British Isles

The British Isles as a single unit is most useful for one thing: the Irish monastic tradition and its reach. Irish Christianity organised itself around monasteries rather than around bishops in cities, produced a penitential discipline of private confession and assigned penance that eventually spread through the whole western church, and sent its monks abroad in a movement its own literature called exile for Christ. Columba to Iona, Aidan to Lindisfarne and Columbanus to Gaul and Italy are the best documented cases.

That expansion met the Roman mission working north from Canterbury, and the point of collision was the date of Easter. The two traditions used different tables for calculating it, so in a mixed royal household the king could be celebrating the resurrection while the queen was still fasting in Lent. Bede treats the dispute at length and presents its settlement at Whitby in 664 as a decision for universal practice over local custom. The Irish churches conformed over the following century, the community on Iona among the last.

The smaller islands are the reason the atlas keeps this entry at all. Man had a Norse and then a distinctively Manx church history; the Hebrides produced a Gaelic devotional tradition of prayers and charms for ordinary work that was collected in the nineteenth century; and Ireland's religious history is its own rather than Britain's. Material belonging to the whole group needs somewhere to sit that is not Britain.

Almost everything known about early religion in these islands was written down by Christian clergy, and mostly by monks, which shapes what survives and how it reads. Bede is the fullest early narrative and he writes to a purpose: the unity of the church, the vindication of the Roman Easter, and the holiness of particular Northumbrian figures. Irish annals, saints' lives and law tracts preserve a great deal of older material, but preserve it inside a Christian frame that turns gods into kings and heroes and files myth as history.

That leaves the pre-Christian religion of the islands to be reconstructed from objects and from outside witnesses. Classical writers describe the druids of Gaul and Britain, usually while justifying a conquest, and Ronald Hutton's history of the subject traces how little of what is popularly attributed to them can actually be got out of those texts, and how much of the familiar image was invented between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. The archaeology, deposits in rivers and bogs, shrine sites, unusual burials, is real evidence, but it rarely tells you what anyone thought.

The result is a record that is unusually good for the early Christian centuries and unusually poor for everything before them, with a hard edge between the two rather than a gradient. The atlas records that edge rather than smoothing it, and marks reconstruction as reconstruction wherever the evidence will not carry more.