AEthelfrith, whose place Eadwine had taken. After a year of
renewed heathendom, however, during part of which the Welsh Cadwalla
reigned over Northumbria, Oswald, son of AEthelfrith, again united Deira
and Bernicia under his own rule. Oswald was a Christian, but he had
learnt his Christianity from the Scots, amongst whom he had spent his
exile, and he favoured the introduction of Pictish and Scottish
missionaries into Northumbria. The Italian monks who had accompanied
Augustine were men of foreign speech and manners, representatives of an
alien civilisation, and they attempted to convert whole kingdoms _en
bloc_ by the previous conversion of their rulers. Their method was
political and systematic. But the Pictish and Irish preachers were men
of more Britannic feelings, and they went to work with true missionary
earnestness to convert the half Celtic people of Northumbria, man by
man, in their own homes. Aidan, the apostle of the north, carried the
Pictish faith into the Lothians and Northumberland. He placed his
bishop-stool not far from the royal town of Bamborough, at Lindisfarne,
the Holy Island of the Northumbrian coast. Other Celtic missionaries
penetrated further south, even into the heathen realm of Penda and his
tributary princes. Ceadda or Chad, the patron saint of Lichfield,
carried Christianity to the Mercians. Diuma preached to the Middle
English of Leicester with much success, Peada, their ealdorman, son of
Penda, having himself already embraced the new faith. Penda had slain
Oswald in a great battle at Maserfeld in 641; but the martyr only
brought increased glory to the Christians: and Oswiu, who succeeded him,
after an interval of anarchy, as king of Deira (for Bernicia now chose a
king of its own), was also a zealous adherent of the Celtic
missionaries. Thus the heterodox Church made rapid strides throughout
the whole of the north.

Meanwhile, in the south the Latin missionaries, urged to activity,
perhaps, by the Pictish successes, had been making fresh progress. In
the very year when Oswald was chosen king by the Northumbrians, Birinus,
a priest from northern Italy, went by command of the pope to the West
Saxons: and after twelve months he was able to baptise their king,
Cynegils, at his capital of Dorchester, on the Thames, his sponsor being
Oswald of Northumbria. A year later, Felix, a Burgundian, "preached the
faith of Christ to the East Anglians," who had indeed been converted by
the Augustinian mi