700 as well as a 9th-century life by a Roman writer. The early Life of Gregory is generally believed to have been based on oral traditions brought to northern England from either Canterbury or Rome, and was completed at Whitby Abbey between 704 and 714. This view has been challenged by the historian Alan Thacker, who argues that the Life derives from earlier written works; Thacker suggests that much of the information it contains comes from a work written in Rome shortly after Gregory's death. Gregory's entry in the Liber Pontificalis is short and of little use, but he himself was a writer whose work sheds light on the mission. In addition, over 850 of Gregory's letters survive. A few later writings, such as letters from Boniface, an 8th-century Anglo-Saxon missionary, and royal letters to the papacy from the late 8th century, add additional detail. Some of these letters are only preserved in Bede's work. Bede represented the native British church as wicked and sinful. In order to explain why Britain was conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, he drew on the polemic of Gildas and developed it further in his own works. Although he found some native British clergy worthy of praise he nevertheless condemned them for their failure to convert the invaders and for their resistance to Roman ecclesiastical authority. This bias may have resulted in his understating British missionary activity. Bede was from the north of England, and this may have led to a bias towards events near his own lands. Bede was writing over a hundred years after the events he was recording with little contemporary information on the actual conversion efforts. Nor did Bede completely divorce his account of the missionaries from his own early 8th-century concerns. Although a few hagiographies, or saints' biographies, about native British saints survive from the period of the mission, none describes native Christians as active missionaries amongst the Anglo-Saxons. Most of the information about the British church at this time is concerned with the western regions of the island of Great Britain and does not deal with the Gregorian missionaries. Other sources of information include Bede's chronologies, the set of laws issued by Æthelberht in Kent, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was compiled in the late 9th century. Gregory the Great and his motivations Immediate background In 595, when Pope Gregory I decided to send a mission to the Anglo-Saxons, the