ried to the poor, and his silver dish
be parted piecemeal among them. Aidan seized the royal hand and blessed
it. "May this hand," he cried, "never grow old."

Oswald's lordship stretched as widely over Britain as that of his
predecessor Eadwine. In him even more than in Eadwine men saw some faint
likeness of the older Emperors; once indeed a writer from the land of the
Picts calls Oswald "Emperor of the whole of Britain." His power was bent
to carry forward the conversion of all England, but prisoned as it was to
the central districts of the country heathendom fought desperately for
life. Penda was still its rallying-point. His long reign was one
continuous battle with the new religion; but it was a battle rather with
the supremacy of Christian Northumbria than with the supremacy of the
Cross. East-Anglia became at last the field of contest between the two
powers; and in 642 Oswald marched to deliver it from the Mercian rule.
But his doom was the doom of Eadwine, and in a battle called the battle
of the Maserfeld he was overthrown and slain. For a few years after his
victory at the Maserfeld, Penda stood supreme in Britain. Heathenism
triumphed with him. If Wessex did not own his overlordship as it had
owned that of Oswald, its king threw off the Christian faith which he had
embraced but a few years back at the preaching of Birinus. Even Deira
seems to have owned Penda's sway. Bernicia alone, though distracted by
civil war between rival claimants for its throne, refused to yield. Year
by year the Mercian king carried his ravages over the north; once he
reached even the royal city, the impregnable rock-fortress of Bamborough.
Despairing of success in an assault, he pulled down the cottages around,
and piling their wood against its walls fired the mass in a fair wind
that drove the flames on the town. "See, Lord, what ill Penda is doing,"
cried Aidan from his hermit cell in the islet of Farne, as he saw the
smoke drifting over the city, and a change of wind--so ran the legend of
Northumbria's agony--drove back the flames on those who kindled them. But
burned and harried as it was, Bernicia still clung to the Cross. Oswiu, a
third son of AEthelfrith, held his ground stoutly against Penda's inroads
till their cessation enabled him to build up again the old Northumbrian
kingdom by a march upon Deira. The union of the two realms was never
henceforth to be dissolved; and its influence was at once seen in the
renewal of Christi