tell us aught certainly of these, let us follow it.”  Coarser argument told on the crowd.  “None of your people, Eadwine, have worshipped the gods more busily than I,” said Coifi the priest, “yet there are many more favoured and more fortunate.  Were these gods good for anything they would help their worshippers.”  Then leaping on horseback, he hurled his spear into the sacred temple at Godmanham, and with the rest of the Witan embraced the religion of the king.

[Sidenote:  Penda]

But the faith of Woden and Thunder was not to fall without a struggle.  Even in Kent a reaction against the new creed began with the death of AEthelberht.  The young kings of the East-Saxons burst into the church where the Bishop of London was administering the Eucharist to the people, crying, “Give us that white bread you gave to our father Saba,” and on the bishop’s refusal drove him from their realm.  This earlier tide of reaction was checked by Eadwine’s conversion; but Mercia, which had as yet owned the supremacy of Northumbria, sprang into a sudden greatness as the champion of the heathen gods.  Its king, Penda, saw in the rally of the old religion a chance of winning back his people’s freedom and giving it the lead among the tribes about it.  Originally mere settlers along the Upper Trent, the position of the Mercians on the Welsh border invited them to widen their possessions by conquest while the rest of their Anglian neighbours were shut off from any chance of expansion.  Their fights along the frontier too kept their warlike energy at its height.  Penda must have already asserted his superiority over the four other English tribes of Mid-Britain before he could have ventured to attack Wessex and tear from it in 628 the country of the Hwiccas and Magesaetas on the Severn.  Even with this accession of strength however he was still no match for Northumbria.  But the war of the English people with the Britons seems at this moment to have died down for a season, and the Mercian ruler boldly broke through the barrier which had parted the two races till now by allying himself with a Welsh King, Cadwallon, for a joint attack on Eadwine.  The armies met in 633 at a place called the Heathfield, and in the fight which followed Eadwine was defeated and slain.

[Sidenote:  Oswald]

Bernicia seized on the fall of Eadwine to recall the line of AEthelfrith to its throne; and after a year of anarchy his second son, Oswald, became its king.  The Welsh had remained encamped in the heart of the north, and Oswald’s first fight was with Cadwallon.  A small Northumbrian force gathered in 635 near the Roman Wall, and pledged itself at the new King’s bidding to become Christian if it conquered in the fight.  Cadwallon fell fighting on the “Heaven’s Field,” as after times called the field of battle; the submission of Deira to the conqueror restored the kingdom of Northumbria; and for seven years the power of Oswald equalled that of Eadwine.  It was not