Not far from Lullingstone, a dig discovered, in a Jutish cemetery, a male interment, woth grave goods - pagan. But the goods were a glass bowl, from Gaul, with a Chi-Rho at the base, and he had no weapons with him - Christian.

At Stone near Faversham, in the 4th century AD a pagan mausoleum or small shrine was built. By the 6th century, it was a Christian chapel to Our Lady of (can't remember, but somewhere very small and local, like a farm name), and it continued so until Tudor times, with various small modifications.

The conversion was a very odd process. But it doesn't seem that major worship rituals continued - if your priestly caste have gone over, who is to do it? If your holy places have been converted, where are you to do it? From the evidence of burials, where you would expect folk religion to hang about a bit, ordinary people went over too.

There are some interesting stories about the locals in various places offering invective to monks - I think one involves St. Wilfrid, not the most attractive of missionaries. I'll try and track them down.

Since the maintenance of a strong pagan presence would have had implications for the organisation of the country, the political hierarchy as well as the church, and especially for taxation, it would have been recorded. Charlemagne wasn't so fierce on pagans for merely religious reasons. He tried to wipe out gilds (the forerunners of the Rotary Club and insurance companies) because they were places where people could discuss things clandestinely, and those discussions could be subversive. And they were Christian by his time - though they had respectable Roman antecedents.

Charlemagne recorded his dealing with resistance with triumphalism. St. Olaf (?eligibility) did the same.

Europe was far more organised and bureaucratic than writers of Junior School history books let on.

Penny