"Turn from this city, O Lord," they sang, "thine
anger and wrath, and turn it from thy holy house, for we have sinned."
And then in strange contrast came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew
worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in prophetic earnestness from
the name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market-place,
"Alleluia!"[48]
It was thus that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengist became
yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine. But the second
landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a reversal and undoing of
the first. "Strangers from Rome" was the title with which the
missionaries first fronted the English King. The march of the monks as
they chanted their solemn litany was in one sense a return of the Roman
legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue
and the thought not of Gregory only, but of the men whom his Jutish
fathers had slaughtered or driven out that Ethelbert listened in the
preaching of Augustine.
Canterbury, the earliest royal city of German England, became a centre
of Latin influence.
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