This result was after all a compromise, and, as has been well pointed out by Dr. Bright, a compromise less favourable to Wilfrid than that which had been made before. He had lost the bishopric of York and had to be content with the less important bishopric of Hexham, but he recovered possession of all his domains and monasteries in Northumbria and Mercia. Wilfrid had now four years of peace at the end of his stormy life. Not long before his death he “invited two abbots and certain very faithful brethren, to the number of eight in all, to meet him at Ripon, and commanded the key-bearer to open his treasury, and to set forth in their sight all the gold and silver with the precious stones, and then ordered them to be divided into four parts according to his judgment”. He explained that it had been his intention to make yet another journey to Rome and offer one of these four portions at the shrines of the Virgin and the saints. Should death prevent him from carrying this design into effect, he charged them to send messengers to offer the gifts in his stead. Of the remaining portions one was to be given to the poor for the redemption of his soul; another was to be divided between the rulers of his two beloved abbeys Hexham and Ripon, “that they may be able by their gifts to win the friendship of kings and bishops”; the last was to be distributed among the friends and companions of his exile to whom he had not yet given landed possessions. From the minute account which the biographer gives of the whole scene, it seems probable that he was one of the six faithful brethren permitted to gaze on the opened treasury, and one of the companions of the exile who received a share in the bequest. After some further arrangements about the future government of the abbey of Ripon, Wilfrid journeyed into Mercia, on an invitation from King Ceolred, reached the monastery of Oundle in Northamptonshire, and there, in 709, after a short sickness, ended his days, in the seventy-sixth year of his age. In the forty-six years of his episcopate he had dedicated churches and ordained bishops, priests and deacons past counting. His body was taken to Ripon and there interred with great solemnity. The abbots of his two chief monasteries believed that they had secured in the departed saint a heavenly intercessor of equal power with their apostolic patrons St. Peter and St. Andrew, and their faith was confirmed when, at a great meeting on the anniversary of his death, they beheld at night a white circle in the heavens reaching all round the sky and seeming to encompass the monastery of St. Peter at Ripon with its protecting glory.