Hadrian of Canterbury

The Venerable Adrian (Hadrian) of Canterbury was a Berber scholar of North African origin in Anglo-⁠Saxon England, abbot of the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul (later Saint Augustine's) at Canterbury. He was a noted teacher and commentator of the Bible. He was born before 637 and died in 710 (in Catholic tradition on 9 January, the day on which he is commemorated). In the Orthodox Church he is commemorated on the third Sunday after Pentecost, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Britain and Ireland.

From Africa to Naples

He was born between 630 and 637 in North Africa, of a family of Romanized Berbers. North Africa, an exarchate of the Byzantine Empire, had for centuries been one of the centres of Christian learning, where Blessed Augustine had lived and worked. According to Bede, he was "by nation an African". As a young man he moved to Naples, then belonging to Byzantium, where he soon became abbot of a monastery, called Monasterium Niridanum (perhaps a mistake for Nisidanum, that is on the island of Nisida, in the bay of Naples). The Byzantine monasteries of Italy were subject to the bishop of Rome, the pope, who knew him personally and held him in esteem. Adrian was famed for his learning, and was young and healthy.

The road to Canterbury

Pope Vitalian offered him twice the vacant see of Canterbury, a see at the edge of the then civilized world, but Adrian humbly declined. He first recommended Andrew, a monk of a neighbouring monastery, who also declined, on the plea of advanced age. Then, when the offer was repeated, he introduced to the pope his friend Theodore of Tarsus, who happened to be at Rome and who accepted the charge. Vitalian, however, stipulated that Adrian should accompany the new archbishop to Britain, saying that Adrian, having twice before journeyed into Gaul, knew the road and the mode of travel. They set out from Rome on 27 May 668, by sea to Marseille, and overland to Arles, where they stayed with Bishop John until they got passports from Ebroin, who ruled that part of Gaul as Mayor of the Palace for the minor king Clotaire III. Reaching northern France, they parted for the winter: Theodore with Agilbert, bishop of Paris, Adrian first with Emmon, bishop of Sens, then with Faro, bishop of Meaux. Called for in the following spring by King Ecgberht of Kent, Theodore reached England at the end of May 669, but Adrian was detained by order of Ebroin, who suspected him of being an emissary of the Greek emperor sent to stir up trouble against the kingdom of the Franks (one source says the cause may have been Adrian's unflattering remarks about the kingdom of the Franks, in comparison with Byzantine Africa). At length Ebroin became convinced that the suspicion had no ground, and Adrian was permitted to go to England, where Theodore immediately made him abbot of the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul at Canterbury (afterwards the monastery of Saint Augustine), in keeping with the pope's instructions. So Bede tells it, in the Ecclesiastical History. Another account, also attributed to Bede, in the Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth, says that Adrian was made abbot only after the resignation of Benedict Biscop, who accompanied Theodore all the way from Rome and held that post for about two years; the two accounts are perhaps not absolutely irreconcilable, but are too different in tone and circumstance to have come from the same pen.

The teacher

Adrian was known as a man learned in the Bible, in Greek and Latin, and a good administrator. Under his direction the abbey came to have a deep and far-⁠reaching influence. Bede describes him as an eminent theologian and a good scholar in secular learning. With Theodore he traversed all parts of the island, gathering multitudes of pupils, and daily they taught with equal diligence and success not only the truths of the faith, but also the branches of science and literature of the time. Bede particularly mentions the metrical art, astronomy and arithmetic, and adds that while he wrote (in the early eighth century) there were still living some of the pupils of Theodore and Adrian who spoke Greek and Latin as readily as their own tongue. A record of their teaching is preserved in the Leiden Glossary. A Ukrainian source says he founded numerous schools in different parts of England, and among their pupils was Aldhelm. Toward the end of the ninth century King Alfred the Great alludes, in the preface to his translation of Pope Gregory I's Pastoral Care, to that short time of flourishing, when the clergy were diligent to teach and to study and foreigners came to England to acquire learning and wisdom, whereas now, in his time, anyone who wished to become a scholar had to go abroad. Adrian lived thirty-⁠nine years in England, long survived his friend the archbishop, and died in 710. One source says his body was found incorrupt in 1091, 371 years after his death, and that his tomb in the church of Saint Augustine was famed for miracles, ascribed among other things to help given to students in trouble with their masters. His name is included in English calendars.