This, as has been said, is a most bewildering list. It is, however, convenient to have it stated at length, inasmuch as several of these kings are named in a noteworthy manner in the letters of Alcuin. To emphasize the view that Alcuin took of the state of Northumbria, the list just given may be summarized thus, it being borne in mind that every king who reigned in Alcuin’s time after Eadbert’s death in 758 is included in the summary. Oswulf, murdered 759; Ethelwald, deprived 765; Alchred, banished 774; Ethelred, expelled 779; Alfwold, murdered 788; Osred, deposed 789; Ethelred, killed by his own people, 796; Osbald, expelled 797; Eardulf, expelled 806. The Venerable Bede had said in his letter to Archbishop Ecgbert in 735 that unless some very great change for the better was made in all walks of life in Northumbria, that country would find its men quite unable to defend it successfully if an invasion took place. We have seen that so far as the reigning persons were concerned, the change was for the worse; we have now to see how bitterly true Bede’s prophecy, or rather his calculation of the necessary consequences, proved to be. We are taken in thought to the year 793, not quite sixty years after Bede’s letter. One excellent reign had lasted twenty-one years, the next eight reigns averaged four and a half years, and all ended in violence. Higbald, the eleventh Bishop of Lindisfarne, 780-803, takes us back nearly to the best times of that specially Holy Isle. Ethelwold, 724-40, his next predecessor but one, was the bishop under whom King Ceolwulf, to whom Bede dedicated his famous work the _Ecclesiastical History of the English Race_, became a monk. It was this king-monk that taught the monks of Lindisfarne to drink wine and ale instead of the milk and water prescribed by their Scotic founder, Aidan. His head was preserved in St. Cuthbert’s coffin. Ethelwold’s immediate predecessor was Eadfrith, 698-721, who wrote that glorious Evangeliarium which is a chief pride of England, the _Lindisfarne Gospels_. To Bishop Eadfrith and his monks Bede dedicated his _Life of St. Cuthbert_, between whom and Eadfrith only one bishop had intervened. The entry at the end of the _Lindisfarne Gospels_ connects Ethelwold and Eadfrith with the production and binding of that noble specimen of the earliest Anglian work. Put into modern English it runs thus:— “Eadfrith, bishop of the church of Lindisfarne, he wrote this book at first, for God and St. Cuthbert and all the saints that are in the island, and Ethelwald, the bishop of Lindisfarne island, he made it firm outside and bound it as well as he could.”