towns of corresponding importance the case is different. If the cities were preserved from pillage, traces of Christianity and civilisation were obliterated. If York kept its position as an inhabited town, its population must have been small and poor: the Anglian sovereigns of Northumbria dwelt, not in the old Roman capital, but at country settlements like Goodmanham. The history of York begins again with the mission of Paulinus and the foundation of the first Saxon cathedral there. We also hear of Lincoln in connection with Paulinus, who consecrated a church there; and this city, like York, was large and important at the time of the Conquest. But, in both these cases, the Anglian invasion first, and the Danish invasion later, caused a serious disturbance to civic and religious life. Although there is evidence that the Saxon bishops who ruled at Dorchester (Oxon.) in the tenth and eleventh centuries looked upon Lincoln as the real seat of their authority, it did not recover its position as an ecclesiastical capital until a Norman bishop raised his cathedral in the south-eastern corner of the hill city. Even then the cathedral stood, not with its front to the _via principalis_, as at Le Mans, nor with its face to the _forum_, as at Coutances, but in an enclosure of its own, apart from the main life of the city. When we think of the great ecclesiastical centres of England, there are some names which recall the Roman occupation; but of these Chichester, Exeter, Lincoln, did not become sees of bishops until the time of the Norman conquest; Chester, although regarded as one seat of their authority by the medieval bishops of Lichfield, was never the real capital of their diocese. Bath and Old Sarum were given episcopal rank by Norman prelates. The true Saxon cathedral towns were villages of post-Roman origin—Lichfield, Wells, Sherborne, Durham, Ripon, Elmham, Thetford. The fact is significant; for, upon the continent of Europe, the ecclesiastical importance of a city was the result of its prominent position as the civil metropolis of a district. The choice of these obscure villages for the sees of Saxon prelates is a testimony to the practical abandonment of Roman cities by the invaders.