wooden hovels and crossed by boggy tracks, over which travellers rode spear in hand and eye kept cautiously about them.  The Northumbrian peasantry among whom he journeyed were for the most part Christians only in name.  With Teutonic indifference they yielded to their thegns in nominally accepting the new Christianity as these had yielded to the king.  But they retained their old superstitions side by side with the new worship; plague or mishap drove them back to a reliance on their heathen charms and amulets; and if trouble befell the Christian preachers who came settling among them, they took it as proof of the wrath of the older gods.  When some log-rafts which were floating down the Tyne for the construction of an abbey at its mouth drifted with the monks who were at work on them out to sea, the rustic bystanders shouted, “Let nobody pray for them; let nobody pity these men; for they have taken away from us our old worship, and how their new-fangled customs are to be kept nobody knows.”  On foot, on horseback, Cuthbert wandered among listeners such as these, choosing above all the remoter mountain villages from whose roughness and poverty other teachers turned aside.  Unlike his Irish comrades, he needed no interpreter as he passed from village to village; the frugal, long-headed Northumbrians listened willingly to one who was himself a peasant of the Lowlands, and who had caught the rough Northumbrian burr along the banks of the Tweed.  His patience, his humorous good sense, the sweetness of his look, told for him, and not less the stout vigorous frame which fitted the peasant-preacher for the hard life he had chosen.  “Never did man die of hunger who served God faithfully,” he would say, when nightfall found them supperless in the waste.  “Look at the eagle overhead!  God can feed us through him if He will”—­and once at least he owed his meal to a fish that the scared bird let fall.  A snowstorm drove his boat on the coast of Fife.  “The snow closes the road along the shore,” mourned his comrades; “the storm bars our way over sea.”  “There is still the way of heaven that lies open,” said Cuthbert.

[Sidenote:  Caedmon]

While missionaries were thus labouring among its peasantry, Northumbria saw the rise of a number of monasteries, not bound indeed by the strict ties of the Benedictine rule, but gathered on the loose Celtic model of the family or the clan round some noble and wealthy person who sought devotional retirement.  The most notable and wealthy of these houses was that of Streoneshealh, where Hild, a woman of royal race, reared her abbey on the cliffs of Whitby, looking out over the Northern Sea.  Hild was a Northumbrian Deborah whose counsel was sought even by kings; and the double monastery over which she ruled became a seminary of bishops and priests.  The sainted John of Beverley was among her scholars.  But the name which really throws glory over Whitby is the name of a cowherd from whose lips during the reign of Oswiu flowed the first