Devoted as Oswald was to the Christianisation of his people he was no pious _roi fainéant_, but a strong and successful monarch who made his power felt at least from the Firth of Forth to the Bristol Channel. Bede tells us, perhaps with some unconscious exaggeration of the glory of his native Northumbria, that “he received under his sway all the nations and provinces of Britain, which are divided into four languages, those of the Britons, the Picts, the Scots, and the Angles”. As he evidently here uses “Angles” as equivalent to Angles and Saxons, this sentence represents Oswald as accomplishing more than Egbert was to achieve two centuries later, and as practically the lord of our whole island. Consistently herewith he represents him as the sixth of the Bretwaldas; and Adamnan, who at first calls him merely “regnator Saxonicus,” says that after the victory of Heavenfield he was “ordained by God emperor of the whole of Britain”. But all these statements must be taken with considerable reservation. Oswald wielded evidently during the seven years of his reign the predominant power in the island, but we are not to think of him as interfering with any of the details of administration in Wessex or East Anglia, still less in Wales or among the Scots of Dalriada. With Wessex, indeed, we are expressly told that he formed ties both of relationship and of religion. When Cynegils, King of the West Saxons, who had been converted to Christianity by the preaching of Birinus, was baptised, his godfather, the man who, according to ecclesiastical phrase, “received him emerging from the sacred laver,” was Oswald of Bernicia, who also became his son-in-law, accepting from the old West Saxon king the hand of his daughter in marriage. From the character of our one chief authority, Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_, it naturally but unfortunately follows that we are left in almost total ignorance of the political events in Oswald’s reign. Gladly would we know, for instance, whether the fierce Mercian, Penda, bowed his head even for a time under the yoke of Northumbrian supremacy, but on this point we are left without information. There are hints of earlier wars and fightings between the two states, but all that we can certainly say is that on August 5, 642, Oswald and Penda met in battle at a place called Maserfield,[66] and that though Penda’s brother fell in the fight the Mercian king “was victorious by diabolic art,” and Oswald lay dead on the battlefield. He died praying: when he saw himself girt round by the Mercian host and knew that his death was inevitable, he cried aloud: “Lord, have mercy on the souls of my army,” and the remembrance of this prayer passed into a proverb: “‘Lord, pity their souls,’ as Oswald said when he was falling to the ground”.