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These documents relate to the Roman council held under Pope Boniface IV (608–615) in 610, in the eighth year of the emperor Phocas, which Mellitus, the first bishop of London, attended while visiting Rome on the affairs of the English church. The opening narrative, close to Bede’s account, records that the council treated the life and peace of monks and that Mellitus subscribed its decrees and carried them back to Britain with letters for Archbishop Laurence, King Æthelbert and the English people. A decree of the council and a letter to Æthelbert follow.
The decree argues that monks who are priests may properly exercise the power of binding and loosing, comparing them to angels, since angelus means messenger and priests announce God’s commands. The authenticity of the decree and the letter has been questioned, and they may reflect later debates about monks’ pastoral rights. The texts are nonetheless of interest for the early relations between Rome and the English church after the Gregorian mission.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 80, Parisiis 1850), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.