arser
argument told on the crowd. "None of your people, Eadwine, have
worshipped the gods more busily than I," said Coifi the priest, "yet
there are many more favoured and more fortunate. Were these gods good for
anything they would help their worshippers." Then leaping on horseback,
he hurled his spear into the sacred temple at Godmanham, and with the
rest of the Witan embraced the religion of the king.

[Sidenote: Penda]

But the faith of Woden and Thunder was not to fall without a struggle.
Even in Kent a reaction against the new creed began with the death of
AEthelberht. The young kings of the East-Saxons burst into the church
where the Bishop of London was administering the Eucharist to the people,
crying, "Give us that white bread you gave to our father Saba," and on
the bishop's refusal drove him from their realm. This earlier tide of
reaction was checked by Eadwine's conversion; but Mercia, which had as
yet owned the supremacy of Northumbria, sprang into a sudden greatness as
the champion of the heathen gods. Its king, Penda, saw in the rally of
the old religion a chance of winning back his people's freedom and giving
it the lead among the tribes about it. Originally mere settlers along the
Upper Trent, the position of the Mercians on the Welsh border invited
them to widen their possessions by conquest while the rest of their
Anglian neighbours were shut off from any chance of expansion. Their
fights along the frontier too kept their warlike energy at its height.
Penda must have already asserted his superiority over the four other
English tribes of Mid-Britain before he could have ventured to attack
Wessex and tear from it in 628 the country of the Hwiccas and Magesaetas
on the Severn. Even with this accession of strength however he was still
no match for Northumbria. But the war of the English people with the
Britons seems at this moment to have died down for a season, and the
Mercian ruler boldly broke through the barrier which had parted the two
races till now by allying himself with a Welsh King, Cadwallon, for a
joint attack on Eadwine. The armies met in 633 at a place called the
Heathfield, and in the fight which followed Eadwine was defeated and
slain.

[Sidenote: Oswald]

Bernicia seized on the fall of Eadwine to recall the line of AEthelfrith
to its throne; and after a year of anarchy his second son, Oswald, became
its king. The Welsh had remained encamped in the heart of the north, and
Oswald's