instruct his people in the truths he had learned; and a monk named Corman was sent.  He, however, was unable to make any impression on the wild and warlike Saxons of the northern kingdom, and he soon returned to Iona with the report that it was useless to try to teach such obstinate and barbarous people.  One of the brethren, listening to his account, ventured to ask him if he were sure that all the fault lay with the people.  “Did you remember,” said he, “that we are commanded to give them the milk first?  Did you not rather try them with the strong meat?” With one accord the brethren declared that he who had spoken such wise words was the man best fitted for the task, and the gentle Aidan was sent to Oswald’s help.  In such a fashion came the Gospel to Northumbria, and Aidan became the first of the long roll of saints whose deeds and lives had such incalculable influence on Northumbrian history.  From Aidan’s arrival in 635 until the death of Oswald the relations between the king and the monk who had settled on Medcaud or Medcaut, soon to be known as Lindisfarne, and later as Holy Island, were those of friend to friend and fellow-worker, rather than those of king and subject.

After the death of Oswald, his conqueror Penda, the fierce King of the Mercians, harried Northumbria, and appearing before the walls of Bamburgh prepared to burn it down.  Piles of logs and brushwood were laid against the city and the fire was applied.  Aidan, in his little cell on Farne Island, to which he had retired, saw the clouds of flame and smoke rolling over the home of his beloved patron.  Raising his hands to Heaven, he exclaimed, “See, Lord, what ill Penda is doing!” Scarcely had he uttered the words, when the wind changed, and drove the flames away from Bamburgh, blowing them against Penda’s host, who thereupon ceased all further attempts against the city.

Not long after this, Aidan was at Bamburgh, when he was seized with sudden illness, and died with his head resting against one of the wooden stays of the little church.  Penda came again the next year, and this time both village and church were burnt, all except, says tradition, the beam of wood against which Aidan had rested in his last moments.

When the Danish ships appeared off our shores, in the two centuries following, Bamburgh was attacked and plundered several times.  In the days of William Rufus, as we have seen, Robert de Mowbray, Earl of Northumberland, rebelled against the Red King, in company with his uncle the Bishop of Coutances, Robert of Normandy, and William of St. Carileph, Bishop of Durham.  Rufus marched into Northumberland, but the quarrel was adjusted for the time; though private strife between the two Bishops led to Mowbray’s driving the monks of Durham from the Priory at Tynemouth and replacing them by monks from St. Albans.