Synod of Whitby
Bede placed his description of the event centrally in his narrative, and he has been recognised as overemphasising the historical significance of the synod because Easter calculation was of special interest to him, and also because he wished to stress the unity of the English Church.
Edwin of Northumbria had converted to Christianity under the influence of missionaries sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great and thus had established the 19-year Easter cycle in his realm.
However, the First Council of Nicaea in 325 decreed that Christians should no longer use the Jewish calendar but should universally celebrate Easter on a Sunday, the day of the resurrection, as had come to be the custom in Rome and Alexandria.
Around 602, the Irish missionary St Columbanus had already been condemned by a synod of French clerics for ignoring their authority and following his homeland's Easter calculations (the Victorian table was declared official in Gaul in 541).
About AD 600 Columbanus wrote to Pope Gregory I: "You should know that Victorius has not been accepted by our teachers and by the old Irish experts and by the mathematicians most skilled in the calculation of the computus, but was considered more worthy of ridicule and pity than of authority.
After his death, his successor Finan found himself challenged by a monk named Ronan, an Irishman who had been trained in Rome and who wished to see the Roman Easter established.
[7] In the early 660s, he expelled Ionan monks from the monastery of Ripon and gave it to Wilfrid, a Northumbrian churchman who had recently returned from Rome.
[8] The synod was held at a place called Streanæshalch, at a monastery of Hilda, herself a powerful Northumbrian noble and adherent to the Ionan Easter.
Because of Agilbert's inability to express the complicated arguments in Old English, which was for him a foreign language, Wilfrid was selected as the prime advocate for the Roman party.
Bishop Colmán defended the Ionan calculation of Easter on the grounds that it was the practice of Columba, founder of their monastic network and a saint of unquestionable holiness, who himself had followed the tradition of St. John the apostle and evangelist.
Wilfrid, chief advocate for the Roman position, later became Bishop of Northumbria, while Colmán and the Ionan supporters who did not change their practices withdrew to Iona.
The Synod of Whitby was just one of many councils held concerning the proper calculation of Easter throughout Latin Christendom in the Early Middle Ages.
[12] It addressed the issues of Easter calculation and of the proper monastic tonsure,[13] and concerned only the part of the English Church that answered to the See of Lindisfarne:[13] that is, it was a Northumbrian affair.
)[13] In the words of Patrick Wormald:[15] From the days of George Buchanan, supplying the initial propaganda for the makers of the Scottish Kirk, until a startlingly recent date, there was warrant for an anti-Roman, anti-episcopal and, in the nineteenth century, anti-establishment stance in the Columban or "Celtic" Church. ...
Henry Mayr-Harting considered Alchfrith's interest in the convocation of the synod to be derived from his desire to see his father's position in Bernicia challenged and to see the replacement of Colmán with another bishop who would be more aligned with himself.
