ENGLAND, CHURCH OF

English national church that traces its history back to the arrival of Christianity in Britain during the 2nd century; it has been the original church of the Anglican Communion (q.v.) since the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. As the successor of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval English church, it has valued and preserved much of the traditional framework of medieval Roman Catholicism in church government, liturgy, and customs, while it also has usually held the fundamentals of Reformation faith. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, who began invading Britain after Rome stopped governing the country in the 5th century, was undertaken by St. Augustine, a monk in Rome chosen by Pope Gregory I to lead a mission to the Anglo-Saxons. He arrived in 597, and within 90 years all the Saxon kingdoms of England had accepted Christianity. In the centuries before the Reformation, the English church experienced periods of advancement and of decline. During the 8th century, English scholarship was highly regarded, and several English churchmen worked in Europe as scholars, reformers, and missionaries. Subsequently, Danish invasions destroyed monasteries and weakened scholarship. Political unity in England was established under the Wessex kings in the 10th century, however, and reforms of the church took place. In the 11th century the Norman Conquest of England (1066) united England more closely with the culture of Latin Europe. The English church was reformed according to Roman ideas: local synods were revived, celibacy of the clergy was required, and the canon law of western Europe was introduced in England. During the Middle Ages, English clergy and laity made important contributions to the life and activities of the Roman Catholic church. The English church, however, shared in the religious unrest characteristic of the later Middle Ages. John Wycliffe, the 14th-century Reformer and theologian, became a revolutionary critic of the papacy and is considered a major influence on the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. The break with the Roman papacy and the establishment of an independent Church of England came during the reign of Henry VIII (150947). When Pope Clement VII refused to approve the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the English Parliament, at Henry's insistence, passed a series of acts that separated the English church from the Roman hierarchy and in 1534 made the English monarch the head of the English church. The monasteries were suppressed, but few other changes were immediately made, since Henry intended that the English church would remain Catholic, though separated from Rome. After Henry's death, Protestant reforms of the church were introduced during the six-year reign of Edward VI. In 1553, however, when Edward's half-sister, Mary, a Roman Catholic, succeeded to the throne, her repression and persecution of Protestants aroused sympathy for their cause. When Elizabeth I became queen in 1558, the independent Church of England was reestablished. The Book of Common Prayer (q.v.; 1549, final revision 1662) and the Thirty-nine Articles (q.v.; 1571) became the standards for liturgy and doctrine. In the 17th century the Puritan movement led to the English Civil Wars (164251) and the Commonwealth (164960). The monarchy and the Church of England were repressed, but both were restored in 1660. The Evangelical movement in the 18th century emphasized the Protestant heritage of the church, while the Oxford Movement in the 19th century emphasized the Roman Catholic heritage. These two attitudes have continued in the church and are sometimes referred to as Low Church and High Church, respectively. In the 20th century the church was active in the ecumenical movement. The Church of England has maintained the episcopal form of government. It is divided into two provinces, Canterbury and York, each headed by an archbishop, with Canterbury taking precedence over York. Provinces are divided into dioceses, each headed by a bishop and made up of several parishes. Women deacons, known originally as deaconesses and serving basically as assistants to priests, were first ordained by the Church of England in 1987, allowing them to perform virtually all clerical functions except the celebration of the Eucharist. The church voted in 1992 to ordain women as priests; the first ordination, of 32 women, took place in 1994 at Bristol Cathedral. Cultural life England's contribution to both British and world culture is too vast for anything but a cursory survey. In the contemporary cultural scene, England is not always distinguishable from Wales and Scotland or even Northern Ireland. Literature It is, arguably, in its literature that England has attained its most influential cultural expression. For more than a millennium, each stage in the development of the English language has produced its masterworks. The heroic poem Beowulf, dating from the 9th or 10th century, preserves the earliest literary language of Britain, the Germanic Anglo-Saxon, known as Old English. Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, French influence shaped the vocabulary as well as the literary preoccupations of Middle English. Geoffrey Chaucer epitomized both the courtly philosophical concerns and the earthy vernacular of this period in his Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, respectively. The Elizabethan era of the late 16th century fostered the flowering of the European Renaissance in England and the golden age of English literature. The plays of William Shakespeare, while on their surface representing the culmination of Elizabethan English, achieve a depth of characterization and richness of invention that have fixed them in the dramatic repertoire of virtually every language. Political and religious conflicts of the 17th century inspired a wealth of poetry, ranging from the metaphysical introspections of John Donne to the visionary epics of John Milton. The dichotomy of Classicism and Romanticism, of reason and imagination, came to dominate the 18th century, with the Neoclassical satire and criticism of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson on the one hand and the somewhat later Romantic self-expression of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats on the other. Also during this period the novel emerged as a form capable of bringing everyday life into the province of literature. From this point, the distinctive regions of England began to exert a powerful influence on many writerssuch as the Lake District on Wordsworth, the Yorkshire moors on the Bront sisters, Dorset on Thomas Hardy, the Midlands coalfields on D.H. Lawrence, and London on Charles Dickens. In the modern period, English literature demonstrated a remarkable capacity to absorb and transmute alien elements, taking into the mainstream of its tradition poets as Irish as William Butler Yeats, as Welsh as Dylan Thomas, or as securely in the classic line as the American expatriates T.S. Eliot and Henry James. Massive immigration from the far reaches of the Commonwealth in the late 20th century further diversified England's literary landscape, with such writers as V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, and has itself become the subject of numerous novels and plays. (For further discussion, see English literature.)