On a low island of barren gneiss-rock off the west coast of Scotland an Irish refugee, Columba, had raised the famous mission-station of Iona.  It was within its walls that Oswald in youth found refuge, and on his accession to the throne of Northumbria he called for missionaries from among its monks.  The first preacher sent in answer to his call obtained little success.  He declared on his return that among a people so stubborn and barbarous as the Northumbrian folk success was impossible.  “Was it their stubbornness or your severity?” asked Aidan, a brother sitting by; “did you forget God’s word to give them the milk first and then the meat?” All eyes turned on the speaker as fittest to undertake the abandoned mission, and Aidan sailing at their bidding fixed his bishop’s see in the island-peninsula of Lindisfarne.  Thence, from a monastery which gave to the spot its after name of Holy Island, preachers poured forth over the heathen realms.  Aidan himself wandered on foot, preaching among the peasants of Yorkshire and Northumbria.  In his own court the King acted as interpreter to the Irish missionaries in their efforts to convert his thegns.  A new conception of kingship indeed began to blend itself with that of the warlike glory of AEthelfrith or the wise administration of Eadwine, and the moral power which was to reach its height in AElfred first dawns in the story of Oswald.  For after times the memory of Oswald’s greatness was lost in the memory of his piety.  “By reason of his constant habit of praying or giving thanks to the Lord he was wont wherever he sat to hold his hands upturned on his knees.”  As he feasted with Bishop Aidan by his side, the thegn, or noble of his war-band, whom he had set to give alms to the poor at his gate told him of a multitude that still waited fasting without.  The king at once bade the untasted meat before him be carried to the poor, and his silver dish be parted piecemeal among them.  Aidan seized the royal hand and blessed it.  “May this hand,” he cried, “never grow old.”

Oswald’s lordship stretched as widely over Britain as that of his predecessor Eadwine.  In him even more than in Eadwine men saw some faint likeness of the older Emperors; once indeed a writer from the land of the Picts calls Oswald “Emperor of the whole of Britain.”  His power was bent to carry forward the conversion of all England, but prisoned as it was to the central districts of the country heathendom fought desperately for life.  Penda was still its rallying-point.  His long reign was one continuous battle with the new religion; but it was a battle rather with the supremacy of Christian Northumbria than with the supremacy of the Cross.  East-Anglia became at last the field of contest between the two powers; and in 642 Oswald marched to deliver it from the Mercian rule.  But his doom was the doom of Eadwine, and in a battle called the battle of the Maserfeld he was overthrown and slain.  For a few years after his victory at the Maserfeld,