Just why Gregory should have decided to evangelise England we do not know. The earliest biography, written in England a century after his death, tells how, while still a deacon, he saw handsome, fair-haired Anglo-Saxon boys in Rome. When told they were Angles, he replied, ‘They are angels of God,’ and immediately formed a desire to convert the nation from which they had come. The story is quite plausible in itself, and Gregory’s interest in this people ‘worshipping stocks and stones … at the edge of the world’ may well have been aroused by seeing English slaves in the Roman market. Certainly by 595 he was instructing the Rector of the papal patrimony in Gaul to buy up seventeen or eighteen year-old English slave-boys, to be trained as monks in the Roman monasteries. He may already have been looking for interpreters for a mission to England.
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