Ah, busy days! For some the 13th century was the busiest of days. Dante was writing his ‘Divine Comedy’. Petrarch was to follow him. Two great men invented the Christian epic and the sonnet. At the same time the Venetian Marco Polo was trekking along the Silk Road to China where Kubla Khan was planning his pleasure-dome (a forerunner of O2) at Xanadu and would later appoint Polo as his ambassador to the West.
Meanwhile back in England King John was contemplating the Great Charter and Simon de Montfort, a Frenchman, was backing popular participation in the running of the country. Stephen de Blois too had a finger in the pie. He thought he was king but nobody else did. His cousin Matilda found him particularly unimpressive.
Little changed. Men cultivated the fields, as they always had done, gained some education from the monasteries and saw the Dominicans and Franciscans bring two new disciplined groups to the Church.
These events made their impact on English Christianity. King John inherited a large part of France to join his island acres but he unwittingly made it possible for a kingdom to emerge with sensible borders and a separate identity.
After centuries of being happy to regard ourselves as a Christian country we now have to ask ourselves what kind of country we do belong to. The term ‘Christian country’ means different things to different people. If our perceptions at the moment are dim, we can go back to the New Testament where the first Christians began to find themselves in a similar position and Constantine, proclaimed emperor at York, pushed things along.
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