Saint Justus

Justus (died on 10 November between 627 and 631) was the fourth archbishop of Canterbury. Pope Gregory the Great sent Justus from Italy to England on a mission to Christianise the Anglo-Saxons from their native paganism; he probably arrived with the second group of missionaries dispatched in 601. Justus became the first bishop of Rochester in 604 and signed a letter to the Irish bishops urging the native Celtic church to adopt the Roman method of calculating the date of Easter. He attended a church council in Paris in 614. Following the death of King Æthelberht of Kent in 616, Justus was forced to flee to Gaul but was reinstated in his diocese the following year. In 624, he was elevated to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, overseeing the dispatch of missionaries to Northumbria. After his death, he was revered as a saint and had a shrine in St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, to which his remains were translated in the 1090s. Justus was a member of the Gregorian mission sent to England by Pope Gregory I. Almost everything known about Justus and his career is derived from the early 8th-century Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum of Bede. As Bede does not describe Justus's origins, nothing is known about him before he arrived in England. He probably arrived in England with the second group of missionaries, sent at the request of Augustine of Canterbury in 601. Some modern writers describe Justus as one of the original missionaries who arrived with Augustine in 597, but Bede believed that Justus came in the second group. The second group included Mellitus, who later became Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury. If Justus was a member of the second group of missionaries, then he arrived with a gift of books and "all things which were needed for worship and the ministry of the Church".