Synod of Chester

The Synod of Chester (Medieval Latin: Sinodus Urbis Legion(um)) was an ecclesiastical council of bishops held in Chester in the late 6th or early 7th century. The period is known from only a few surviving sources, so dates and accounts vary, but it seems to have been a major event in the history of Wales and England, where the native British bishops rejected overtures of peace from Augustine's English mission. This led directly to the Battle of Chester, where Æthelfrith of Northumbria seems to have killed the kings of Powys and (possibly) Gwynedd during an attack on the ecclesiastical community at Bangor-on-Dee.

The laconic Welsh annals record the entry

in the undated early 12th-century A text and

in the later B-text, which, although also undated, places it 569 years after the birth of Christ. Phillimore's reconstruction of the A text dated it to 601.

The Gregory mentioned is probably Pope Gregory I (d. 604). The David mentioned is Saint David, who was also responsible for the earlier Synod of Brefi and the Synod of Victory (over Pelagianism) which was held in the other Caerleon.

In his Ecclesiastical History, the English Bede devoted much of his account to the resistance of the British clergy to Victor of Aquitaine's revision of the Easter computus. The work describes two meetings between Archbishop Augustine of Canterbury and the native bishops, the first of which occurred at a place known to Bede as "Augustine's Oak". Bede locates this on the border of the Hwicci and West Saxons, which would place it just southeast of the Severn or Bristol Channel. Since he describes the men ("bishops or doctors") as coming from the "next province of the Britons" to Æthelberht, it appears that the territory of the later Hwicce had been recovered since Deorham. The Welsh may have been the Pengwern colony recorded as establishing itself in Glastonbury by the Welsh genealogies.

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