Beginning with Bede and continuing in recent studies, there has been a tendency to depict the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity as a political event: preachers persuaded kings to convert, resulting in the conversion of royal households as well as whole kingdoms. This may overestimate the authority and power of early Anglo-Saxon kings, and overlook the contingencies and negotiations at the heart of conversion; it may also obscure the agency and experiences of local communities and those beyond the royal household. It risks reinforcing the assumption that changes in belief preceded changes in practice, which in turn provide an index of belief. By way of contrast, John Blair and Marilyn Dunn havepresented conversion as a socio-cultural process: a nobility with relatively recent origins and uncertain status invested in an exotic external culture as a strategy to stabilise their status, and conversion was a dialogue which transformed their society and that religion. Building on their approaches, this essay is an interdisciplinary case study of conversion as a socio-cultural process, focusing on the seventh-century cemetery at Street House, North Yorkshire. It argues that the transformation of belief was a contingent and negotiated process within local communities and that it occurred partly through mortuary ritual.

Religion may be considered a cultural system in which ‘sacred symbols function to synthesise a people's ethos – the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood – and their world-view – the picture they have of the way things in sheer actually are […]’. Religious conversion demands the reimagining of society. Rituals – repetitive performances concerned with cosmology – are crucial to such reimaginings. Socio-cultural norms are often generated through ritual performances involving physical and cultural liminality: taking the community physically outside of itself and performing a breakdown and rebuilding of structures of status, authority, and power. The force of such rituals is that, regardless of the varied intentions or perceptions of participants, they generate public moral commitments and memories about those commitments, with which individuals and groups can act in accordance, or which they can self-consciously contravene.