as it was far more enduring than the petty lordship which stretched over Eastern Britain.  Only three or four years after Gregory had pitied the English slaves in the market-place of Rome, he found himself as Bishop of the Imperial City in a position to carry out his dream of winning Britain to the faith; and an opening was given him by AEthelberht’s marriage with Bertha, a daughter of the Frankish king Charibert of Paris.  Bertha like her Frankish kindred was a Christian; a Christian bishop accompanied her from Gaul; and a ruined Christian church, the church of St. Martin beside the royal city of Canterbury, was given them for their worship.  The king himself remained true to the gods of his fathers; but his marriage no doubt encouraged Gregory to send a Roman abbot, Augustine, at the head of a band of monks to preach the Gospel to the English people.  The missionaries landed in 597 in the Isle of Thanet, at the spot where Hengest had landed more than a century before; and AEthelberht received them sitting in the open air on the chalk-down above Minster, where the eye nowadays catches miles away over the marshes the dim tower of Canterbury.  The king listened patiently to the long sermon of Augustine as the interpreters the abbot had brought with him from Gaul rendered it in the English tongue.  “Your words are fair,” AEthelberht replied at last with English good sense, “but they are new and of doubtful meaning.”  For himself, he said, he refused to forsake the gods of his fathers, but with the usual religious tolerance of the German race he promised shelter and protection to the strangers.  The band of monks entered Canterbury bearing before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing in concert the strains of the litany of their Church.  “Turn from this city, O Lord,” they sang, “Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house, for we have sinned.”  And then in strange contrast came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in prophetic earnestness from the name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market-place, “Alleluia!”

[Sidenote:  Christian England]

It was thus that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengest became yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine.  But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a reversal and undoing of the first.  “Strangers from Rome” was the title with which the missionaries first fronted the English king.  The march of the monks as they chaunted their solemn litany was in one sense a return of the Roman legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric.  It was to the tongue and the thought not of Gregory only but of the men whom his Jutish fathers had slaughtered or driven out that AEthelberht listened in the preaching of Augustine.  Canterbury, the earliest royal city of German England, became a centre of Latin influence.  The Roman tongue became again one of the tongues of Britain, the language of its worship, its correspondence, its literature.