AD 128. The Roman invaders complete Hadrian’s Wall, marking the northern limit of their Imperialism. The Wall delineates the border between the future Scotland and the future England with Wales (Roman ‘Britain’) and also determines that the Roman Empire will not include Ireland. Ironically, it is thanks to the existence of the pagan Roman Empire that a limited Christianization spreads and Sts Ninian and Patrick will both be born in the neighbourhood of the Wall.
The Faith is adopted by the noble few of merchants, like Sts Julius and Aaron, soldiers like St Alban, officials like the forebears of St Ninian, St Patrick and St Gildas, and villa-owners and their servants, especially in what became South Wales. However, paganism, including in the semi-Christian forms of Pelagianism and nominalism, as recorded by Sts Bede, Patrick and Gildas, is far stronger. It will eventually dominate among the Celts who will make no attempt to convert the incoming English.
469 years pass.
AD 597. The Irish missionary Fr Columba, spreading the Faith of Jerusalem come via Egypt and Gaul as well as Roman Britain, reposes on Iona in the far north-west. His mission will spread throughout Scotland and all the northern half of England and further south. The Italian Fr Augustine arrives in Canterbury in the far south-east with his mission to the pagan English, with Cross and Icon of Christ. His mission will spread throughout the south of England and meet that of the Celts come from the north. The two missions will be combined into one great stream by the Greek Archbishop Theodore.
After their repose both St Columba and St Augustine are soon venerated as saints. This glorious age of shared Anglo-Celtic holiness blossoms and is weakened only under Viking attacks 200 years later, though these bring the glory of martyrdom to many. Only then can a great rebirth begin under the holy King Alfred the Great (+ 899) from the English capital in Winchester, which peters out 150 years later in the eleventh century, under the new, Frankish-barbarian, political order of feudalism. This has developed in North-Western Europe and will eventually isolate all Western and Central Europe from the Church for 900 years.
469 years pass.
AD 1066. The last Vikings, the aggressive semi-pagan Normans, invade England (and later the rest of the British Isles and Ireland) under William the Bastard, the illegitimate son of Robert the Devil. They bring violent invasion, genocide and plunder, and their ‘blessing’ from fallen Rome with its full-blown new religion, half-Christian and half-barbarian. With its concentration-camp feudal enslavement and village compounds, it is violently enforced by watchtower castles, ‘filled with devils’, and horsemen trained to intimidate and kill. Uniat-style, the new religion is outwardly similar to what went before, but inwardly totally different, as if reflecting the past in a distorting mirror.
This novel Frankish religion, a combination of pagan Roman Imperialism with heathen Teutonism, makes the peoples’ kings into remote tyrants, Christian peasants into oppressed feudal serfs, humble married priests into proud clericalist celibates and replaces monasteries and ascetic prayer with universities and abstract studies. This religious Normanization violently supplants the Old English Church and Faith. It brings its inherent spiritual deformation of the filioque, the anti-Incarnational division between Divine and human, clerical and lay, sacred and secular, which is the seed of its own destruction, for it results in ever-growing, humanist secularization.
469 years pass.
AD 1535. The bloodthirsty Tudor tyrant Henry VIII, the Hitler of his age, replaces splintering and much discredited institutional Roman Catholicism with his own new, desacralizing and secularizing, moralizing and hypocritical State religion. He imposes this anti-ascetic and anti-sacramental doctrine with the same Uniat-style deceit and Viking violent invasion, genocide and plunder as the Normans, murdering abbots and simple folk alike. In the following century the three Norman vices lead to a series of civil wars throughout the Isles, in which over a million people will die. The Hitler of that age, the new William, the Republican tyrant and mass-murderer Cromwell, is still feted outside Parliament in Norman London to this day.
The three vices of violent invasion, genocide and plunder characterize the worldwide Normanization which Henry’s dynasty undertakes under the name of British Imperialism. From the Viking piracy of Francis Drake to the enslavement of Africans in the New World, from genocide in Ireland to massacres in North America, from Clive in India to the poisoning of the Chinese with opium, from the invasion of Russia to that of Tibet, from the wiping out of the Tasmanians to Rhodes in Africa, from machine-gunning in the Sudan to concentration camps for Boer families, from the Bengal famine to the repression of the Kikuyu, violent invasion, genocide and plunder are the order of the age in a global Empire which justifies its wars and theft as ‘free trade’.
469 years pass.
AD 2004. Having rejected the hypocritical 1535 State religion and Imperialism, but replaced it with a humanistic form of paganism, the English, like the peoples in the other parts of the British Isles and Ireland, begin to awake. Though not recognized as such, this is a movement of Denormanization and fightback against the oppression of the pompous Norman Establishment of 1066. Resistance has been sparked by the disastrous invasion of Iraq of 2003, unleashed by the Unionist British Norman Establishment against the will of the people and their sense of justice. By 2016, the 950th anniversary of the Norman invasion and occupation, this popular, anti-Unionist resistance leads to freedom from the Roman Catholic structured-EU. This promises the gradual development of new sovereign relationships between the Four Nations of the Isles.
The whole centralist Norman Unionism of the UK Establishment in London, which the Normans (like the Imperialist Romans before them) had fixed as their Capital, is being challenged. Amid the reaction to the past which has given rise to the revival of tattooed paganism, a throwback to the pre-597 Pictish world, there are glimmers of hope for the restoration of the values of the pre-1066 world that came after paganism, but before oppression. In throwing out the post-1066 world, there is no need to reject the values of the 597-1066 world, no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The values of the Old English Church and Faith, which are in reality the values of the multinational Church of God, still alive in Russia and other faithful and uncompromised parts of the Orthodox world, may yet be reborn before the end.