or principalities were as yet wholly heathen. Indeed, the various
Teutonic colonies seemed to have received Christianity in the exact
order of their settlement: the older and more civilised first, the newer
and ruder last. Paulinus, however, made another conquest for the church
in Lindsey (Lincolnshire), "where the first who believed," says the
Chronicle, "was a certain great man who hight Blecca, with all his
clan." In the very same year with these successes, Justus died, and
Honorius received the See of Canterbury from Paulinus at the old Roman
city of Lincoln. So far the Roman missionaries remained the only
Christian teachers in England: no English convert seems as yet to have
taken holy orders.

Again, however, the church received a severe check. Mercia, the youngest
and roughest principality, stood out for heathendom. The western colony
was beginning to raise itself into a great power, under its fierce and
strong old king Penda, who seems to have consolidated all the petty
chieftainships of the Midlands into a single fairly coherent kingdom.
Penda hated Northumbria, which, under Eadwine, had made itself the chief
English state: and he also hated Christianity, which he knew only as a
religion fit for Welsh slaves, not for English warriors. For twenty-two
years, therefore, the old heathen king waged an untiring war against
Christian Northumbria. In 633, he allied himself with Cadwalla, the
Christian Welsh king of Gwynedd, or North Wales, in a war against
Eadwine; an alliance which supplies one more proof that the gulf between
Welsh and English was not so wide as it is sometimes represented to be.
The Welsh and Mercian host met the Northumbrians at Heathfield (perhaps
Hatfield Chase) and utterly destroyed them. Eadwine himself and his son
Osfrith were slain. Penda and Cadwalla "fared thence, and undid all
Northumbria." The country was once more divided into Deira and Bernicia,
and two heathen rulers succeeded to the northern kingdom. Paulinus,
taking AEthelburh, the widow of Eadwine, went by sea to Kent, where
Honorius, whom he had himself consecrated, received him cordially, and
gave him the vacant see of Rochester. There he remained till his death,
and so for a time ended the Christian mission to York. Penda made the
best of his victory by annexing the Southumbrians, the Middle English,
and the Lindiswaras, as well as by conquering the Severn Valley from the
West Saxons. Henceforth, Mercia stands forth as one of the