Saint Adrian of Canterbury

In 664 Deusdedit, the Archbishop of Canterbury, died, and the priest sent to Rome to be consecrated in his place died there of the plague with almost all his companions. ² Pope Vitalian looked for someone else to send. ² Bede describes the man he found: an abbot named Hadrian, "by nation an African, well versed in holy writ, experienced in monastical and ecclesiastical discipline, and excellently skilled both in the Greek and Latin tongues." ²

His monastery stood near Naples. Bede calls it the Niridian monastery, and Michael Ott, writing for the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1907, Nerida, a Benedictine house; Herbert Thurston, in the same encyclopedia's article on Aldhelm, says Adrian had formerly been a monk of Monte Cassino. ¹²⁵ Ott adds that he became abbot when he was very young. ¹

The pope commanded him to take the bishopric. Adrian answered that he was unworthy of so great a dignity. ¹² Bede says he first proposed a monk named Andrew, whom everyone who knew him thought worthy, but whose health ruled him out; pressed again, Adrian asked for time to find another candidate. ² He found one in Rome: Theodore, a monk from Tarsus in Cilicia, learned in Greek and Latin and sixty-six years old. ²

Vitalian agreed, but he did not let Adrian off. ¹² In Bede's account Adrian was to take Theodore to Britain, since he had already crossed France twice and knew the road, and, as Theodore's "fellow labourer in doctrine", to take special care that Theodore did not, "according to the custom of the Greeks, introduce anything contrary to the true faith". ² Ott puts it more simply: Adrian was to go with him and be his adviser in governing the diocese. ¹ Franciscan Media tells the condition differently again, saying the pope accepted Adrian's refusal on condition that he serve as the Holy Father's own assistant and adviser. ⁶

Theodore was consecrated on March 26, 668, and the two set out on May 27. ² They sailed to Marseilles and went on by land to Arles. ² There they were held until Ebroin, the mayor of the palace, gave them leave to travel, and then the hard winter forced them to stop wherever they could; Theodore stayed with the bishop of Paris, and Adrian with the bishops of Sens and Meaux. ²

Theodore crossed to England, but Adrian was stopped. Ebroin suspected that he carried a message from the emperor to the English kings against the interests of the Frankish kingdom. ¹² Ott names the emperor as Constans II and says the delay lasted two years, until Ebroin satisfied himself that the suspicion was groundless and let him go. ¹

When he arrived, Theodore gave him the monastery of Saint Peter the Apostle at Canterbury, where, Bede notes, the archbishops were usually buried. ¹² It had been founded by Saint Augustine and was later known, Ott says, as St. Austin's. ¹ Franciscan Media calls it the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul. ⁶ Bede's life of Benedict Biscop shows that he had been ruling it until then: Benedict, who traveled from Rome with Theodore, governed the house for two years, and "afterwards, Hadrian became abbot." ⁴

He did not stay inside it. Bede says Theodore visited the whole island wherever the English lived, "everywhere attended and assisted by Hadrian", teaching the right rule of life and the canonical way of keeping Easter. ² Ott sees in their journeys the work of bringing the customs of the Anglo-Saxon Church into line with those of Rome. ¹

What Adrian is remembered for is the teaching. Because both men were well read in sacred and secular learning, Bede writes, "they gathered a crowd of disciples, and there daily flowed from them rivers of knowledge to water the hearts of their hearers". ² Alongside Scripture they taught the arts of ecclesiastical poetry, astronomy and arithmetic. ² Bede adds a judgment of his own: there were never happier times since the English came into Britain. ²

Under Adrian, Ott says, the school of Canterbury became the center of English learning, and he set up other schools in various parts of England; their pupils included many of the saints, scholars and missionaries who rekindled faith and learning in France and Germany in the following century. ¹ Franciscan Media says the school produced many future bishops and archbishops, and that its students learned Greek and Latin. ⁶

Bede gives names. Albinus, who succeeded Adrian as abbot, knew Greek "to no small perfection, and the Latin as thoroughly as the English, which was his native language." ³ Tobias, Bishop of Rochester, who had been taught by Theodore and Hadrian, knew both languages as well as his own. ³ Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury and later Bishop of Sherborne, credited his own progress in letters to Adrian, according to Thurston, who also thinks Aldhelm's fondness for Greek and extravagant words can be traced, with some probability, to Adrian's influence. ⁵

Bede records his death in a chapter dated 709, saying it came in the year after Wilfrid's, in the forty-first year since Pope Vitalian sent him and the thirty-ninth since he reached England. ³ Ott gives 710, and Franciscan Media says "probably" 710. ¹⁶ He was buried, Bede says, in the church of the blessed Mother of God in his own monastery. ³

Franciscan Media adds two things later than Bede. It says that several hundred years after his death, during rebuilding, his body was found incorrupt, and that his tomb then became famous for miracles. ⁶ It also passes on a rumor, and calls it one, that schoolboys in trouble with their masters made regular visits there. ⁶

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Adrian, so none is given here. ¹⁶⁷ The Roman Martyrology remembers him for what he taught: born in Africa, he came from Naples to England and, rich in sacred and secular learning alike, instructed a multitude of disciples in the knowledge of salvation. ⁷

Saint Adrian's feast is kept on January 9, which Ott gives as the day of his death. ¹ Franciscan Media keeps it on that day, and the Roman Martyrology enters him on it, as abbot, at Canterbury. ⁶⁷

He turned down the highest office in the English Church, and was sent to England anyway. ¹² Franciscan Media draws the obvious moral from it, that we sometimes refuse something only to end up in much the same place. ⁶ What the sources show besides is that he did not treat the second-best post as a demotion. He spent close to forty years in it. ³⁶

He also had the harder job of the two. In Bede's telling he was there to guide a man older and more senior than himself and to keep an eye on him, and the sources record no quarrel between them, only the two of them traveling the country together and teaching side by side. ² It is not an easy thing to be the adviser who was offered the chair.

Most of what he did lived on in other people. The chapters of Bede read for this page record no sentence of his, but they name pupils who were still alive, and still reading Greek, when Bede wrote. ²³ A teacher whose work is best seen in his students is a fair description of most teachers, and of most of the people who hand the faith on.