But more than the tongue of Rome returned with Augustine.  Practically his landing renewed that union with the Western world which the landing of Hengest had destroyed.  The new England was admitted into the older commonwealth of nations.  The civilization, art, letters, which had fled before the sword of the English conquerors returned with the Christian faith.  The fabric of the Roman law indeed never took root in England, but it is impossible not to recognize the result of the influence of the Roman missionaries in the fact that codes of the customary English law began to be put in writing soon after their arrival.

[Sidenote:  AEthelfrith]

A year passed before AEthelberht yielded to the preaching of Augustine.  But from the moment of his conversion the new faith advanced rapidly and the Kentish men crowded to baptism in the train of their king.  The new religion was carried beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy which AEthelberht wielded over the neighbouring kingdoms.  Saeberht, King of the East-Saxons, received a bishop sent in 604 from Kent, and suffered him to build up again a Christian church in what was now his subject city of London, while soon after the East-Anglian king Raedwald resolved to serve Christ and the older gods together.  But while AEthelberht was thus furnishing a future centre of spiritual unity in Canterbury, the see to which Augustine was consecrated, the growth of Northumbria was pointing it out as the coming political centre of the new England.  In 593, four years before the landing of the missionaries in Kent, AEthelric was succeeded by his son AEthelfrith, and the new king took up the work of conquest with a vigour greater than had yet been shown by any English leader.  For ten years he waged war with the Britons of Strathclyde, a tract which stretched along his western border from Dumbarton to Carlisle.  The contest ended in a great battle at Daegsastan, perhaps Dawston in Liddesdale; and AEthelfrith turned to deliver a yet more crushing blow on his southern border.  British kingdoms still stretched from Clyde-mouth to the mouth of Severn; and had their line remained unbroken the British resistance might yet have withstood the English advance.  It was with a sound political instinct therefore that AEthelfrith marched in 613 upon Chester, the point where the kingdom of Cumbria, a kingdom which stretched from the Lune to the Dee, linked itself to the British states of what we now call Wales.  Hard by the city two thousand monks were gathered in one of those vast religious settlements which were characteristic of Celtic Christianity, and after a three days’ fast a crowd of these ascetics followed the British army to the field.  AEthelfrith watched the wild gestures of the monks as they stood apart from the host with arms outstretched in prayer, and bade his men slay them in the coming fight.  “Bear they arms or no,” said the King, “they war against us when they cry against us to their God,” and in the surprise and rout which followed the monks were the first to fall.