06-05-2014, 12:00 AM
http://www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com/do...NGLAND.pdf
In his book The fall of Orthodox England (2011), Vladimir Moss argues that England was essentially Orthodox prior to the Norman invasion of 1066. He further contends that William’s conquest had been blessed by Roman Pope Alexander in order to bring England into full communion with Rome.
British Serbs educated here will likely have studied England’s ancient past from Celts through to to Anglo-Saxons and the nation’s conversion to Christianity. While we may know the figures of King Harold, Edward the Confessor, Ethelred the Unready, Edgar and Edward the Martyr our teachers would not have been unaware of the relationship they had to Constantinople and Orthodoxy. Vladimir Moss offers this perspective which, while far from undisputed, offers children from British-Serb mixed families a tradition of unity of faith of our distant forefathers. Moss discusses also the flight of the English Orthodox after the invasion.
Vladimir Moss is a Guildford-based author on the theme of the Orthodox Church and in particular the traditional Orthodoxy of England. Born Anthony Moss to a family of a British diplomat, his father took up a post in Belgrade and Anthony attended a Serbian primary school. He has worked and visited throughout Eastern Europe including Russia and Greece and in 1974 joined the Moscow Patriarchate in London.
We pick out a few interesting quotes below and invite you to read the full text for an alternate version of England’s ancient history.
On October 14, 1066, at Hastings in southern England, the last Orthodox king of England, Harold II, died in battle against Duke William of Normandy. William had been blessed to invade England by the Roman Pope Alexander in order to bring the English Church into full communion with the “reformed Papacy”; for since 1052 the English archbishop had been banned and denounced as schismatic by Rome
The main aim of the present work is twofold: first, to provide a spiritual…history of the decline and fall of Orthodox England, and secondly, to collect material relevant to the hoped-for future glorification of the great spiritual heroes of the period – notably King Edward the Confessor and Martyr-King Harold – in the Orthodox Church. The writer feels that such an undertaking is especially timely now that the relics of Martyr-King Harold have been discovered and identified
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
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
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
The relationship between Church and State in England was one of “symphony” in the Byzantine sense, not of aesaropapism; for the kings, as well as being in general exceptionally pious, did nothing without consulting their bishops and other members of the witan or assembly – who were not afraid to disagree with the king, or remind him of his obligations.
By contrast, in the Christian East, as in primitive Christianity, a wholly celibate priesthood never became the norm…
The weakness of the English consisted in the fact that in their whole history there was not a single instance of struggle with Rome over doctrinal (as opposed to canonical or administrative) matters, nor any appeal by the English Church to the Eastern Churches against the Pope; so that there were no clear indications as to how a struggle between the King and the Pope, or the local Church and the Pope, would end…
Prince Alfred actually died from his wounds in the monastery of Ely, that great fortress of Anglo-Saxon Orthodoxy. The body was buried with great honour in the southern porch of the west end of the church, where “wondrously beautiful visions of lights often occur”, wrote the monastery chronicle
Moreover, according to the anonymous biographer, who learned it “from the joint testimony of good and fitting men”, God glorified King Edward with the gift of miracles… The blind man hastened quickly to court, and asked the king’ servants to grant him that which he had not had for a long time. And so, when his face had been washed in the same way as the previous blind man, he was restored to health, and the renewed glory of his former condition was given back to him.
After the Danish conquest of England in 1016, Edward and his family had gone into exile, first in Ladoga111 and Kiev in Russia, and then in Hungary
Thus the reputation of King Edward, already renowned for his holiness in England and Western Europe, was beginning to spread even to the Orthodox East – whither so many exiled English families would soon have to flee.
Modern historians have accused King Edward of weakness. Humility and chastity in the midst of a corrupt and adulterous generation are not properly thought of as signs of weakness, but rather of great spiritual strength and grace. However, let us concede that St. Edward had a certain weakness: like Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, whom he resembled so closely, his weakness was that he trusted people too much, and was constantly being betrayed by them
However, there is now compelling evidence that a mutilated body discovered in a splendid coffin in Godwin’s family church at Bosham on April 7, 1954 is in fact the body of the last Orthodox king of England.
William of Malmesbury adds that the Glastonbury monks refused to accept the chant of William of Fécamp because “they had grown up in the practice of the Roman Church”. This shows that the Old English Church preserved the old traditions of Orthodox Rome, which had now been superseded on the continent.
Even the holy relics of the English saints were subjected to desecration [by the Normans]. For, as Thierry writes, “the hatred which the clergy of the conquest bore to the natives of England, extended to the saints of English birth; and in different places their tombs were broken open and their bones scattered about.”
The Conqueror’s ownership of the land was firmly established in Domesday Book,” which thereby became the record of the day of doom of the Orthodox Christian autocracy in the West
What influence did the Norman-Papist Conquest of England have on the destiny of the neighbouring British Orthodox Churches? And what was the destiny of those English Orthodox who fled beyond the seas?…Scandinavia seems to have been their main destination.
King Harold’s daughter, Gytha, moved further still. She was to marry the Grand-Prince of Kiev, Vladimir, and lived in Kiev, then a great centre of Christian civilization. Here, having been made welcome, she gave birth to several children, of whom the eldest son was named Harold like his grandfather, but also received the Slavic name, Mstislav.
Possibly the greatest emigration, however, was elsewhere; the Old English were attracted above all by the almost mystical name of Constantinople…In historical terms this emigration is comparable only to the emigration of the Russian elite and nobility in 1917 when confronted by the Bolshevik terror…Here they found a land called ‘Domapia’, which they renamed New England. Here they founded towns and having driven out the invaders, they reclaimed them for the Empire. Moreover, they renamed the towns ‘London’, ‘York’ and called others after the towns where they had come from…
We cannot reverse almost 1000 years of apostasy if we do not reach back beyond it to the 1000 years of True English Christianity – the “dark ages” of English history that were in fact filled with the most glorious light.
In his book The fall of Orthodox England (2011), Vladimir Moss argues that England was essentially Orthodox prior to the Norman invasion of 1066. He further contends that William’s conquest had been blessed by Roman Pope Alexander in order to bring England into full communion with Rome.
British Serbs educated here will likely have studied England’s ancient past from Celts through to to Anglo-Saxons and the nation’s conversion to Christianity. While we may know the figures of King Harold, Edward the Confessor, Ethelred the Unready, Edgar and Edward the Martyr our teachers would not have been unaware of the relationship they had to Constantinople and Orthodoxy. Vladimir Moss offers this perspective which, while far from undisputed, offers children from British-Serb mixed families a tradition of unity of faith of our distant forefathers. Moss discusses also the flight of the English Orthodox after the invasion.
Vladimir Moss is a Guildford-based author on the theme of the Orthodox Church and in particular the traditional Orthodoxy of England. Born Anthony Moss to a family of a British diplomat, his father took up a post in Belgrade and Anthony attended a Serbian primary school. He has worked and visited throughout Eastern Europe including Russia and Greece and in 1974 joined the Moscow Patriarchate in London.
We pick out a few interesting quotes below and invite you to read the full text for an alternate version of England’s ancient history.
On October 14, 1066, at Hastings in southern England, the last Orthodox king of England, Harold II, died in battle against Duke William of Normandy. William had been blessed to invade England by the Roman Pope Alexander in order to bring the English Church into full communion with the “reformed Papacy”; for since 1052 the English archbishop had been banned and denounced as schismatic by Rome
The main aim of the present work is twofold: first, to provide a spiritual…history of the decline and fall of Orthodox England, and secondly, to collect material relevant to the hoped-for future glorification of the great spiritual heroes of the period – notably King Edward the Confessor and Martyr-King Harold – in the Orthodox Church. The writer feels that such an undertaking is especially timely now that the relics of Martyr-King Harold have been discovered and identified
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
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
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
The relationship between Church and State in England was one of “symphony” in the Byzantine sense, not of aesaropapism; for the kings, as well as being in general exceptionally pious, did nothing without consulting their bishops and other members of the witan or assembly – who were not afraid to disagree with the king, or remind him of his obligations.
By contrast, in the Christian East, as in primitive Christianity, a wholly celibate priesthood never became the norm…
The weakness of the English consisted in the fact that in their whole history there was not a single instance of struggle with Rome over doctrinal (as opposed to canonical or administrative) matters, nor any appeal by the English Church to the Eastern Churches against the Pope; so that there were no clear indications as to how a struggle between the King and the Pope, or the local Church and the Pope, would end…
Prince Alfred actually died from his wounds in the monastery of Ely, that great fortress of Anglo-Saxon Orthodoxy. The body was buried with great honour in the southern porch of the west end of the church, where “wondrously beautiful visions of lights often occur”, wrote the monastery chronicle
Moreover, according to the anonymous biographer, who learned it “from the joint testimony of good and fitting men”, God glorified King Edward with the gift of miracles… The blind man hastened quickly to court, and asked the king’ servants to grant him that which he had not had for a long time. And so, when his face had been washed in the same way as the previous blind man, he was restored to health, and the renewed glory of his former condition was given back to him.
After the Danish conquest of England in 1016, Edward and his family had gone into exile, first in Ladoga111 and Kiev in Russia, and then in Hungary
Thus the reputation of King Edward, already renowned for his holiness in England and Western Europe, was beginning to spread even to the Orthodox East – whither so many exiled English families would soon have to flee.
Modern historians have accused King Edward of weakness. Humility and chastity in the midst of a corrupt and adulterous generation are not properly thought of as signs of weakness, but rather of great spiritual strength and grace. However, let us concede that St. Edward had a certain weakness: like Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, whom he resembled so closely, his weakness was that he trusted people too much, and was constantly being betrayed by them
However, there is now compelling evidence that a mutilated body discovered in a splendid coffin in Godwin’s family church at Bosham on April 7, 1954 is in fact the body of the last Orthodox king of England.
William of Malmesbury adds that the Glastonbury monks refused to accept the chant of William of Fécamp because “they had grown up in the practice of the Roman Church”. This shows that the Old English Church preserved the old traditions of Orthodox Rome, which had now been superseded on the continent.
Even the holy relics of the English saints were subjected to desecration [by the Normans]. For, as Thierry writes, “the hatred which the clergy of the conquest bore to the natives of England, extended to the saints of English birth; and in different places their tombs were broken open and their bones scattered about.”
The Conqueror’s ownership of the land was firmly established in Domesday Book,” which thereby became the record of the day of doom of the Orthodox Christian autocracy in the West
What influence did the Norman-Papist Conquest of England have on the destiny of the neighbouring British Orthodox Churches? And what was the destiny of those English Orthodox who fled beyond the seas?…Scandinavia seems to have been their main destination.
King Harold’s daughter, Gytha, moved further still. She was to marry the Grand-Prince of Kiev, Vladimir, and lived in Kiev, then a great centre of Christian civilization. Here, having been made welcome, she gave birth to several children, of whom the eldest son was named Harold like his grandfather, but also received the Slavic name, Mstislav.
Possibly the greatest emigration, however, was elsewhere; the Old English were attracted above all by the almost mystical name of Constantinople…In historical terms this emigration is comparable only to the emigration of the Russian elite and nobility in 1917 when confronted by the Bolshevik terror…Here they found a land called ‘Domapia’, which they renamed New England. Here they founded towns and having driven out the invaders, they reclaimed them for the Empire. Moreover, they renamed the towns ‘London’, ‘York’ and called others after the towns where they had come from…
We cannot reverse almost 1000 years of apostasy if we do not reach back beyond it to the 1000 years of True English Christianity – the “dark ages” of English history that were in fact filled with the most glorious light.