Whitby, Synod of

Whitby, Synod of (664), the setting for the resolution of a local flare‐up of the paschal controversy in Northumbria. Oswald, king of Northumbria (634–42), was baptized in Iona and introduced missionaries from there to establish the church in his kingdom. His brother king Oswiu (642–70), according to Bede, ‘thought nothing could be better than Irish teaching, having been instructed and baptized by the Irish and having a complete grasp of their language’. By this time the Irish churches were themselves divided on the paschal question, and an argument erupted in England between Bishop Fínán of Lindisfarne, originally from Iona, and a southern Irishman Rónán, ‘who had been instructed in Gaul and Italy in the authentic practice of the church’. Their dispute divided the king, who followed the Celtic practice, and the queen, from Kent, who followed the Roman method. At a synod in Whitby, the centre piece of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the queen brought the English Bishop Wilfrid and a Frankish bishop Agilbert, trained in the south of Ireland, to dispute with Fínán's successor Colmán, and King Oswiu agreed to adopt the Roman practice. The Iona clergy left Northumbria at this point, and Bishop Wilfrid toured England to spread the Roman practice there. The notion that this synod represented the end of an entity that could be called the Celtic church, independent of Roman control, derives from a simplistic Protestant reading of Bede's work.

Richard Sharpe