great English song.  Though well advanced in years, Caedmon had learned nothing of the art of verse, the alliterative jingle so common among his fellows, “wherefore being sometimes at feasts, when all agreed for glee’s sake to sing in turn, he no sooner saw the harp come towards him than he rose from the board and went homewards.  Once when he had done thus, and gone from the feast to the stable where he had that night charge of the cattle, there appeared to him in his sleep One who said, greeting him by name, ’Sing, Caedmon, some song to Me.’  ‘I cannot sing,’ he answered; ’for this cause left I the feast and came hither.’  He who talked with him answered, ‘However that be, you shall sing to Me.’  ‘What shall I sing?’ rejoined Caedmon.  ‘The beginning of created things,’ replied He.  In the morning the cowherd stood before Hild and told his dream.  Abbess and brethren alike concluded ‘that heavenly grace had been conferred on him by the Lord.’  They translated for Caedmon a passage in Holy Writ, ’bidding him, if he could, put the same into verse.’  The next morning he gave it them composed in excellent verse, whereon the abbess, understanding the divine grace in the man, bade him quit the secular habit and take on him the monastic life.”  Piece by piece the sacred story was thus thrown into Caedmon’s poem.  “He sang of the creation of the world, of the origin of man, and of all the history of Israel; of their departure from Egypt and entering into the Promised Land; of the incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ, and of His ascension; of the terror of future judgement, the horror of hell-pangs, and the joys of heaven.”

[Sidenote:  Synod of Whitby]

But even while Caedmon was singing the glories of Northumbria and of the Irish Church were passing away.  The revival of Mercia was as rapid as its fall.  Only a few years after Penda’s defeat the Mercians threw off Oswin’s yoke and set Wulfhere, a son of Penda, on their throne.  They were aided in their revolt, no doubt, by a religious strife which was now rending the Northumbrian realm.  The labour of Aidan, the victories of Oswald and Oswin, seemed to have annexed the north to the Irish Church.  The monks of Lindisfarne, or of the new religious houses whose foundation followed that of Lindisfarne, looked for their ecclesiastical tradition, not to Rome but to Ireland; and quoted for their guidance the instructions, not of Gregory, but of Columba.  Whatever claims of supremacy over the whole English Church might be pressed by the see of Canterbury, the real metropolitan of the Church as it existed in the North of England was the Abbot of Iona.  But Oswiu’s queen brought with her from Kent the loyalty of the Kentish Church to the Roman See; and the visit of two young thegns to the Imperial City raised their love of Rome into a passionate fanaticism.  The elder of these, Benedict Biscop, returned to denounce the usages in which the Irish Church differed from the Roman as