Approaches to Christian and pre-Christian belief in early medieval England have long been restricted by those who have polarised these positions, whether they have sought to uncover Germanic heathenism where there is none to be found, or claimed that the Roman inheritance of the Anglo-Saxons makes it impossible to say much about their pre-Christian religious traditions. Neither of these caricatured positions is likely to offer a representative picture of Anglo-Saxon beliefs and how they changed over the course of the period, because the conversion of the English was not a matter of confrontation between opposing camps. Studies in recent years have shown that the conversion was neither violent nor rapid, but took place via processes of inculturation, syncretism and assimilation.

In the course of the conversion, the worship of pre-Christian gods and numerous other practices were strictly forbidden, and largely forgotten. Many other aspects of pre-Christian belief, however, were to become an integral part of the fabric of early English Christianity. As John Blair has observed:

Whilst various aspects of pre-Christian belief were eliminated, others were to serve as the foundations of English Christianity. These survivals were naturally those which already had established parallels in the Christian tradition, permitting the smooth transfer of Christian concepts onto existing systems of belief. Aspects of what is traditionally described as the ‘natural world’, that were as familiar to those who had written Judaeo-Christian Scripture as they were to heathens in northern Europe, offered an easily identifiable bridge between these two religious traditions. Missionaries were able to take advantage of these similarities, using them to facilitate conversion and prevent apostasy. This book argues that trees and woodland were one such aspect of pre-Christian belief in early medieval England, and that the English conversion took place in such a way that they maintained a broadly similar role in the post-conversion era – not as pagan survivals, but as a fully integrated aspect of early English Christianity.