Christianity, fulfilling Divine promise, had brought “not peace, but a sword” to the Romans, and the Saxon king, Edwin of Northumbria, had not long been converted and baptized at York, on the site of the present Minster, before he was slain in conflict with the heathen. It was Paulinus, first Archbishop of York, who had baptized Edwin in 625. Sent to the North of England by Gregory the Great, as Augustine had already been sent for the conversion of the South, it was the Pope’s intention to establish two Archbishoprics; and thence arose centuries of quarrelling between the Archbishops of Canterbury and those of York as to who was supreme. York, indeed, only claimed equal rights; but Canterbury claimed precedence. In the Synod of 1072 the Archbishop of York was declared subordinate to Canterbury, but half a century later, in order to make peace, Rome adjudged them equal. Even this did not still the strife, and Roger Pont l’Évêque, the Archbishop of York, who was contemporary with Becket, and aided the king in his struggle with that prelate, was especially bitter in the attempt to assert in all places and at all seasons this equality. He renewed the contention with Becket’s successor, and provoked an absurd scene at the Council of Westminster in 1176, when, arriving late and finding the Archbishop of Canterbury present and already seated, he sat down in his lap. The result was, that the Council of Westminster immediately resolved itself into a faction fight, in which my lord of York was jumped upon and kicked, for all the world like a football umpire who has given an unpopular decision. Even this did not settle either the Archbishop of York or the strife, and so at last, in 1354, it was decreed that each should be supreme in his own Province, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury should be “Primate of All England,” while his brother of York should bear the title of “Primate of England”; but whenever an Archbishop of York was consecrated he should send to the Primate of All England a golden jewel, valued at £40, to be laid on the Shrine of St. Thomas. “Thus,” says Fuller, in his inimitably humorous manner, “when two children cry for the same apple, the indulgent father divides it between them, yet so that he gives the better part to the child which is his darling.” Rome has long since ceased to have part or lot in the English Church, but this solemn farce of nomenclature is still retained. In such things as these does York retain something of its old pride of place. Even its Mayor is a Lord Mayor, which was something to be proud of before these latter days, now Lord Mayors are three a penny, and every bumptious modern overgrown town is in process of obtaining one. The first Lord Mayor of York, however, was appointed by Richard the Second, and thus the title has an honourable antiquity.