The life of St Augustine of Canterbury
The group came ashore the following spring on the coast of Kent, where the local ruler, wed to a Frankish princess who already practiced the Christian faith, proved willing to hear them out and let them settle near his own seat of power.
Within months that same ruler had himself embraced baptism, and once Augustine had been made a bishop he went on to bring vast numbers of the kingdom's people into the Church alongside their king, with one account placing the count in the thousands during that first winter. He turned an existing building into his cathedral church and raised a second community just beyond the town walls, honoring the apostles Peter and Paul, a foundation later renamed to honor Augustine himself after his death. Not every part of his work went smoothly: he struggled throughout his life to bring the island's older, native Christian communities into step with the customs he had carried from Rome, and that particular effort largely failed in his own time. Still, what he began did not end with him, and the wider conversion of the English people over the century that followed traced its roots back to this first landing. He reposed sometime around 604 or 605.
