Justus

Justus
Archbishop of Canterbury
Gravestone marking the burial site of Justus in St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury
Appointed	624
Term ended	on 10 November between 627 and 631
Predecessor	Mellitus
Successor	Honorius
Other posts	Bishop of Rochester
Orders
Consecration	604 by Augustine of Canterbury
Personal details
Died	on 10 November between 627 to 631
Buried	St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury
Sainthood
Feast day	10 November
Venerated in	Eastern Orthodox Church Roman Catholic Church Anglican Communion
Canonized	Pre-congregation, prior to formal canonisation process
Attributes	archbishop carrying a Primatial cross
Patronage	Volterra, Italy
Shrines	St Augustine's, Canterbury

Justus (died on 10 November between 627 and 631) was the fourth Archbishop of Canterbury. He was sent from Italy to England by Pope Gregory the Great, on a mission to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons from their native paganism, probably arriving with the second group of missionaries despatched in 601. Justus became the first Bishop of Rochester in 604, and 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 Justus became Archbishop of Canterbury, overseeing the despatch of missionaries to Northumbria. After his death he was revered as a saint, and had a shrine in St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury.

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' origins, nothing is known about him prior to his arrival 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". A 15th-century Canterbury chronicler, Thomas of Elmham, claimed that there were a number of books brought to England by that second group still at Canterbury in his day, although he did not identify them. An investigation of extant Canterbury manuscripts shows that one possible survivor is the St. Augustine Gospels, now in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Manuscript (MS) 286.