The terrible struggle between heathendom and Christianity was followed by a long and profound peace.  For three years after the battle of Winwaed Mercia was governed by Northumbrian thegns in Oswiu’s name.  The winning of central England was a victory for Irish Christianity as well as for Oswiu.  Even in Mercia itself heathendom was dead with Penda.  “Being thus freed,” Baeda tells us, “the Mercians with their King rejoiced to serve the true King, Christ.”  Its three provinces, the earlier Mercia, the Middle-English, and the Lindiswaras, were united in the bishopric of the missionary Ceadda, the St. Chad to whom Lichfield is still dedicated.  Ceadda was a monk of Lindisfarne, so simple and lowly in temper that he travelled on foot on his long mission journeys till Archbishop Theodore with his own hands lifted him on horseback.  The old Celtic poetry breaks out in his death-legend, as it tells us how voices of singers singing sweetly descended from heaven to the little cell beside St. Mary’s Church where the bishop lay dying.  Then “the same song ascended from the roof again, and returned heavenward by the way that it came.”  It was the soul of his brother, the missionary Cedd, come with a choir of angels to solace the last hours of Ceadda.

[Sidenote:  Cuthbert]

In Northumbria the work of his fellow missionaries has almost been lost in the glory of Cuthbert.  No story better lights up for us the new religious life of the time than the story of this Apostle of the Lowlands.  Born on the southern edge of the Lammermoor, Cuthbert found shelter at eight years old in a widow’s house in the little village of Wrangholm.  Already in youth his robust frame hid a poetic sensibility which caught even in the chance word of a game a call to higher things, and a passing attack of lameness deepened the religious impression.  A traveller coming in his white mantle over the hillside and stopping his horse to tend Cuthbert’s injured knee seemed to him an angel.  The boy’s shepherd life carried him to the bleak upland, still famous as a sheepwalk, though a scant herbage scarce veils the whinstone rock.  There meteors plunging into the night became to him a company of angelic spirits carrying the soul of Bishop Aidan heavenward, and his longings slowly settled into a resolute will towards a religious life.  In 651 he made his way to a group of straw-thatched log-huts, in the midst of an untilled solitude, where a few Irish monks from Lindisfarne had settled in the mission-station of Melrose.  To-day the land is a land of poetry and romance.  Cheviot and Lammermoor, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow and Annan-water, are musical with old ballads and border minstrelsy.  Agriculture has chosen its valleys for her favourite seat, and drainage and steam-power have turned sedgy marshes into farm and meadow.  But to see the Lowlands as they were in Cuthbert’s day we must sweep meadow and farm away again, and replace them by vast solitudes, dotted here and there with clusters of