"Rome attacks the 'Witches' .."the Mother of Christ and her faithful companion, St John" "the Divined Mother"

"Long after the envoys of now ecclesiastical Rome had contrived to extirpate British Christianity - that early and still-pure Faith which had been carried to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea (and by, some say, even the Mother of Christ and her faithful companion, St John) - Roman Christianity grudgingly allowed a claim by the British bishops that this introduction of Christianity by a Disciple of the Lord gave the bishops precedence over those of any other branch of the Church.

A sentimental tolerance for this claim had softened Roman opinion towards primitive British
Christianity, but when Rome reappeared on British shores in AD 597, no such sentimental tolerance had developed, and it was with the firm intention of 'converting' British Christianity to the Roman obedience by any means, not excluding force, that Augustine and his companions landed in Kent.

As it happened, the 'conversion' did not exclude force. Moving very much as the pagan Romans of Suetonius had moved against the Druids - and in almost the same part of Britain - the agents of the Roman Church moved against the great Abbey of Bangor, centre of Christianity, killed six hundred of its monks, and destroyed a library rivalling in size and importance those of Pergamum or Alexandria.

Small excuses are needed to effect large charges: like the wolf in the fable, Augustine used any - and the smallest - excuse to do what he had intended to do from setting out on his 'civilising' mission. With him, Augustine brought Pope Gregory's orders to the British bishops that they should put themselves under the direction of Augustine. But, as the British bishops had never accepted the claim of the Bishop of Rome to speak for, and make the rules for, all Christians, they refused to accept the orders.

A second meeting provided Augustine with his needed excuse to go against these semi-heretics; when the British bishops entered the meeting-hall, Augustine did not rise, and, offended by this discourtesy, the bishops promptly walked out. It was now Augustine's turn to be offended - at the bishops' temerity in taking offence! - and ten years later, Aethelfrith, King of Northumbria, a 'distinguished convert' to the Roman faith, moved against Bangor. Small differences between the British and Roman practices offered, after the massacre, no difficulties in 'ironing out'. The adoption of the Roman method of calculating the date of Easter; the adoption of the Roman form of tonsure for priests and monks, the substitution of certain British ritual forms by the Roman equivalents - all these were accepted by British Christians who had not failed to profit by the lesson in 'frightfulness' provided at Bangor. Now remained the Old Religion.

We are so used today to living as the subjects or citizens of multi-million-population countries that it is not easy to visualise a world in which 'independent sovereign states' were to be counted in their hundreds.

It was easy not so very long ago - say until about 1806, when Napoleon the Great began the first important unifying of Europe since Charlemagne had tried to recreate the Roman Empire a thousand years earlier. When Napoleon set about the unification of Germany there were no fewer than six hundred states in Germany alone; some big - as Prussia, Bavaria and Hanover; some small, and many even smaller; principalities, duchies, margravates, landgravates, counties, baronies, prince-bishoprics, as Cologne, Osnaburg and Wurtzburg"

Source and More
http://tikaboo.com/library/Harrison.Michael.The.Roots.of.Witchcraft.eBook-EEn.pdf