Gregory’s dispatch of a mission to the English in Britannia marked a crucial stage in the Western Latin Church’s change of direction away from Byzantium and towards the north and west. Once the Western Church had been the poor relation of the Greek East in terms of numbers and theological sophistication. It had been tied to the fortunes of an empire in increasing disarray and was then confronted by rulers with an alien variety of Christian faith. Now it was reaching out beyond the boundaries of the Roman imperial world.
