of English independence that would not be suppressed by any invader in the long term and eventually became our parliamentary democracy that still fostered its monarchy that we all more or less fiercely believe in.
Of course all credit for the eventual Reformation belongs to Europe, mainly Germany although theres historical precedent galore predating Martin Luther's defiant and courageous proclamation about Catholicisms wrong doing.
However from my point of view what mattered was Henry 8th's dissolution of the monasteries which included many churches. It may have been of dubious morality since it was to give him licence to marry whom he liked and enrich the state coffers from the booty stolen by his henchmen but frankly it was also deserved if only as a result of said churches corrupt money making practices.
What it really did though, of far more importance, was to free England from the clutches of the Papacy and its sycophantic followers like the Spanish and the French. It freed us up to become a maritime trading nation and also allowed us to develop our own eccentric idiosyncratic way of doing things, like beheading the king Charles the 1st who was not only a complete waste of space but a Catholic too!
Despite repeated Catholic attempts to invade, subvert and infiltrate the English government, they failed to manage it and became ever more unpopular as the result which is why we still celebrate Guy Fawkes day on November 5th.
Finally the Civil War between the Round Heads, (Oliver Cromwells New Model Army) and the Cavaliers which were those forces that supported the monarchy (which was Catholic) settled the matter once and for all as far as England was concerned but Scotland and Ireland remained hotspots of Catholic sedition.
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