And the Christians came
In the last years of the Roman occupation, it seems Britain was still pagan, with druids cutting mistletoe and curing all kinds of ailments with frog spittle and duck feathers. Then a lad called Patrick was taken prisoner and sent to the galleys as a slave. This Patrick was a bright lad and learned all their was to know about the new religion, Christianity. When he escaped he to Ireland and did a kind of Moses thing, waving his staff and sending all the snakes rushing into the sea. That made him famous and he started preaching about this new religion, not the way the Romans thought about it with a Pope in charge, but something the Irish could accept. He was all for a system where, even if they were joined by the same belief, each little valley or glen had its own priest, who gave the local chief advice on how things should be. The Scots, I won’t call them Scotti, heard about it when a chap called Columbus took up residence in Iona, an island half way between Ireland and Scotland. (Columbus went there because there was nothing to fight over as there was in Ireland or the Highlands, and he could have time to think.) His religion seeped down the west coast to Wales but didn’t get much further because the lords in the South of England didn’t like this business of local chiefs doing as they liked. They had wide flat lands and could make sure everyone who lived there did as they were told. When the Pope sent a missionaries to teach the people how to be proper Christians, the missionaries organised a meeting in Whitby to get everyone to agree on whether Patrick and Columba, or the Pope, were right. The only people who could get there were the people from the south of England, you weren’t going to struggle down from Auchterarder or across from Pontarddulais, so it was naturally decided that the Pope was right and they should all be Roman Catholics. Which set up the situation that grew into Methodists in Wales, Presbyterians in Scotland and Anglicans in England, all believing the same thing in different ways and burning people to prove they were the peace makers and to prove that, while God gave life, he had authorised them to take that gift away.