Meanwhile, in the south the Latin missionaries, urged to activity, perhaps, by the Pictish successes, had been making fresh progress.  In the very year when Oswald was chosen king by the Northumbrians, Birinus, a priest from northern Italy, went by command of the pope to the West Saxons:  and after twelve months he was able to baptise their king, Cynegils, at his capital of Dorchester, on the Thames, his sponsor being Oswald of Northumbria.  A year later, Felix, a Burgundian, “preached the faith of Christ to the East Anglians,” who had indeed been converted by the Augustinian missionaries, but afterwards relapsed.  Only Sussex and Mercia still remained heathen.  But, in 655, Penda made a last attempt against Northumbria, which he had harried year after year, and was met by Oswiu at Winwidfield, near Leeds; the Christians were successful, and Penda was slain, together with thirty royal persons—­petty princes of the tributary Mercian states, no doubt.  His son, Peada, the Christian ealdorman of the Middle English, succeeded him, and the Mercians became Christians of the Pictish or Irish type.  “Their first bishop,” says Baeda, “was Diuma, who died and was buried among the Middle English.  The second was Cellach, who abandoned his bishopric, and returned during his lifetime to Scotland (perhaps Ireland, but more probably the Scottish kingdom in Argyllshire).  Both of these were by birth Irishmen.  The third was Trumhere, by race an Englishman, but educated and ordained by the Irish.”  Thus Roman Christianity spread over the whole of England south of the Wash (save only heathen Sussex):  while the Irish Church had made its way over all the north, from the Wash to the Firth of Forth.  The Roman influence may be partly traced by the Roman alphabet superseding the old English runes.  Runic inscriptions are rare in the south, where they were regarded as heathenish relics, and so destroyed:  but they are comparatively common in the north.  Runics appear on the coins of the first Christian kings of Mercia, Peada and AEthelred, but soon die out under their successors.

Heathendom was now fairly vanquished.  It survived only in Sussex, cut off from the rest of England by the forest belt of the Weald.  The next trial of strength must clearly lie between Rome and Iona.

The northern bishops and abbots traced their succession, not to Augustine, but to Columba.  Cuthberht, the English apostle of the north, who really converted the people of Northumbria, as earlier missionaries had converted its kings, derived his orders from Iona.  Rome or Ireland, was now the practical question of the English Church.  As might be expected, Rome conquered.  To allay the discord, King Oswiu summoned a synod at Streoneshalch (now known by its later Danish name of Whitby) in 664, to settle the vexed question as to the date of Easter.  The Irish priests claimed the authority of St. John for their crescent tonsure; the Romans, headed by Wilfrith,