Church of England

The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England, the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the oldest among the communion's thirty-eight independent national churches. The Church of England considers itself to be both Catholic and reformed: The Church of England traces its formal corporate history from the 597 Augustinian mission, stresses its continuity and identity with the primitive universal Western church, and notes the consolidation of its particular independent and national character in the post-Reformation events of Tudor England. According to tradition, Christianity arrived in Britain in the first or second century (probably via the tin trade route through Ireland and Iberia), and existed independently of the Church of Rome, as did many other Christian communities of that era. Records note British bishops, such as Restitutus in attendance at the Council of Arles in 314, and, even more significantly, Britain was the home of... full article at wikipedia