Both Æthelberht and Sæberht died around 616 or 618, causing a crisis for the mission.[4] Sæberht's three sons had not converted to Christianity, and drove Mellitus from London.[27] Bede says that Mellitus was exiled because he refused the brothers' request for a taste of the sacramental bread.[4][notes 3] Whether this occurred immediately after Sæberht's death or later is impossible to determine from Bede's chronology, which has both events in the same chapter but gives neither an exact time frame nor the elapsed time between the two events.[29] The historian N. J. Higham connects the timing of this episode with a change in the "overkingship" from the Christian Kentish Æthelberht to the pagan East Anglian Raedwald, which Higham feels happened after Æthelberht's death. In Higham's view, Sæberht's sons drove Mellitus from London because they had passed from Kentish overlordship to East Anglian, and thus no longer needed to keep Mellitus, who was connected with the Kentish kingdom, in office.[30]
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