intervals of
reform; again and again the Northmen over-swept the land. The 460 years
of Anglo-Saxon Christianity constituted a period of memorable
achievements and sad vicissitudes; but that period included more than a
hundred years of high sanctity, belonging for the most part to the
seventh century, a century to England as glorious as was the thirteenth
to Mediaeval Europe.

Within that century the kingdoms of the Heptarchy successively became
Christian, and those among them which had relapsed returned to the
Faith. Sovereigns, many of whom had boasted a descent from Odin himself,
stood as interpreters beside the missionaries when they preached, and
rivalled each other in the zeal with which they built churches, some of
which were founded on the sites of ancient temples, though, in other
cases, with a charitable prudence, the existing fanes were spared,
purified, and adapted to Christian worship. At Canterbury and York,
cathedrals rose, and on many a site besides; and when the earlier had
been destroyed by fire, or had fallen through decay, fabrics on a vaster
scale rose above their ruins, and maintained a succession which lasts to
this day. Monasteries unnumbered lifted their towers above the forests
of a land in which the streams still ran unstained and the air of which
had not yet been dimmed by smoke, imparting a dignity to fen and flat
morass. Round them ere long cities gathered, as at St. Albans,
Malmesbury, Sherborne, and Wimborne; the most memorable of those
monasteries being that at Canterbury, and that at Westminister,
dedicated to St. Peter, as the cathedral church near it had been
dedicated to St. Paul. In the North they were at least as numerous. The
University of Oxford is also associated with that early age. It was
beside the Isis that St. Frideswida raised her convent, occupied at a
later date by canons regular, and ultimately transformed into Christ
Church by Cardinal Wolsey--becoming thus the chief, as it had been the
earliest, among the schools in that great seat of learning which within
our own days has exercised a religious influence over England not less
remarkable than that which belonged to its most palmy preceding period.

During that century England produced most of those saintly kings and
queens whose names still enrich the calendar of the Anglo-Saxon Church,
sovereigns who ruled their kingdoms with justice, lived in
mortification, went on pilgrimages, died in cloisters. The great
missiona