The conversion of England to Christianity took, from first to last, some ninety years (A.D. 597 to 686), though during the last thirty the ancestral heathenism was only lingering on in remote comers of the land. The original missionary impulse came from Rome, and Augustine is rightly regarded as the evangelist of the English; yet only a comparatively small part of the nation owed its Christianity directly to the mission sent out by Pope Gregory. Wessex was won over by an independent adventurer, the Frank Birinus, who had no connexion with the earlier arrivals in Kent. The great kingdom of Northumbria, though its first Christian monarch Edwin was converted by Paulinus, a disciple of Augustine, relapsed into heathenism after his death. It was finally evangelized from quite another quarter, by Irish missionaries brought by King Oswald from Columba's monastery of Iona. The church that they founded struck root, as that of Paulinus and Edwin had failed to do, and was not wrecked even by Oswald's death in battle at the hands of Penda the Mercian, the one strong champion of heathenism that England produced. Moreover, Penda was no sooner dead, smitten down by Oswald's brother Oswio at the battle of the Winwaed (A.D. 655), than his whole kingdom eagerly accepted Christianity, and received missionaries, Irish and Northumbrian, from the victorious Oswio. It is clear that, unlike their king, the Mercians had no profound enthusiasm for the old gods. Essex, which had received its first bishop from Augustine's hands but had relapsed into heathenism after a few years, also owed its ultimate conversion to a Northumbrian preacher, Cedd, whom Oswio lent to King Sigeberht after the latter had visited his court and been baptized, hard by the Roman wall, in 653. Yet even in those English regions where the missionaries from Iona were the founders of the Church, the representatives of Rome were to be its organizers. In 664 the Northumbrian king Oswio, at the synod of Whitby, declared his adhesion to the Roman connexion, whether it was that he saw political advantage therein, or whether he realized the failings and weaknesses of the Celtic church, and preferred the more orderly methods of her rival. Five years later there arrived from Rome the great organizer, Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus, who bound the hitherto isolated churches of the English kingdoms into a well-compacted whole, wherein the tribal bishops paid obedience to the metropolitan at Canterbury, and met him frequently in national councils and synods. England gained a spiritual unity long ere she attained a political unity, for in these meetings, which were often attended by kings as well as by prelates, Northumbrian, West Saxon and Mercian first learnt to work together as brothers. The English church.