Angels of Anglia


Angels of Anglia ... a work currently on the stocks

The Angels of Anglia: A Work in Progress

History turns on quiet moments. In the summer of 589, the future Pope Gregory the Great walked through a Roman slave market and saw a group of fair-haired boys for sale—Angles, he was told. “Not Angles, but angels,” he is said to have remarked. That moment, recorded by the Venerable Bede, would set in motion a transformation of a whole people.

The Angels of Anglia is the story of those boys. Wulfstan, proud and sharp-eyed, Béon, sturdy and defiant, and their companions, torn from their homeland and thrust into the intellectual and spiritual world of a Roman monastery  where they make friends friends with Luca and other young monks  under the guidance of Abbot Gregory (soon to become Pope) and Augustine. They are bought as slaves but shaped into scholars, monks, and, ultimately, missionaries to their own people.

This is a novel of faith and displacement, of identity lost and remade. It is the story of an island - my native island - poised between the old gods and the new, seen through the eyes of children who will become its teachers.

The project is taking shape—early chapters are complete, and the world of late 6th-century Rome is being carefully built. The characters now have quite well degined personalities, and the monasteries their light and shadow. The lively streets of Rome are also coming to life. Ahead lies the journey to England, the slow work of conversion, and the weight of history itself.

The past is not a distant land—it is the foundation of our present. This is its story, unfolding.  It hope it will be ready for summer 2025.




 

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