[46] Bede, Hist. Eccl., i., 25. Evidently the defeat sustained (according to the Chronicle) in 568 at the hands of Ceawlin, king of Wessex, had been more than made good.
[47] This follows from the date of St. Martin’s death, which was about 402.
[48] Archiepiscopus genti Anglorum ordinatus est (Hist. Eccl., i., 27). Observe that Bede without hesitation uses the word Angli to denote the whole Anglo-Saxon-Jutish nationality.
[49] See Kemble, The Saxons in England, i., 148.
[50] In the county of Flint about ten miles south of Chester: not to be confounded with Bangor on the Menai Straits or with the Irish monastery of Bangor in County Down.
[51] See H. A. Wilson in Mason’s Mission of St. Augustine, pp. 248–52.
[52] As in the case of the stigmata of St. Francis, modern science has shown that it is possible to accept the historic truth of this narrative without admitting the hypothesis, either of miracle or of fraud.
[53] That of Richard of Hexham (circa 1141. Prologue to his History). Simeon of Durham (circa 1104) says that “all the country between Tees and Tyne was then [in the seventh century] a waste wilderness, the habitation of wild animals, and therefore subject to no man’s sway” (Vita Oswaldi, cap. i.).
[54] “Ond rixode twelf gear, ond he timbrode Bebbanburh, seo waes aerost mid hegge betyned, ond aefter mid wealle.” Mr. Bates, whose History of Northumberland is a most helpful guide to this part of our history, reminds us that this “hackneyed passage is an interpolation of a Kentish scribe in the eleventh century”. Still, though we may not quote it as a first-rate authority, there seems no reason for rejecting it altogether.
[55] Hist. Eccl., i., 34.