Prior to Rome’s departure Britain had a Christian community. In 314 CE three bishops from York, Lincoln, and London attended the Council of Arles in southern Gaul. The council had been convened by Emperor Constantine I to deal with the problem of the Donatists, a schismatic Christian Group in North Africa. In 396 CE a bishop from Gaul visited Britain

After the Legions departed, Saxon tribes invaded the southeast of Britain. They settled in the area now called Kent. The Romano-Celtic people were driven westward to London, to Wales, to the Midlands. There is little evidence of contact post-conquest. Crucially the Romano-Celtic people made no attempt to convert the pagan Saxons to Christianity.

Pope Gregory the Great, in 595 CE, chose Augustine, a prior of an abbey in Rome, to lead a mission to Britain. Gregory and Augustine had met several times. The Pontiff was impressed with Augustine’s administrative capability and knowledge of the Bible. Why was Kent selected? The historical record is mute; the speculative answer is: Ethelbert was the paramount chief of the Saxons. While he was pagan, his wife Bertha, a daughter of Charibert I King of Paris, was a Christian. Ethelbert allowed Bertha to practise her faith. If you convert the tribal chief, you convert the tribesmen.

Venerable Bede, a monk resident at the Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow, wrote about the conversion of the Saxons approximately 150 years after the events he describes. Augustine was accompanied by 40 persons. When Bede writes the population of England was pagan, he was ‘correct’. He may not have been aware of the Christian-orientated Romano-Celtic people. If he was aware in the alternate; since they had lived in isolation, they had never recognized the Pope as Pontiff.