Depending on who is telling the story, accounts differ as to when the priesthood came to the British Isles. Anglicans tend to give this account: Christianity arrived in the British Isles around AD 47 according to Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae. Christians likely entered as metal workers and traders traveling long the tin route between Spain and Ireland. The earliest historical evidence of Christianity among the native Britons is found in the writings of such early Christian Fathers as Tertullian and Origen in the first years of the 3rd century. In the 1st or 2nd century, southern Britain became...