heir
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
wh