Our personal journey, which would eventually lead to this book, started with our desire to address shortcomings in CLIL theory and practice as identified by state-of-the-art research since around 2010 outlined in Chapter One. Primarily, we wanted to understand why so many learners seemed to have difficulties expressing their understanding of subject content in adequate ways, especially in writing. The only conclusion we could reach back then was that those research findings indicated gaps in student learning or, as we would learn in the process, that learning did not go deep enough. If learners can’t explain their understanding properly, the chances are they haven’t fully understood. Somehow, many learners seemed to be stuck at a superficial level of learning and unable to ‘connect the dots’ in order to develop conceptual knowledge, which in turn is a prerequisite for transfer of learning.

In this chapter we will examine the Church as a structured, organised set of institutions, and the people who ran them. We will consider forms of monasticism – churches notionally dedicated to spiritual withdrawal from the world – as well as the provision of pastoral care for the bulk of society. We will also look at saints: the men and women believed to have lived a holy life on earth, and who still exercised influence from heaven. What emerges is an influential and culturally rich set of organisations, which were highly varied and deeply embedded in their own particular societies. While the Church taken as a collective whole was very important in early medieval Britain, there was no single church organisation for the whole island, or even for many political units.

Chapter 1 considered some of the milestones in the development of CLIL over several decades. It acknowledged the CLIL phenomenon as diverse and dynamic in developing theoretical principles and constructs that guide and situate classroom teaching and learning across different contexts. However, we suggest that the nature of ‘intercurricular disconnect’ (Lin, 2016) and the independent universes of language and curricular content as ‘reified entities’ (Dalton-Puffer, 2011, p. 196) should neither be underestimated nor seen as impermeable barriers with regard to changing classroom practices.

The title of this chapter is not meant to give the impression that the study of peoples and their origins is synonymous with migrations. If anything, it is meant to highlight, and contest, the long-established perception that the two are closely intertwined, and that they are one of the prime attractions of the period. The idea of the early Middle Ages being marked by the movement of peoples into Britain is the product of a long, complex intellectual pedigree that does indeed have roots in the period itself, but that also gathered new steam in modern times, as scholars in the eighteenth century and after used increasingly sophisticated techniques to further nationalist agendas. On that basis, it is easy to understand why ethnicity and migration often came as a pair and overlapped closely. Ideas of collective ‘national’ identity were – and are – social constructs, sometimes very transparently so, and the idea of migration was a cornerstone in the mythology built around them. Crucially, perceiving that the concept of, say, Englishness or Welshness is a historical artifice does not make it any less real: issues of identity have always had the power to stir and provoke. Migration, too, was a real phenomenon. People in the early Middle Ages moved, at times over long distances and in significant numbers, or on a less articulated basis. The challenge is to disentangle the two and get a sense of how and why they came to be treated together.

This is the first of two chapters that examine the impact and role of the Christian Church in early medieval Britain. Conversion to the new religion is the principal focus here, the central question being how the new faith implanted itself. The subject is one of the best evidenced and most intensively studied themes of this volume, for Christian writers of the period attached great significance to the establishment of their faith, and so took pride in recording its early days. One of the challenges is to evaluate these sources, which often tell us as much about the writers and their own times as the period they represent. Another challenge is to consider what the spread of Christianity meant for the people of early medieval Britain. It signified different things in different places, and for people of higher or lower social standing. Material evidence is one important source for how the religion implanted itself in aspects of day-to-day life, such as burial. Finally, this chapter considers the beliefs that Christianity displaced, how they varied from the new religion and what weight should be assigned to later accounts and accusations of ‘paganism’.