then, an unconquered Roman town,
or for whatever other reason, becomes at once the ecclesiastical
centre and one to which, even when this baptism takes place, the King
of Northumbria was at the pains of travelling southward to, to be
present as sponsor for the new Christian.

The story has a special historical interest, because it shows how very
vague were the boundaries and the occupancies of the little wandering
chieftains of this period. It need hardly be pointed out that no
regular division into shires can have existed so early, and, as we
have already insisted, the Thames itself was not a permanent boundary
between any two definable societies, yet those who regard the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as historical would show one Penda had appeared
a few years before as the chief of a group of men with a new name, the
Mercians--probably a loose agglomeration of tribes occupying the
middle strip of England; a group whose dialect and measures of land
are, perhaps, the ancestors of the modern Midland dialect and most of
our measures. Cynegil's baptism could not have taken place in
territory controlled by Penda, for he was the champion of all the
Anti-Christian forces of the time, and though he had just defeated the
West Saxons, and (according to a later legend) pushed back their
boundary to the line of the Thames, his action, like that of all the
little kings of the barbaric age in Britain, can have been no more
than a march with a few thousands, a battle, and a retreat. In a word,
the true and verifiable story of Cynegil's baptism is one of the many
valuable instances which help to prove the unreliability of that part
of the early Chronicle which does not deal with ecclesiastical
affairs.

The priest who received Cynegil into the Church was one Birinus, an
Italian, and perhaps a Milanese; he appears, from his first presence
in Dorchester, to have fixed the seat of a bishopric in that village.
His reasons for choosing the spot are as impossible to discover as are
the origins of any other of the characteristics of the place. It was,
in any case, as were so many of the sees of the Dark Ages, a frontier
see--a sort of ecclesiastical fortress, pushed out to the very limits
of the occupation of the enemy.

Whether Dorchester continued to be a bishopric from this moment
onwards we cannot tell; but no less than three hundred years
afterwards--in the tenth century--it appears again, and this time as
the centre of the gigantic dioces