Still the greater part of English Britain remained heathen. Kent, Essex,
and Northumbria were converted, or at least their kings and nobles had
been baptised: but East Anglia, Mercia, Sussex, Wessex, and the minor
interior 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