Boniface V (Latin Bonifatius) was a Neapolitan who succeeded Pope Adeodatus I (Deusdedit I, 615–618) — after a substantial 13-month papal vacancy — as Bishop of Rome on December 23, 619. His six-year pontificate is principally significant for the substantial papal encouragement of the Anglo-Saxon Catholic mission that Pope Gregory the Great had begun in 597 under Augustine of Canterbury (see Augustine's entry already in the catalogue).
By the early 620s the Augustinian mission to Anglo-Saxon Britain had successfully established Catholic communities in Kent (Canterbury), Essex (London), and East Anglia, and the mission was beginning its substantial northward expansion into Northumbria under the foundational missionary Paulinus of York (see Paulinus's entry already in the catalogue). Pope Boniface V's substantial papal correspondence — preserved in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (2.10–11) — included foundational letters to King Edwin of Northumbria, to Queen Æthelburh of Kent (Edwin's wife), and to Bishop Paulinus, encouraging the Northumbrian conversion and providing papal-diplomatic support for the mission.
Boniface V's intervention was instrumental in the eventual baptism of King Edwin of Northumbria by Paulinus at York on Easter Sunday, April 12, 627 AD — the foundational moment of Northumbrian Catholic conversion. Boniface himself died at Rome on October 25, 625, 18 months before the Edwin baptism he had so substantially encouraged.