Deusdedit of Canterbury - Life

Life

A post-Norman Conquest tradition, originating with Goscelin, gives Deusdedit's original name as Frithona, possibly a corruption of Frithuwine. He was consecrated by Ithamar, Bishop of Rochester, on 26 March or perhaps 12 March 655. He was the sixth archbishop after the arrival of the Gregorian missionaries, and the first to be a native of the island of Great Britain rather than an Italian, having been born a West Saxon. One reason for the long period between the conversion of the Kentish kingdom in about 600 and the appointment of the first native archbishop may have been the need for the schools established by the Gregorian missionaries to educate the natives to a sufficiently high standard for them to take ecclesiastical office. Deusdedit probably owed his appointment to the see of Canterbury to a collaboration between Eorcenberht of Kent and Cenwalh of Wessex. The name Deusdedit means "God has given", and was the name of a recent pope, Deusdedit, in office from 615 to 618; it was the practice of many of the early medieval Saxon bishops to take an adopted name, often from recent papal names. It is unclear when Deusdedit adopted his new name, although the historian Richard Sharpe considers it likely to have been when he was consecrated as an archbishop, rather than when he entered religious life.

The see of Canterbury seems at this time to have been passing through a period of comparative obscurity. During the nine years of Deusdedit's pontificate all the new bishops in England were consecrated by Celtic or foreign bishops, with one exception: Deusdedit consecrated Damianus, Ithamar's successor as Bishop of Rochester. Deusdedit did, however, found a nunnery in the Isle of Thanet and helped with the foundation of Medeshamstede Abbey, later Peterborough Abbey, in 657. He was long overshadowed by Agilbert, bishop to the West Saxons, and his authority as archbishop probably did not extend past his own diocese and that of Rochester, which had traditionally been dependent on Canterbury.

The Synod of Whitby, which debated whether the Northumbrian church should follow the Roman or the Celtic method of dating Easter, was held in 664. Deusdedit does not appear to have been present, perhaps because of an outbreak of the plague prevalent in England at the time.