An African pioneer
Michael Wood on the little-known Libyan teacher who revolutionised learning in Anglo-Saxon England
When a Libyan cleric called Hadrian arrived in Canterbury in AD 670, Anglo-Saxon England was a wild and semi-pagan land. Within a matter of years, it was the driving force behind a remarkable renaissance in learning. Michael Wood reveals how this little-known “man of Africa” helped lay the foundations of English culture
In recent years our eyes have been opened to black histories in Britain before the Windrush generation, stretching back through the world wars, on to the Victorian era and beyond. The numbers were small, but the presence was significant, as the black characters in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays show.
Much further back, there were Africans in Roman Britain, from Mauretania, today’s Morocco and Algeria. Among them was Victor, the former slave of a cavalry soldier called Numerianus, who is described as “natione Maurum” (“of the Moorish nation”) on a second-century AD tombstone from modern-day South Shields.
Then there’s near silence. In the thousand years between the end of Roman Britain and the first British overseas explorations under the Tudors, people of colour are far less visible. Their stories cause barely a ripple in the waters of British history. One such story exists just below that surface – rarely impacting on public consciousness. But it is immeasurably important all the same.
Writing in 731, the English historian Bede introduces his readers to a “vir natione Afir”, “a man of African race”. Perhaps a Berber (or Amazigh), this man was a leading light in one of the most significant cultural movements of the past 1,400 years – a teacher of extraordinary influence on English history. This man was born in north Africa and spent the last 40 years of his life in England. He is buried here. But he had a good old Roman name: we know him as Abbot Hadrian the African.
So how did a north African, born in the early seventh century, end up changing the course of English history? The story begins in the land of Hadrian’s birth, Libya, where for many generations people of Greek descent had mixed with locals, and from where some of the early church fathers hailed. Bishop Quodvultdeus (died c450) was another north African man of the church to journey to Europe (albeit two centuries earlier). Quodvultdeus’s haunting face may be preserved in a beautiful mosaic from the catacombs of San Gennaro in Naples (shown above right).
Hadrian was perhaps raised in the coastal town of Apollonia, which had at least four Byzantine churches in his day, and a great Roman palace whose dramatic seashore remains have been excavated by archaeologists. Years later, he reminisced with his students in England about the beautiful bird that he called ‘porphyrion’, the African purple gallinule, which roamed the courtyard gardens of a north African ruler’s palace. Perhaps he had seen this place as a young man.
Apollonia had been rebuilt in the sixth century under the great Byzantine emperor Justinian, but the Arab invasions of the seventh century brought that world to an abrupt end. The nearby city of Benghazi fell to Arab armies in 642. Maybe the collapse of Byzantine rule forced Hadrian into flight. Whatever the reason, he soon made his way to southern Italy.
After crossing the Mediterranean, Hadrian became an abbot on Nisida, a picturesque island in the Bay of Naples (now joined to the shore by a causeway). Evidently he was a man of some standing and high reputation. He went on diplomatic trips to Gaul and may have acted as a Greek-speaking interpreter for Emperor Constans on his visit to Italy in 663. At any rate, by the late 660s Hadrian’s reputation was such that Pope Vitalian asked him to take over the vacant archbishopric in Britain. It’s an amazing idea when you
The page from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People in which he describes the arrival in England of a “man of African race”: Hadrian think about it: a north African abbot and scholar being sent to “the outermost edge of the world”, where as Pope Gregory had said, the tribes till recently “worshipped sticks and stones”.
At first Hadrian refused to take the job, and he suggested Andrew, the abbot of a nunnery in Naples. But then he proposed a more senior man, a friend with whom his name would be forever linked: Theodore of Tarsus. Theodore was a Greek originally educated in Syria at Antioch and Edessa, from which he had fled during the Arab invasion of Syria. Now in Italy, he was living in semi-retirement with the Syrian exile community at Tre Fontane, a still idyllic cluster of churches south of Rome’s walls.
Theodore agreed to go. He arrived on 27 May 669, serving as archbishop of Canterbury until his death in 690. Hadrian joined him the next year, and whatever his initial doubts, stayed for the rest of his life. Together the two men would go about putting into effect one of the most significant teaching programmes in British history.
The nearly 70-year-old Syrian and 40-something Libyan made a formidable teaching partnership. And, soon, the school they established in Canterbury became famous Europe-wide. “They went everywhere and did everything together,” says Bede, writing in 731. “It was the happiest time since the English first came to Britain.”
As Bede’s words suggest, in the course of their work, Hadrian and Theodore travelled all over England, “visiting every part of the land”. One of their councils in 684 was held at Twyford beyond Hadrian’s Wall (today a picturesque village by the East Coast mainline stop at Alnmouth). But they lived and worked in Canterbury – building a library, devising courses, giving lectures, and training the next generation of priests, administrators, artists and writers. One of these, Aldhelm, could proudly announce himself as “the first among the Germanic peoples to master the intricacies of Latin verse”.
Bede says Hadrian spoke both Greek and Latin, and his exceptional language skills come out in surviving glossaries and teaching notes where we can see him riffing between those two languages and Old English. Bede also tells us that some of his pupils got to know Greek as well as their own language.
England was a wild and semi-pagan land, and in their baggage Hadrian and Theodore carried manuscripts and teaching aids to try to revive learning, which had stalled since St Augustine’s
Hadrian was a leading light in one of the most significant cultural movements of British history