Such being the condition of things, Oswy, in conjunction with his son and colleague, Alchfrid, convoked in the year 664 a synod at Streanæshalch to discuss the thorny question of the difference between the Churches. The place was well fitted to be the scene of a memorable meeting. Its Saxon name, which, according to Bede, signified lighthouse-bay, well indicates that conspicuous cliff on the Yorkshire coast which we now know so well by the more common-place name of Whitby, given to it some three centuries later by its Danish destroyers and rebuilders. Hither, to this wind-beaten rock, had the holy Hilda, great-niece of Edwin of Deira, removed her convent from the more northern Hartlepool; and here she dwelt, ruling her double monastery of monks and nuns in all gentleness and purity, while the little Elfleda, Oswy’s youngest daughter, whom he had vowed to God on the eve of his great battle with Penda, was growing up under her tuition into all the virtues of a perfect nun, and preparing to take her place one day as abbess of the convent. To the student of English literature Whitby monastery is for ever memorable as the home of the first English poet, Caedmon, who there, while sitting in the cow-byre, received the command from a heavenly visitor to sing “the beginning of things, the going forth out of Egypt, the suffering and the resurrection of the Lord”. At this place, then, all that was eminent for holiness in the infant Church of Northumbria came together to discuss the then all-important question of the true date for the keeping of Easter. However uninteresting from a religious point of view this question may now appear, the practical inconvenience of its unsettled condition was clearly seen in the household of King Oswy. Here was he, following the Celtic usage, celebrating his Easter feast on the fourteenth day of the lunar month which included the vernal equinox, while his wife, Eanfled, daughter of Edwin and granddaughter of Ethelbert of Kent, refused to recognise as a possible Easter any Sunday earlier than the fifteenth of the same month. Hence it might possibly happen, nay, in the very next year after the council it actually would have happened, that in the very same palace the king would be celebrating Easter Sunday with all the feasting and the gladness which were considered the suitable accompaniments of the day of the Lord’s resurrection, while the queen and all the holy men and women of her party would be sitting in the sadness of Lent preparing to follow in imagination the Dolorous Way by which on the successive days of Passion week the Saviour would be led up to the crowning grief of Calvary. The difference, as the fair-minded Bede is careful to explain, was not the same as that which separated the so-called Quarto-decimans from the Western Church, and which was finally condemned at the Council of Nicæa. That party, adhering strictly to the Jewish usage, celebrated Easter at the same