Death of Pope Gregory the Great

The famous story about Pope Gregory I, before he became pope, seeing some fair-haired English boys in a slave-market in Rome and saying, ‘Not Angles, but angels’ appeared in the first biography of him, which was written by an anonymous monk of Whitby around or soon after 700. It is one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon anecdotes to have survived. English Catholics took a particular interest in Gregory because it was he who sent St Augustine to Kent in 597 to bring Roman Christianity to a country whose Celtic Christians did not recognise the supremacy of Rome and where paganism still flourished.