f
Lindisfarne, which was at this time filled by one whom we have seen
before labouring as the Apostle of the Lowlands. Cuthbert had found a new
mission-station in Holy Island, and preached among the moors of
Northumberland as he had preached beside the banks of Tweed. He remained
there through the great secession which followed on the Synod of Whitby,
and became prior of the dwindled company of brethren, now torn with
endless disputes against which his patience and good humour struggled in
vain. Worn out at last, he fled to a little island of basaltic rock, one
of the Farne group not far from Ida's fortress of Bamborough, strewn for
the most part with kelp and sea-weed, the home of the gull and the seal.
In the midst of it rose his hut of rough stones and turf, dug down within
deep into the rock, and roofed with logs and straw. But the reverence for
his sanctity dragged Cuthbert back to fill the vacant see of Lindisfarne.
He entered Carlisle, which the king had bestowed upon the bishopric, at a
moment when all Northumbria was waiting for news of a fresh campaign of
Ecgfrith's against the Britons in the north. The Firth of Forth had long
been the limit of Northumbria, but the Picts to the north of it owned
Ecgfrith's supremacy. In 685 however the king resolved on their actual
subjection and marched across the Forth. A sense of coming ill weighed on
Northumbria, and its dread was quickened by a memory of the curses which
had been pronounced by the bishops of Ireland on its king, when his navy,
setting out a year before from the newly-conquered western coast, swept
the Irish shores in a raid which seemed like sacrilege to those who loved
the home of Aidan and Columba. As Cuthbert bent over a Roman fountain
which still stood unharmed amongst the ruins of Carlisle, the anxious
bystanders thought they caught words of ill-omen falling from the old
man's lips. "Perhaps," he seemed to murmur, "at this very hour the peril
of the fight is over and done." "Watch and pray," he said, when they
questioned him on the morrow; "watch and pray." In a few days more a
solitary fugitive escaped from the slaughter told that the Picts had
turned desperately to bay as the English army entered Fife; and that
Ecgfrith and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of corpses, on
the far-off moorland of Nectansmere.

[Sidenote: Mercian greatness]

The blow was a fatal one for Northumbrian greatness, for while the Picts
pressed on the kingdom fr