The victory by the Winwaed left Oswy undoubtedly the mightiest king in Britain. It may be convenient to enumerate here the chief territorial changes during the latter half of the seventh century which can be discerned between the succession of bishops and the miracles of saints that form naturally the chief subject of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.

1. Northumbria, at any rate after Oswy’s victory, may have stretched along the eastern coast from Aberdeen or the Cromarty Firth nearly to the Wash. We are distinctly told that “he subdued the nation of the Picts or at least the largest part of them to the Anglian kingdom,” and it is generally agreed that this must refer to the Picts north of the Firth of Forth, which was at this time the ordinary Anglian boundary. Southward, the dominions of which Oswy was overlord probably now included the whole of Yorkshire. It seems, however, to have been an accepted principle that when the overlord was king in Bernicia there must be an under-king in Deira. For seven years, as we have seen, the comely and gracious Oswin, either as equal colleague or as such under-king, reigned in Deira (644–51). After his murder and the consequent extinction of the direct male line of the descendants of Aelle, Oswald’s son, Ethelwald, ruled over the southern kingdom. Did his dubious conduct on the battle-plain of the Winwaed fail to secure for him the favour of his victorious uncle? We cannot say, but it is an ominous circumstance that soon after that event he vanishes from the scene and is replaced by Alchfrid, son of Oswy by his first marriage. We have heard of this prince as assisting in the conversion of his brother-in-law, Peada, to Christianity; we have seen him fighting by his father’s side against his father-in-law, Penda; we shall find him taking a leading part in the discussions about the date of Easter and generally befriending the Roman party; but besides these facts we hear also of some action on his part, possibly in the way of overt rebellion, whereby he added to the “labours” of his father. Whatever the date of this rebellion, if such it were, after 664 we hear no more of Alchfrid.

The mystery, however, that hangs over the life and death of Alchfrid almost heightens the interest which is attached to a monument raised to his memory, the celebrated Bewcastle Cross. There in the midst of a wide and desolate moor, as desolate, perhaps, now as it was twelve hundred years ago, rises an obelisk fourteen and a half feet high, once surmounted by a cross which has now disappeared, bearing in Runic letters the sacred name “Gessus Christus” (so must our Anglian ancestors have spoken of the Saviour), and an inscription which, though not yet deciphered beyond dispute, certainly says that the stone was raised as a memorial of “Alchfrith, son of Oswy, and aforetime King”. Other runes give us the names of Alchfrid’s wife, Cyneburga, of her sister (?) Cyneswitha, and of her brother Wulfhere, King of Mercia. An inscription seems to record that it was reared in the first year of his brother Egfrid, that is in 670. This date gives additional interest to the quaint but not ungraceful specimens of Anglian art with which the obelisk is enriched, to the flowing tracery of vine-leaves and grape-clusters, the birds and dogs, the figures of John the Baptist and our Lord, and (in the lowest compartment of all) the standing figure of a man with a bird on his wrist, perhaps King Alchfrid himself with his falcon. Even should the reading of one line of the inscription, “Pray for his soul’s great sin,” prove too fanciful to be accepted by future students, we have in the other utterances of this monument enough to invest with a peculiar interest the name of Oswy’s son and Penda’s son-in-law.

After the death of this prince, two younger sons of Oswy are spoken of on somewhat doubtful authority as successively holding the position of Deiran under-kings. It seems clear that there was in the two provinces, Bernicia and Deira, a certain reluctance to coalesce, an unwillingness of each to submit to the king chosen by the other, which it is not difficult to understand. Whatever may have been its cause, this tendency to estrangement between its two great provinces had doubtless something to do with the early downfall of Northumbria.

The southern boundary of Oswy’s kingdom was at this time a somewhat uncertain one. In the first place, what is now the county of Lincoln, or, as it was then called, Lindissi, was for generations the regular prize of war between Northumbria and Mercia. It was added to his dominions by the victorious Edwin, and if lost through his defeat by Penda, it was recovered by Oswald, but, as we have seen, so little was his yoke beloved that the monks of Bardney in Lincolnshire at first refused to give shelter to his bones. Under Penda it was doubtless again annexed to Mercia, and probably shared the fortunes of that middle kingdom until, between 671 and 675, it was recovered from Wulfhere, son of Penda, by Oswy’s son and successor, Egfrid. It was once more regained for Mercia by Ethelred, probably about the year 679, and apparently never after owned the sway of a Northumbrian king.

2. After the victory of the Winwaed, Oswy seems to have been virtually master of Mercia. He continued his son-in-law, Peada, as under-king of Southern Mercia, that is the part of the kingdom south of the river Trent, but he apparently kept Northern Mercia in his own hands. In the spring of the following year, however, at the very time when the newly converted nation was celebrating the Easter festival, Peada was murdered, and dark suspicions prevailed that his young Christian wife was an accomplice in the crime. It is not hinted that Oswy himself had instigated the deed, but doubtless the horror of it added to the dislike with which the people of Mercia viewed the Northumbrian rule. Three years after old Penda’s death, three of his veteran generals successfully conspired against the Northerner, brought out of his hiding-place a young son of their late master, named Wulfhere, whom they had till then successfully concealed, expelled Oswy’s thanes, and restored the independence of the Mercian kingdom, apparently with its old boundaries. The new king Wulfhere was a zealous Christian—as indeed, strange to say, were all the children of Penda—and reigned for seventeen years well and gloriously (659–675). We hear of no attempt by Oswy to recover his supremacy over Mercia, although, as we have seen, his son did recover that shuttle-cock of battle, Lindsey. Wulfhere’s chief wars seem to have been with the Kings of Wessex, over whom he won several victories. The extent of his power is most clearly shown by the fact that having formed a friendship with Ethelwalh, King of the South Saxons, and persuaded him to be baptised, he handed over to him the Isle of Wight and the district occupied by the Meonwaras in the east of Hampshire, which he had wrested from the King of Wessex. The son of Penda officiated as godfather to the new convert, whose example in accepting the Christian faith was followed by many of his thanes and soldiers, but not as yet by the bulk of the South Saxon people.

3. Of political events in the kingdom of the East Angles in the period now under review, we find scarcely a trace. Shut off from the rest of England by the great fen-lands, which covered almost the whole of the modern counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon, East Anglia seems to have generally kept the even tenour of her own solitary way, which was at this time the way of holiness. If we may judge of the people from their rulers, we should be inclined to conjecture that, under the influence of the preaching of Felix and Fursa, this isolated district of England was passing through a phase of religious fervour like that which made its counties the stronghold of Lollardy in the fourteenth, and of Puritanism in the seventeenth centuries, sending at the latter period so many stern enthusiasts to fight in the new-modelled army of Cromwell. Of course, in the seventh century religious zeal took a direction which would have brought it into fierce collision with the Ironsides of Naseby and Marston Moor. All the fairest fruits of Christianity at this time were ripened in the cloister, and a monastic life seems to have had irresistible attractions for the ladies of the royal East Anglian race. King Anna, who, as we have seen, fell in battle against Penda in the year 654, left three daughters, two of whom were the wives of kings, but all of whom ended their lives as abbesses in a convent, and in the next generation two daughters of one of these saintly ladies (one of them also a queen consort) followed their mother’s example.

4. Very different at one time was the religious history of the kingdom of the East Saxons, represented by the two modern counties of Essex and Middlesex. When we last heard of the affairs of this little kingdom Mellitus had been contemptuously driven forth from his episcopal seat in London because he refused to administer the white bread of the communion to the heathen sons of King Saberct (617?). Since that time a generation had passed away, and Essex was still heathen. The king now reigning in London—one of the many Sigeberts who about this time perplex the student of Anglo-Saxon pedigrees—was, we are told, a friend and a frequent visitor to Oswy of Northumbria. In the halls of Bamburgh and Ad Murum the conversation often turned on religious subjects; and “How,” said the Northumbrian king, “can you think that these things are gods, which are made by the hands of men? You take a piece of wood or stone, and what is not needed for the purpose of idol-making you either burn in the fire or shape into some common household utensil which, when it is done with, is pitched out of doors and trodden under foot of men. How can these things be divine? We must think of the true God as incomprehensible, unseen, omnipotent, eternal, the righteous ruler of the world, who does not dwell in perishable substances but has His eternal seat on high. We can understand, too, that the beings whom He has created, if they will learn His will and do it, shall receive from Him eternal rewards.” Many dialogues of this kind at last produced an effect. The East Saxon king was baptised by Finan of Lindisfarne, Aidan’s successor, at the same royal villa of Ad Murum which had witnessed the baptism of Peada, the Mercian. Returning to his own kingdom he sought to bring his subjects over to his new faith and sent to Oswy for a missionary (653). Hereupon Cedd, one of a family of zealous Northumbrian converts who had been preaching Christianity in Mercia, was recalled from his work in the Midlands and sent to Essex, where he carried on a most successful mission, was consecrated as bishop, and, apparently for the first time, founded the church of London on a secure basis. Sigebert, however, was slain after a reign of some years by two noblemen of his kindred who were offended by his meek submission to the counsels of the bishop, and after one intervening reign,71 two kings named Sighere and Sebbi reigned over the East Saxons jointly, but always in subjection to the overlordship of Wulfhere, King of Mercia, whose “sphere of influence” evidently included all the south of England with the doubtful exception of Wessex.

The accession of these two kings probably took place soon after 660, but dates as well as accurate pedigrees are grievously wanting for all this portion of history. In 664 a terrible pestilence, which ravaged Essex as well as all the rest of England, shook the newly-born faith of the people and divided their rulers. Sighere and all his subjects openly apostatised from the faith of Christ, sought out the old half-ruined heathen fanes, and began once more to worship the idols replaced therein. Sebbi, on the other hand, and the men under his sway remained steadfast in their profession of Christianity. Nor does the relapse into heathenism of the other half of the kingdom seem to have been of long continuance. The zeal of the overlord Wulfhere soon remedied that error. He sent his Mercian bishop, Jaruman, on a mission to the East Saxons, the third which had been despatched to that wavering people, and Jaruman, backed by the authority of his sovereign, without much difficulty overturned once more the idol-altars and brought back the recalcitrant East Saxons within the embraces of the Church. From this time onwards London, its bishops and its commerce become of ever-increasing importance in the pages of the historians.

5. The political history of Kent during this period offers little of interest. The king whose name figures most largely in the pages of Bede is Erconbert (640–64). He married Sexburh, daughter of Anna, one of the devout East Anglian family, and, partly perhaps owing to her influence, Church and State were more closely welded together in this than in any of the other kingdoms. “He was the first of all the English kings who by his princely authority ordered the idols throughout his kingdom to be abandoned and destroyed, and the fast of the forty days [of Lent] to be observed. And in order that these commands might be despised by none, he proclaimed fit and proper punishments against the transgressors.” Thus in Kent we have reached the second stage in the establishment of Christianity, which is now no longer merely tolerated or approved by the sovereign but dominant and in a certain sense persecuting.

6. The obscure history of the South Saxon kingdom has been already touched upon in connexion with that of Mercia. Suffice it to remind the reader that under the protecting hand of the great Midland king, who evidently wished to make of this kingdom a counterpoise to the power of Wessex, it included not only the modern county of Sussex but also the Isle of Wight and a good deal of the east of Hampshire; and that though its royal family were Christian the bulk of the people remained idolators. This religious isolation of the South Saxon people is generally attributed to the fact already alluded to, that they were separated from the rest of England by the mighty forest of the Andredeswald, that “dark impenetrable wood” which yielded in later ages to the axes of the charcoal-burners of Sussex and Kent, so that the country which we call the Weald is now left comparatively bare and treeless. It is hard for us who now know the chief town of the coast of Sussex as virtually a suburb of London, to imagine the time when Sussex, isolated in its heathen barbarism, remained virtually another world to the inhabitants of Essex and Middlesex.

7. The history of the West Saxon kingdom, for which such a brilliant future was reserved in the coming generations, is for the seventh century obscure and uninteresting. Partly, of course, this may be accounted for by the fact that our one transcendent authority for this period, Bede, is himself a most patriotic Northumbrian, and cares little for distant Wessex. But even after making allowance for this weighting of one of the scales, it is impossible not to recognise the fact that in the West Saxon line during the greater part of the seventh century we meet with no such powerful personalities as Edwin, Oswald, and Oswy, nor do we find there any symptoms which would have warranted a beholder in looking for the eventual appearance of the splendid figures of Alfred, Edward, and Athelstan.

As we have seen, the fortunes of Wessex in her conflict with Mercia were at this time generally unprosperous. In 628 there was the disastrous war with Mercia. Then came the preaching of Birinus, the baptism and death of Cynegils and his son, the accession of the still heathen Cenwalh and his expulsion by his enraged brother-in-law of Mercia. He returned, perhaps, on the invitation of his kinsman Cuthred, to whom he made an enormous grant of property (3,000 “lands” or hides) at Ashdown in Berkshire. Having embraced Christianity in his exile, he completed the conversion of Wessex to the new faith. Unsuccessful as he seems generally to have been in his wars with Mercia, he met with better fortune in his campaigns against the southern Britons. In 652 we are told that he fought—assuredly with the “Walas,” though this is not expressly stated—at Bradford-upon-Avon. He thus apparently completed the conquest of Wiltshire, and it may well have been within a generation after Cenwalh’s victory that Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, built that quaint little church, dedicated to St. Lawrence, which still stands overlooking the south-country Bradford, and which is nearly the best surviving monument of true Saxon architecture. Six years later (658) Cenwalh again fought with the Welsh at Peonnum (or the Pens, generally identified with Pensel Wood on the south-eastern border of Somerset), and this time we are distinctly told that he drove them as far as the river Parret. The larger half of the county of Somerset thus became definitively West Saxon, and the far-famed sanctuary of Glastonbury and the poetic valley of Avalon now owned the sway of a king who, though a Saxon, was also a Christian.

An important acquisition certainly: yet the very fact that it had still to be made, illustrates the extremely gradual character of the Saxon conquest of Britain. Two hundred years have now elapsed since the accepted date of the landing of Hengest, one hundred and seventy since Cerdic, one of the latest of the invaders, set foot on the shore of Southampton Water, and yet the West Saxons have only just crossed the Mendip Hills; nearly half of Somerset and the whole of Devonshire and Cornwall have yet to be won. The other records of the reign of Cenwalh relate to his battles, generally unsuccessful, with the Mercian kings. His fellow-Christian, young Wulfhere, ravaged what was left of West Saxon territory north of the Thames, as far as Ashdown. While the territory of Wessex had been in some degree growing towards the west, it was, as we have already seen, curtailed towards the east by the loss of the district of the Meonwaras and the Isle of Wight which were handed over by Wulfhere to Sussex. Altogether there was little in the fortunes of the West Saxon dynasty under Cenwalh, or under the obscure rulers who followed him, to betoken that the hegemony would one day be theirs. When towards the end of the century Caedwalla and Ine appear upon the scene, the prospect somewhat brightens, but the victories of the first and the laws of the second must be dealt with in a later chapter.

From this brief review of the relations of the various English kingdoms to one another towards the close of the seventh century, it will be abundantly evident how far we yet were from anything like national unity. There does not even seem to be any dawning feeling of fellowship of race. Angle wages with Angle and Saxon with Saxon a long and embittered warfare; and more than once a Mercian or West Saxon king avails himself of British help to win the victory over his kinsfolk. If Anglo-Saxon unity was at length obtained, and we know that it was not till far on in the tenth century that it was even approximately realised, this result was due undoubtedly to two great causes: the influence of the national Christian Church and the necessity of self-defence against the Scandinavian invaders. With the first of these causes alone we have here to deal. It cannot be doubted that zeal for their new-born Christian faith was already in some measure drawing the English kings together. When Oswald of Bernicia stood sponsor for West Saxon Cynegils, when his brother Oswy persuaded East Saxon Sigebert to forsake the follies of idolatry, a moral bond of union was formed, which might be developed into a political relationship. The consciousness of common interest in the Civitas Dei might well become, and eventually did become, a consciousness of fellow-citizenship in one great country.

In order however that the Church might exert this unifying influence on English politics it was essential that she should be of one mind herself; but at this time the unfortunate division between the Roman and the Celtic Churches on the utterly unimportant questions of the shape of the tonsure and the right calculation of Easter did much to prevent so desirable a consummation. Utterly unimportant they seem to us, and probably few ecclesiastics of any school of thought would now deny their triviality; but there is a well-known law of theological dynamics that the bitterness of feeling between rival Churches is in inverse proportion to the magnitude of the issues between them; and so it proved at this crisis. Owing to the different quarters from which the different English kingdoms had received their Christianity, the religious map of England was divided in the following manner. Kent and East Anglia were firm in their following of Rome. Wessex also, which had been won for Christianity by Birinus, was steadily, though perhaps not enthusiastically, Roman. Bernicia, till late in the reign of Oswy, clung firmly to the teachings of Iona. Deira seems to have been generally on the same side, though the remembrance of the teaching of Paulinus, kept alive, as it was, by the teaching of his follower James the Deacon, had probably modified the strength of its Celticism; and Alchfrid the king, influenced by the persuasions of his friend Cenwalh, King of Wessex, had embraced with fervour the party of Rome. Mercia and Essex, both of which had been evangelised by Northumbrian missionaries, seem to have been somewhat half-hearted in their adherence to the Celtic traditions.

Such being the condition of things, Oswy, in conjunction with his son and colleague, Alchfrid, convoked in the year 664 a synod at Streanæshalch to discuss the thorny question of the difference between the Churches. The place was well fitted to be the scene of a memorable meeting. Its Saxon name, which, according to Bede, signified lighthouse-bay, well indicates that conspicuous cliff on the Yorkshire coast which we now know so well by the more common-place name of Whitby, given to it some three centuries later by its Danish destroyers and rebuilders. Hither, to this wind-beaten rock, had the holy Hilda, great-niece of Edwin of Deira, removed her convent from the more northern Hartlepool; and here she dwelt, ruling her double monastery of monks and nuns in all gentleness and purity, while the little Elfleda, Oswy’s youngest daughter, whom he had vowed to God on the eve of his great battle with Penda, was growing up under her tuition into all the virtues of a perfect nun, and preparing to take her place one day as abbess of the convent. To the student of English literature Whitby monastery is for ever memorable as the home of the first English poet, Caedmon, who there, while sitting in the cow-byre, received the command from a heavenly visitor to sing “the beginning of things, the going forth out of Egypt, the suffering and the resurrection of the Lord”.

At this place, then, all that was eminent for holiness in the infant Church of Northumbria came together to discuss the then all-important question of the true date for the keeping of Easter. However uninteresting from a religious point of view this question may now appear, the practical inconvenience of its unsettled condition was clearly seen in the household of King Oswy. Here was he, following the Celtic usage, celebrating his Easter feast on the fourteenth day of the lunar month which included the vernal equinox, while his wife, Eanfled, daughter of Edwin and granddaughter of Ethelbert of Kent, refused to recognise as a possible Easter any Sunday earlier than the fifteenth of the same month. Hence it might possibly happen, nay, in the very next year after the council it actually would have happened, that in the very same palace the king would be celebrating Easter Sunday with all the feasting and the gladness which were considered the suitable accompaniments of the day of the Lord’s resurrection, while the queen and all the holy men and women of her party would be sitting in the sadness of Lent preparing to follow in imagination the Dolorous Way by which on the successive days of Passion week the Saviour would be led up to the crowning grief of Calvary. The difference, as the fair-minded Bede is careful to explain, was not the same as that which separated the so-called Quarto-decimans from the Western Church, and which was finally condemned at the Council of Nicæa. That party, adhering strictly to the Jewish usage, celebrated Easter at the same time as the old Passover on “the fourteenth day of the first month,” on whatever day of the week that day might happen to fall. Not so, however, with the sons of Iona. Columba, Aidan and all the saints of the old Celtic Church remembered the Crucifixion on a Friday and the Resurrection on a Sunday, whether those days fell on the fourteenth or sixteenth of the lunar month or not. Thus the correct date for the Christian seasons for both parties had to be arrived at by a compromise between the week reckoning and the month reckoning; the only question at issue being the form of that compromise and the limits of permitted deviation. The Celt contended that the pendulum must swing between the fourteenth and the twentieth days of the moon’s age; while the Roman ecclesiastic allowed it to swing only between the fifteenth and the twenty-first. A small difference truly to cause such long and heated arguments, yet, as we have seen, where a house was divided against itself on this question, it might occasion no little practical inconvenience.

There was much that was illogical and unscientific in the arguments on both sides of the controversy. The fathers from Iona were fond of appealing to the authority of the beloved Apostle John, which, so far as it proved anything, proved not their contention but that of the old, universally condemned Quarto-decimans. The supporters of the Roman usage loudly asserted the necessity of following St. Peter, who certainly cannot be proved, nor can with much probability be even conjectured, to have ever expressed an opinion on the point at issue between the Churches. Much stress did they also lay on the unchanging custom of the Roman Church, whereas that Church had in fact shown its good sense by modifying its calendar in some important particulars in deference to the calculations of the more scientific fathers of Alexandria. Doubtless the real arguments, appealing to the heart rather than to the head, were on the one side the remembrance of saintly Christian lives, such as those of Columba and Aidan, producing a natural reluctance to admit that such men had lived and died in grievous error; and on the other side a feeling of impatience that the inhabitants of a few rocky islands in the wild Atlantic should set their judgment against the richly endowed and stately Churches of Paris, Arles and Vienne, of Milan and of Rome.

On the Celtic side of the controversy were ranged the saintly Hilda herself, and Colman, Bishop of Lindisfarne, who, after the short intervening episcopate of Finan, had succeeded to the dignity held by the universally venerated Aidan. It was probably hoped, too, that King Oswy would be a stout defender of the usages which he and his brothers had learned in their long boyish banishment at Iona. On the other side, eager for union with Canterbury and Rome, stood Eanfled, the queen, and her step-son, Alchfrid of Deira. There, too, was James the Deacon, the follower of Paulinus, who for thirty-one years had maintained the cause of Roman Christianity in Deira. Highest in ecclesiastical rank on this side was Agilbert the Frank, Bishop of Dorchester, a learned man who had studied for some years in Ireland—then a great centre of theological study—but had apparently not cared to add the knowledge of Anglo-Saxon to his other accomplishments, for we are told that Cenwalh, King of Wessex, once his friend and admirer, growing weary at length of his “barbarous” way of talking, planted down at Winchester a rival bishop who could talk with him in Saxon. This gave Agilbert such offence that he resigned his diminished see of Dorchester, and returned to Gaul, where he was appointed Bishop of Paris. That migration was, however, yet in the future, and it was still as Bishop of the West Saxons, though possibly of the divided see, that Agilbert appeared to support his sovereign’s friend, Alchfrid, in the great controversy. The hint about Agilbert’s “barbarous” Frankish language is especially interesting to the philologer as showing how widely the language of the Franks, probably from its admixture with degenerate Latin, was beginning to diverge from the kindred Anglo-Saxon. Two generations previously at the court of Ethelbert, the Kentish courtiers seem to have conversed without difficulty with the companions of their Frankish queen.

When all were seated, King Oswy arose and made a speech on the need for unity of practice between men who were all seeking the same heavenly kingdom. Let them inquire which was the true rule for the calculation of Easter, and all follow that. He then called on his own bishop, Colman, to set forth the reason for his rule. Colman replied with the usual reference to the holiness of his predecessors and to the authority of the beloved Apostle John. Bishop Agilbert being called upon to reply, acutely conscious of his inability to speak in the English tongue, prayed that the task of replying might be assigned to one of his disciples, named Wilfrid the presbyter, who fully shared all his opinions and could clearly set them forth in the king’s own language without the intervention of an interpreter.

Herewith there stepped on to the stage of English history an actor who was never to be long absent thence through more than forty troublous years. Wilfrid, who was now about thirty years of age, was the son of a Northumbrian thegn, a youth brought up in the rude luxury of a rich Anglian’s hall, with horses, armour and goodly raiment at his disposal; but at the age of fourteen a harsh step-mother in his home, and some instinct of aspiration after a holier life, sent him to Lindisfarne, where he learned much, but gradually became dissatisfied with the Celtic position of isolation from Rome. Queen Eanfled, encouraging his disaffection, assisted him to visit the court of her cousin, Erconbert of Kent, from whence in his twentieth year he set out for Rome. On his way through Gaul the bright and handsome Northumbrian had offers of worldly preferment and a rich marriage from the Archbishop of Lyons, but refusing all such worldly advantages, he pressed on to “the tombs of the apostles”. Though to the reader of the pontifical annals, Rome in the middle of the seventh century, with its Monotheletic controversy and its Lombard wars, may not seem a very inspiring theme, it is clear that the great world-city, with its stately ruins and statelier church-organisation, exerted a powerful fascination over the mind of the young Northumbrian, and during all the rest of his life we find him, like another Loyola, staunch in his resolve to live or die for the defence of the Holy See. He learned from a certain Archdeacon Boniface “the daily lessons from the four gospels, the reasonable mode of calculating Easter, and many other things relating to the discipline of the Church of which he had been ignorant in his own country,” and then returning through Gaul he again visited his friend, the Archbishop of Lyons, and received from him the monastic tonsure. The archbishop was still minded to make him his heir, and apparently with some such expectation Wilfrid remained for three years in attendance upon him. By one of those reverses of fortune to which the courtier-prelates of Merovingian Gaul were frequently subject, Wilfrid’s patron lost both office and life, and Wilfrid himself narrowly, and only on account of his foreign origin, escaped sharing his doom.72 Returning at last (in 658), after long wanderings, to his native Deira, he there found Alchfrid reigning, a man like-minded with himself in his preference of Rome to Iona. He settled eventually in a monastery at Ripon, from which Eata, friend and pupil of Aidan, had been expelled on account of his adherence to the Celtic usages by the hotly partisan king. Here Wilfrid, a year before the convocation of the synod, had been ordained as priest by Bishop Agilbert and installed as abbot of the monastery, which seems to have been to the end of his days the most dearly loved of his homes.

Such was the man, already well versed in the Paschal controversy, and deeply tinged with the Roman and Gaulish contempt for the religion of the Hebrides, to whom the grateful task was assigned of demolishing the arguments of Colman. “The Easter which we observe,” said he, “is that which I myself have seen celebrated at Rome, home and burial-place of the two great apostles. Wheresoever I journeyed, intent on learning and on prayer, throughout Italy and Gaul I found this feast celebrated. This feast, Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, nay, and the whole Christian world through all its various nations and languages do observe, save only these two obstinate nations, the Picts and the Britons (inhabitants of the two furthest isles in the ocean and of only a part even of them), who do with stupid energy strive against the opinion of the whole world.” So spoke the haughty, foreign-fashioned ecclesiastic; and when we have heard this first tactless utterance of his, we are the better able to understand why all the forty years of his episcopate were more or less passed in strife. Colman plaintively asked if Wilfrid would call the blessed apostle John stupid. Wilfrid replied that St. John like St. Paul might do many things to conciliate Jewish prejudice, and that after all, his usage being that of the earlier Quarto-decimans, did not coincide with the Celtic Easter which must always fall on a Sunday. “No,” he ended, “you who shut out the 21st day of the moon from your calculation, agree neither with John nor with Peter, neither with the Law nor with the Gospel.”

The debate then drifted off into a discussion of “the cycle of Anatolius,”73 and an appeal by Colman to the virtues of Columba and his successors who had kept the Celtic Easter. “Surely,” he pleaded, “the miracles which they had wrought showed that their teaching was acceptable in the sight of God.” “I do not deny,” answered Wilfrid, “that these men of whom you thus speak were God’s servants. I think that if any Catholic calculator had come to them and taught them the better way, they would have obeyed his monitions. And however holy your, or I would rather say our, Columba may have been, however mighty in signs and wonders, can you prefer his authority to that of the blessed Prince of the Apostles, to whom the Lord said, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven’?” As Wilfrid made this closing quotation the king turned to Colman and said: “Is it true that these words were spoken by the Lord to Peter?” “It is true, O king!” was the answer. “Can you produce any instance of a similar power conferred on your Columba?” “We have none,” answered Colman. Said the king: “Do both parties agree without controversy on this point, that these words were spoken pre-eminently to Peter and that to him the keys of heaven were granted by the Lord?” Both answered: “We do”. Thereupon the king thus announced his conclusion: “Then I say to you that this is the door-keeper whom I am loth to contradict, and whose ordinances I desire to obey to the utmost of my power, lest haply when I arrive at the doors of the kingdom there shall be none to open them unto me if I have lost the favour of him who keeps the keys thereof”.

The Bernician king evidently conceived of heaven as of a Northumbrian palace hall: and not unnaturally he, who knew his hands to be stained with the blood of his gracious kinsman Oswin, desired to enlist the sympathies of the most powerful patron possible on his side against the day when he should have to plead for entrance therein. Oswy’s decision was, of course, final. All over Northumberland the Roman customs as to Easter and the tonsure now prevailed. Bishop Colman, who could not reconcile himself to the new ways, abdicated his see and returned to Iona, accompanied by all the Irish monks from Lindisfarne and by thirty Anglian brethren who shared their opinions. From Iona he afterwards went to Ireland and founded a monastery on an island off the coast of Mayo, which had not a very successful career. Cedd, bishop of the East Saxons, who had acted as interpreter and to some extent as mediator between the two parties, accepted the decision of the synod, and returned to enforce it in London and the rest of his diocese. Everywhere now throughout Teutonic Britain unity with Rome was established, and little more than a century elapsed before all the Celtic communities in Iona, in Ireland, even in sturdy recalcitrant Wales, had adopted the Roman Easter and the coronal tonsure.74

The change was one which probably ought upon the whole to be considered beneficial. Unity was the thing now most needed, both politically and ecclesiastically, and unity had to be achieved by the State through the Church. It was, therefore, well that this pebble, which broke the full flow of the stream towards unity, should be removed out of the way by the synod of Whitby. It was well, also, that there should be no hindrance to free and full intercourse between the ecclesiastics of England and those of the continent. True, the civilisation of Italy and Gaul in the seventh century was nothing to boast of. To Cicero or to Marcus Aurelius it would have seemed like barbarism: but it was superior to the barbarism of the Saxon, perhaps in some respects superior even to the undoubtedly high civilisation, at this time, of Celtic Tara and Armagh. Still it was not all gain that resulted from the decision of the synod of Whitby and the rupture of the spiritual bond that had bound Lindisfarne to Iona. Even Bede, with all his loyalty to Rome and abhorrence of the Celtic Easter, seems to feel this fact; else why does he introduce just at this point an eloquent panegyric on the simple life of Colman and his predecessors, their genuine poverty and the faithfulness with which they at once handed to the poor any money which they received from the rich? “At that time the religious habit was held in great veneration, so that wheresoever cleric or monk appeared, he was joyfully welcomed by all as the servant of God; those who met him on the road with bent necks rejoiced to receive the blessing of his lips or of his extended hand: they listened eagerly to his words of exhortation. The priests and clerics of that day had no care for anything else but preaching, baptising, visiting the sick—in a word, for the salvation of souls. So utterly were they delivered from the poison of avarice, that no one of them would receive land or presents even for the building of monasteries, unless absolutely compelled to do so by secular rulers.” In these and similar sentences Bede hints at the degeneracy of his own times and seems to mourn that more of the spirit of Iona had not lingered in the Anglian Church. In Columba, Aidan, Colman and their disciples, as has been already said, we seem to see something of that absolute indifference to wealth, that kinship with Nature and her children, that almost passionate love for Poverty and the Poor which, six centuries later, was to shed a halo round the head of Francis of Assisi. These men were zealous missionaries, “humble and holy men of heart”: the men who were about to replace them in the organised and regularly affiliated Church, though by no means devoid of missionary zeal, nor of the spirit of self-denial, were before all, great ecclesiastics and lordly rulers of the Church.

The year 664 which witnessed the assembling of the synod at Whitby was, for other reasons, a sadly memorable one to the English nation. In that year, on May 1, there was a total eclipse of the sun, and this, to the unscientific minds of our ancestors, seemed to be in some mysterious way connected with a terrible visitation of pestilence which, apparently in the summer and autumn, swept over our island, beginning at the southern shore and from thence passing northward till it reached Northumbria, and crossed over into Ireland; everywhere carrying off multitudes of people. On July 14, Erconbert, King of Kent, and Deusdedit, archbishop, both died within a few hours of each other, apparently smitten by the pestilence. Later on, probably in the same year, Tuda, the new Bishop of Lindisfarne, and Cedd, the interpreter-bishop of the Whitby synod, fell victims to the same wide-wasting enemy. We have already had occasion to notice the effect which this terrible calamity had in causing many of the East Saxons to relapse for a time into idolatry. The stories concerning the plague with which Bede crowds his pages are generally of the edifying death-bed sayings uttered by its victims and the visions of supernal bliss vouchsafed to them before their departure. Intent on these spiritual aspects of the visitation, and not sparing his readers one of the miracles which he had heard of as marking its course, Bede has not recorded any of its physical symptoms as Thucydides has done in his memorable description of the Plague of Athens. We learn, however, from other sources75 that it was intensely infectious, that one of the symptoms was inflamed swellings, and that the faces of the patients were tinged with a ghastly yellow colour. Probably, therefore, it belonged to the same type of disease as the yellow fever which is now so suddenly fatal in tropical countries. We perceive from Bede’s narrative that its force was not expended by the visitation of 664, but that it returned at intervals during the next twenty years, and that there was one outbreak of especial violence in the year 686 from which Bede’s own monastery of Jarrow suffered severely. The coadjutor-abbot Eosterwine of the sister convent of Wearmouth died of the plague in his thirty-seventh year; and at Jarrow the pestilence carried off all the monks who could read or preach or sing the antiphons, save only the abbot Ceolfrid and one little boy whom he had trained. The old man and the child kept up an abridged form of the daily service without the antiphons for one week. Then, as the tears of Ceolfrid had almost prevented him from taking part in this mutilated service, they summoned up courage to sing the whole psalter through, antiphons and all, till at last a full choir had been trained to help them to bear the burden. It is generally believed, though it cannot be proved, that the little boy who thus officiated with Ceolfrid was Bede.

In reading Bede’s Ecclesiastical History it is impossible not to be struck with the especial severity wherewith the plague raged in the monasteries both of men and women. At Lindisfarne, at Ely, at Wearmouth and Jarrow, at Carlisle, at Barking and at Lastingham in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the plague committed great ravages, often carrying off nearly all the inmates. The manager of a modern school or hospital will not be surprised at this, when he remembers that the monastic rule enjoined the use of woollen garments and prohibited linen; that the more ascetically disposed monks or nuns washed themselves only three or four times in the year; and that the monks lay down to rest in the same woollen garments and with the same unloosed shoes which they had worn and in which they had worked throughout the day. This self-denial, especially in the sons and daughters of princely houses, sprang from a noble motive: it had been perhaps originally ordained as a protest against the luxurious life of the young Roman nobility for whom

The Bath and Wine and Women made up life.

But it was none the less a calamity for Europe that an unnatural and unneeded divorce should have been made between Christianity and cleanliness. Sanitary science, during the long medieval centuries and even for some time after they had ended, had little chance of making its way in the world. Exactly one thousand years after the pestilence of 664 were felt the first foreboding symptoms of the Great Plague of London.

There is little else to record as to the reign of Oswy of Bernicia after the departure of the ecclesiastics from Whitby. In consequence of the death of Archbishop Deusdedit, the two Kings of Northumbria and Kent took counsel “concerning the state of the English Church” (this joint action of North and South in an ecclesiastical matter was itself an important event), and decided to send one of the late archbishop’s clergy named Wighard to Rome that he might there be consecrated as his successor. This step was taken probably in the year 667, and though at the time unsuccessful, for Wighard and nearly all his companions died of pestilence soon after their arrival in Rome, it led to important results.

Towards the end of his reign Oswy suffered from declining health. Like so many other kings and ecclesiastics of Anglo-Saxon stock, he desired to go to Rome and, if it might be, end his days there, and he would fain have had Wilfrid, now a consecrated bishop, as guide of his journey. With this view he offered large moneys to the young ecclesiastic—the very offer seems to show the difference between Wilfrid’s character and Aidan’s—but apparently the disease made too rapid progress for the fulfilment of his design. The journey to Rome had to be abandoned; Oswy died on February 15, 671,76 and Egfrid his son, son of Eanfled and grandson of Edwin of Deira, reigned in his stead.