The Englishman Boniface, who played a large part (720-55) in the Christianization of northern Germany, and who in the usual fashion claimed to have baptized a hundred thousand natives in one year, secured the excommunication of several rival bishops of the anti-Roman school; and those who would not accept re-ordination at his hands he sought to have imprisoned or flogged, denouncing them, in the style of the Churchman of all ages, as "servants of the devil and forerunners of Antichrist." His authority was established in new districts at the head of an armed force; and when with fifty priests he met his death (755) in Friesland at the hands of heathen natives, he was marching with a troop of soldiers. Even where force was not used, the persuasions offered were of the grossest kind. Thus a friend of Boniface is found advising him to point out to the heathen that the Christians have the bulk and the best of the world, possessing all the rich lands which yield wine and oil, while the pagans are now confined to the coldest and most barren regions. No religion was ever more unspiritually propagated. Under Charlemagne, Christian missionary methods left those of Islam in the rear. For the subjection of the still free Saxons, between the Baltic and the borders of Thuringia and Hesse, he needed the aid of the Church's organization; and they, realizing the state of the case, for the most part refused to be baptized. In his wars with them, accordingly, he decreed that those who rejected the gospel should be put to death. As the wars lasted thirty-three years, the number of the slain must be left to imagination. The survivors were finally bribed into belief by a restoration of their local rights, and by being freed from tribute to the king. They do not seem, however, to have been freed from the exactions of the Church, which, according to the testimony of Charlemagne's adviser, Alcuin, had been a main cause of the exasperation of the Saxons against it. Among those exactions Alcuin mentions not only tithes--which had now become a recognized form of Church revenue--but the infliction of many penalties for moral and ecclesiastical offences. Such exactions the monarch endorsed; and he it was who enforced the payment of tithes.