How the issue of calculating Easter came to a head at Whitby Abbey
THE Romans introduced Christianity to Britain during the 1st century. As the Roman Empire crumbled in the early 5th century and the Celts, Picts, and more remote regions started to rebel, the old religious traditions were revived.
By the 7th century, Christianity consisted of an organised religion loyal to Rome and a widespread, less-structured form of Celtic Christianity taught by travelling monks based on the Isle of Iona.
The issue between these two factions that caused the most consternation was the timing of Easter. Early Christians celebrated the festival in alignment with the Jewish Passover. Calculated as the 14th day of Nisan, the first lunar month of the Jewish year. In AD325, the Council of Nicaea decided that Easter Day should fall on a Sunday.
This led to all sorts of problems and by AD600 there were three different ways of calculating Easter.
This disunity was most evident in the Kingdom of Northumberland, where the king and queen nobility alike. Colman, the Bishop of Lindisfarne, went into bat for King Oswiu and Iona. His queen, Eanflaed, was represented by a Frankish bishop called Agilbert.
Unfortunately, the bishop didn’t understand the local dialect, so Wilfred had to step in. The founder of Ripon Abbey didn’t waste his opportunity and eventually won the king, whose call it was, over to the Roman way of doing things.
The rest of the country eventually followed the kingdom that stretched north of the Humber to Lothian. The calculation advocated by Wilfred was actually Alexandrian, rather than the method used in Rome. It is still viewed, however, as the catalyst for the Romanisation of British Christianity and the loss of the Ionian influence.
Super sub Wilfred was made Bishop of Northumbria. Colman resigned as Bishop of Lindisfarne and went back to Ireland. 1,360 years later, Easter is still celebrated on the first Sunday after the full moon of the Spring Equinox.