Awaking, Oswald assembled his council, told them his dream and received the unanimous promise of the army that if they won the victory they would make profession of the Christian faith. He then caused a large wooden cross to be prepared and a hole to be dug, in which it was firmly planted, he himself holding it erect with both hands while his soldiers filled in the soil. When this was done he cried to the host with a loud voice: “Let us all bend our knees and together call upon God Almighty, the Living and the True, that He in His pity will defend us from our proud and cruel foe: for He knoweth that this is a just war that we have undertaken for the deliverance of our people”. All obeyed his command and prayed to the God of the Christians. That night, just before dawn, they moved out of camp, attacked the probably unsuspecting Britons, and inflicted upon them a crushing defeat. Many of the enemy must have perished on the wide moorland; some who probably fled southwards with Cadwallon, their king, were whelmed in the deep waters of the Tyne. Cadwallon himself met his death (how we know not) on the banks of the little Rowley Burn, some five miles south of the Tyne and ten miles from the field of battle. Such was the event which ruined the British hopes of a reconquest of the island, which confirmed the endangered work of Ethelfrid, ratified the victory of Chester, cut off the Britons of the south from their kinsmen in Strathclyde, and confined the former to that mountainous rectangle of territory which we know as Wales. The son of the slain king, “Cadwallader the Blessed,” perhaps strove for a time to maintain the high, almost imperial pretensions of his father, but his long reign seems to have been on the whole disastrous, and when he died a pilgrim at Rome in the year 681, the Welsh chronicler himself admits that “thenceforth the Britons lost the crown of the kingdom and the Saxons gained it”.[64] The two centuries which followed the battle of Heavenfield are the darkest and dreariest in the history of Wales. Returning in triumph, as Columba in vision had promised him, Oswald proceeded to his father’s wooden palace at Bamburgh, and from thence, apparently with little difficulty, extended his rule over all Northumbria. In Bernicia he would, of course, as the son of Ethelfrid, find many loyal hearts ready to greet him; and even Deira, now that Edwin and his progeny were off the stage, had possibly a welcome for the man who was not only the deliverer from British oppression, but also on his mother’s side descended from the old line. For it will be remembered that Acha, wife of Ethelfrid, was daughter of Aelle of Deira.