60 English and Continental Backgrounds
established and permanent church was largely the work
of one man. This was Theodore of Tarsus, who was
archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 690. With but
few important later changes, the church remained what
he made it up to the time of the Danish invasions and con-
quests late in the ninth century. His greatest work was
the creation of the dioceses. The diocese, the territory
over which a bishop had control, was the fundamental
division in Roman church polity. It is sometimes said
that Theodore divided existing dioceses into smaller ones;
but, as just stated, the small kingdoms, considered as
fields for missionary effort, were about the only ecclesi-
astical divisions before his time. Even granting that
early churchmen sometimes took account of the smaller,
tribal divisions in organising their work, it would be doing
violence to later ideas to call these dioceses in more than
one or two instances.x It had been the purpose of Pope
Gregory I., when he planned the Christianising of Eng-
land, to have two co-ordinate archbishoprics established,
one in the south and the other in the north. This was not
carried out, however, and Theodore made his organisation
upon the basis of one metropolitan church, that at Canter-
bury. It seems to have been owing to the influence of
Bede in behalf of northern England that the bishop of
York was made archbishop in 734.2 During part of the
same century, owing to the political supremacy of Mercia,
Lichfield was recognised as an archbishopric.3 But the
normal arrangement, from the time of Bede to the dis-
ruption of the church in the north by the invading Danes,
was a division into two archbishoprics and seventeen
1 The dioceses of Canterbury and Rochester correspond to the ancient
divisions of east and west Kent. In very early times, these territories
often had different kings.
2 A bitter rivalry often existed between the two archbishops, leading
sometimes to the most undignified quarrels. The question of precedence
was not satisfactorily decided in Anglo-Saxon times. See below, p, 129.
s It was made an archbishopric about 735 and ceased to be one through
action of the Synod of Clovesho in 803. King Offa of Mercia, in return
for the pope's concession in making a Mercian archbishopric, agreed to
pay him an annual sum of money. This was the beginning of the tribute,
later made general in England, known as Peter's Pence.