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have received religious teaching of any kind from the Celts, whose religion they would probably regard as one element of their weakness. Christianity, however, proffered by the stately and far reaching power of Rome, and preached by men of ability and prudence such as Augustine and Paulinus, presented itself under circumstances much more favourable to acceptance; and met indeed with a success, and an absence of serious opposition little in accordance with the views of those who have been pleased to represent our Teutonic forefathers as a horde of pernicious barbarians. Augustine and his companions arrived in Kent in 597, and the Christianizing of this, the most polished of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, appears to have been the work of scarcely more than a year. In 604 the conversion of the East Saxons followed, and the see of London was founded. By 627 Paulinus had accomplished his work in the great kingdom of Northumbria, the extent of which was then commensurate with the meaning of its name. Into the details of the continued advance of this new faith, it is not my purpose now to enter, suffice it to say that little more than half a century sufficed for the almost total extinction of Paganism, except in Mercia, and that in many cases the even more rapid spread of Christianity would appear to have been hindered rather by a lack of missionary power, than by any disinclination to receive its teachings,

Meanwhile, the year 627 had been marked by the accession to the throne of Mercia of a man eminently fitted to rule a warlike but unsettled race, and destined to become the terror and the scourge of all surrounding states. King of a people to whom conflict was not only one of the conditions, but one of the pleasures of existence, Penda himself appears as the embodiment of that fierce and warlike spirit of which the religion he and his professed, was but the expression. In Mercia, at that time, a peaceful rule and an unstable rule would probably have been convertible terms;to Penda, peace would probably have meant obscurity and failure. Much as he has been vilified, his principal fault would appear to have been his living a century too late; his chief misfortune the reigning in a state so backward as to permit of his exercising to

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their fullest extent the savage virtues which had made the Saxon invasion successful, but which the long duration of a more settled life had rendered elsewhere obsolete. His first quarrel was with his southern neighbours, the West Saxons, the record which we possess of the war from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle being as follows. "628. In this year Cynegils and Cwichelm fought against Penda at Cirencester and afterwards came to an agreement." This may serve as an instance of the brief and unsatisfactory manner in which events not to be regarded as unimportant are customarily dismissed in the chronicles of the time. There can however be little doubt that the "agreement" was one satisfactory to Penda, and that in fact it consisted in the transfer of the newly conquered Celtic territory on the northern bank of the Severn, to the kingdom of Mercia. Five years later a more important struggle, and one intimately connected with our present subject, in the invasion of Northumbria, was undertaken by Penda in conjunction with his Celtic neighbour, Cadwalla-an almost unique instance of the alliance of a Saxon king with the chieftain of a Celtic tribe for offensive purposes. In the decisive battle of Heathfield, fought in October, 633, Eadwine of Northumbria was slain with his son Osfrith, the entire Northumbrian army was destroyed, and the kingdom lay at the mercy of the conquerors. The site of this battle is supposed to have been what is now called Hatfield Chase, a few miles due east of Doncaster, and on the confines of Lincolnshire. The vanquished country was devastated with great barbarity; the Christian Cadwalla, maddened perhaps by the keen recollection of the manifold sufferings of his people, earning a sinister distinction even in those troubled times by the indiscriminate ferocity of his revenge, in which, according to Bede, "he spared neither the female sex nor the innocent age of children, but with savage cruelty put them to tormenting deaths, resolving to cut off all the race of the English within the borders of Britain." The result of this war was naturally a serious discouragement to the Christian religion, which had been so recently established in Northumbria, and to which King Eadwine had been one of the most notable and valued converts; and Penda became henceforth

the champion of the ancient faith of his people, and by far the most serious obstacle to the complete Christianising of Britain. So bitter a remembrance did the Northumbrians retain of their misfortune, that they erased from their chronicles the year during which their land had been laid waste, adding it for purposes of computation to the reign of their next king, Oswald, and in the words of Bede, "holding the year accursed for the brutal impiety of the King of the Britons." Oswald himself, after an actual reign of eight years, was slain by Penda at the battle of Maserfield (probably Mirfield, three miles west of Dewsbury), in 641, and the unhappy kingdom of Northumbria was again subjugated. The hapless king was long venerated as a saint, and one of the miracles ascribed to his relics, and narrated by Bede, is so suggestive as to the condition and social manners of the time, that I cannot refrain from quoting it.

About the same time another person of the British nation as it is reported, happened to travel by the same place where the aforesaid battle was fought, and observing one particular spot of ground greener and more beautiful than any other part of the field, he judiciously concluded within himself that there could be no other cause for that unusual greenness but that some person of more holiness than any other in the army had been slain there. He therefore took with him some of that earth, tying it up in a linen cloth, supposing it would some time or other be of use for curing sick people, and proceeding on his way came at night to a certain village and entered a house where the neighbours were feasting at supper. Being received by the owners of the house, he sat down with them at the entertainment, hanging the cloth in which he had brought the earth on a post against the wall. They sat long at supper and drank hard, with a great fire in the middle of the room; it happened that the sparks flew up and caught the top of the house, which being made of wattles and thatch was presently in a flame. The guests ran out in a fright without being able to put a stop to the fire. The house was consequently burnt down, only that post on which the earth hung remained entire and untouched, on observing which they were all amazed.

Meanwhile, after defeating and dethroning the King of Wessex, Penda had committed the government of a portion of his now extensive dominions, the kingdom namely of the Middle Angles, to his son Peada, a young man of mild and benevolent disposition, and universally beloved. The account of the virtues of Peada, of his wooing of Ahlfleda, daughter of Oswy, or Oswiu, who had succeeded to the troubled throne of Northumbria, of the refusal of his suit unless he became a Christian, of the readiness with which

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he listened to the expounding of the principles of the Christian faith, and of his manly declaration that he would accept them as his own, whether the hand of the maiden were granted to him or not, form a touching episode in the chronicle of Bede-brief, yet too long here to be quoted. No objection to the conversion of his son, of the people under his rule, or of individual members of his own kingdom was made by Penda. The bluff old pagan, who adhered to the faith of his ancestors probably in the main because it was most accordant with his own warlike propensities, contented himself with venting his contemptuous scorn upon those of his own subjects who, having nominally accepted Christianity, failed to carry its precepts into actual effect. As Bede says, "he hated and despised them saying they were contemptible and wretched who did not obey their God in whom they believed." The end of the last pagan monarch who was to hold noticeable sway in England was now at hand. In 655, twenty-two years after his first invasion of Northumbria, Penda prepared once more to devastate the unhappy kingdom which he appears to have held in hand as a favourable field for occasional rapine. Conscious of his probable inability to withstand his terrible enemy, Oswy had collected a large sum of money with which he vainly offered to buy off the threatened invasion. Had Penda been a careful student of human nature, a supposition which is not very likely, he might have been aware of the danger he incurred in thus driving to desperation an adversary who was not contemptible, but whose weakness reduced him to offer terms for the purchase of peace. There are few creatures so weak as not to become formidable when fairly driven to bay. There is no human resolution so bitterly immutable as the resolve of the naturally irresolute man who has been driven by Fate into a corner; and there is no courage so fierce and so untameable as the courage of the man who fights from desperation and not from choice. Left without an alternative by the insolence of a foe who would not even suffer him to buy peace by ignominy, Oswy hastily collected such forces as his shattered realm could afford him, and advanced to meet the enemy.

Of the battle which ensued, decisive and indeed momentous as

it was, we possess but very scanty details. The compiler of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle marks his sense of the fact that it commenced a new era in English history by specially computing its date from the beginning of the world; but dismisses the event in a single sentence. Bede and Florence of Worcester are fortunately more circumstantial in their narratives, but much is still left to conjecture. That the two opposing forces must have been enormously disproportioned in strength, is clear. Oswy had had little time for preparation, the condition of his kingdom could not have admitted of the perfect equipment of his forces, and his own authority must have been at a somewhat low ebb in an age when powerful subjects were practically independent, and the kingship of a king depended largely upon his ability to reward his followers from the fruits of victory. Penda, on the other hand, was perhaps the greatest military commander of his day, his rule extended from the North Sea to the frontiers of Wales, and his long and uninterrupted career of victory offered every inducement to enlistment under his banner. No less than thirty kings, as they are called by the chronicler,-Thanes that is of sufficient importance to hold themselves as semi-independent by reason of the number of the forces they held under their command-followed him in this expedition. Florence of Worcester describes Penda as having mustered thirty legions, while Oswy, with his son Alfred, had but one; a statement which may very likely be exaggerated but which expresses at any rate an extraordinary discrepancy between the two armies. They met on the 15th November, at Winwœdfeld, or Wingfield, on the northern side of the river Winwœed, now called the Aire, and at no great distance from the modern Leeds.*

* The exact locality of this battle is a point which it would be very gratifying to settle, but which at present is quite obscure.

Thoresby says the Wenwoed is the Aire and the place Wingfield near Leeds. Whitaker says that "Aire" is a British name and therefore not likely to have been superseded and revived again. He suggests the Wint, a much smaller stream to the S. E. of Leeds.

I venture a suggestion of my own which is at present but pure conjecture. Nennius, in his generally incoherent and valueless chronicle has a singular passage relating to this battle and seeming to point to the possession of original information. He says the Thanes and Penda had reached the city

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