"The disputes, excited in Britain, were of the most ridiculous kind,
and entirely worthy of those ignorant and barbarous ages.
There were some intricacies, observed by all the Christian churches,
in adjusting the day of keeping Easter; which depended on a
complicated consideration of the course of the sun and moon; and it
happened that the missionaries, who had converted the Scots and
Britons, had followed a different calendar from that which was
observed at Rome, in the age when Augustine converted the Saxons.
The priests also of all the Christian churches were accustomed to
shave part of their head; but the form given to this tonsure was
different in the former from what was practised in the latter.
[...]
These controversies had, from the beginning, excited such animosity
between the British and Romish priests that, instead of concurring in
their endeavors to convert the idolatrous Saxons, they refused all
communion together, and each regarded his opponent as no better than a
pagan.
The dispute lasted more than a century; and was at last finished, not
by men's discovering the folly of it, which would have been too great
an effort for human reason to accomplish, but by the entire prevalence
of the Romish ritual over the Scotch and British."