AETHELBERHT I

died Feb. 24, 616 king of Kent (560-616) who issued the first extant code of Anglo-Saxon laws, a code that established the legal position of the clergy and many secular regulations. Aethelberht's marriage to Bertha (or Berhta), daughter of Charibert, king of Paris, and a Christian, may account for the tolerant reception that he accorded Augustine and other missionaries dispatched to Kent by Pope Gregory I the Great in 597. Aethelberht gave them a dwelling at Canterbury and later accepted Christianity himself, though he did not force it on his subjects. According to the English historian and theologian Bede, his kingdom included all of England south of the Humber, but probably only at the end of his reign.