he had preached beside the banks of Tweed.  He remained there through the great secession which followed on the Synod of Whitby, and became prior of the dwindled company of brethren, now torn with endless disputes against which his patience and good humour struggled in vain.  Worn out at last, he fled to a little island of basaltic rock, one of the Farne group not far from Ida’s fortress of Bamborough, strewn for the most part with kelp and sea-weed, the home of the gull and the seal.  In the midst of it rose his hut of rough stones and turf, dug down within deep into the rock, and roofed with logs and straw.  But the reverence for his sanctity dragged Cuthbert back to fill the vacant see of Lindisfarne.  He entered Carlisle, which the king had bestowed upon the bishopric, at a moment when all Northumbria was waiting for news of a fresh campaign of Ecgfrith’s against the Britons in the north.  The Firth of Forth had long been the limit of Northumbria, but the Picts to the north of it owned Ecgfrith’s supremacy.  In 685 however the king resolved on their actual subjection and marched across the Forth.  A sense of coming ill weighed on Northumbria, and its dread was quickened by a memory of the curses which had been pronounced by the bishops of Ireland on its king, when his navy, setting out a year before from the newly-conquered western coast, swept the Irish shores in a raid which seemed like sacrilege to those who loved the home of Aidan and Columba.  As Cuthbert bent over a Roman fountain which still stood unharmed amongst the ruins of Carlisle, the anxious bystanders thought they caught words of ill-omen falling from the old man’s lips.  “Perhaps,” he seemed to murmur, “at this very hour the peril of the fight is over and done.”  “Watch and pray,” he said, when they questioned him on the morrow; “watch and pray.”  In a few days more a solitary fugitive escaped from the slaughter told that the Picts had turned desperately to bay as the English army entered Fife; and that Ecgfrith and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of corpses, on the far-off moorland of Nectansmere.

[Sidenote:  Mercian greatness]

The blow was a fatal one for Northumbrian greatness, for while the Picts pressed on the kingdom from the north AEthelred, Wulfhere’s successor, attacked it on the Mercian border, and the war was only ended by a peace which left him master of Middle-England and free to attempt the direct conquest of the south.  For the moment this attempt proved a fruitless one.  Mercia was still too weak to grasp the lordship which was slipping from Northumbria’s hands, while Wessex which seemed her destined prey rose at this moment into fresh power under the greatest of its early kings.  Ine, the West-Saxon king whose reign covered the long period from 688 to 726, carried on during the whole of it the war which Cenwealh and Centwine had begun.  He pushed his way southward round the marshes of the Parret to a more fertile territory,