'England and The Papacy in the Early Middle Ages', by Benjamin Savill

England and The Papacy in the Early Middle Ages

Benjamin Savill

Oxford University Press, £83, 352 pages

Relations between England and the papacy famously go back to the early beginnings of both the English nation and the English Church, at least as far as the official mythologising of each would have it. “Non angli,”  quipped St Gregory the Great, “sed angeli.”

Those keen to build up their view of papal Rome’s interactions with England could do a lot worse than dipping into Benjamin Savill’s England and The Papacy in the Early Middle Ages. In this recent publication in the Oxford Historical Monographs series, Savill tells the story of Anglo-papal exchange from c AD 680 to shortly after the Norman Conquest through the medium of papal privileges.