The dating clauses of Gregory's letters gave Bede a firm foundation for chronological inferences, but there was no similar foundation in Anglo-Saxon tradition whether the source was Canterbury, Wessex or Northumbria, and it is this gap which creates for us, as it did for Bede, many obscurities in the history of Christianity among the Anglo-Saxons in the decade following Gregory's death in 604. Bede knew that in 604 Augustine consecrated two of his companions as bishops — Mellitus and Justus — but we do not know whence he derived the date and can only guess that it came from Canterbury. He also knew, from the epitaph inscribed on his tomb, that Augustine himself died on 26 May during the reign of King Æthelbert, but he did not know the year. Accepting that Augustine was still alive in 604, we know that he was dead by 610 when Pope Boniface IV addressed letters to his successor, Archbishop Lawrence. Later sources guess at different dates, but Bede did not go beyond his evidence, nor did he attempt to be chronologically precise about a tradition which had reached him of Augustine's relations with some of the bishops of the British church.

The tradition tells how, with the help of King Æthelbert, Augustine summoned the bishops and teachers from the nearest British province to a conference at a place which in Bede's day was called Augustine's Oak and lay on the borders of the Hwicce and the West Saxons.