The life of Wilfrid with all its strange vicissitudes of triumph and disgrace is confessedly one of the most difficult problems in early Anglo-Saxon history. The enthusiastic panegyric of Eddius, the conventional praise and strange reticence of Bede, leave us still greatly in the dark as to the real cause of the hostility of the leading men of Northumbria, both in Church and State, towards one who seemed made to be a victorious leader of men. The vast blanks in the history can now be supplied only by conjecture, and any such conjectural emendation would probably be unjust to one or other of the disputants, to Wilfrid, to Theodore or to Egfrid. Only this much may with confidence be asserted, that the dispute, bitter as it was, turned on no question of doctrine or of morals; hardly in the end on any question of Church government. It is the possession of the great monastic properties, both in Northumbria and Mercia, which seems to be the real bone of contention between Wilfrid and his foes, and when we read of the large possessions wherewith these were endowed, ten “families” to one monastery and thirty to another (domains probably equivalent to at least 1,200 and 3,400 acres), and when we see the well-filled treasury blazing with gold and jewels, which after all his reverses gladdens the aged eyes of Wilfrid at the close of his career, we are, perhaps, enabled to understand a little more clearly what was the unexpressed grievance in the mind of the Northumbrian kings and bishops against their greatest ecclesiastic. With justice he exclaimed again and again, “What are the crimes of which you accuse me?” They had, it would seem, no crimes to allege against him, but the king felt that the vast wealth which he had accumulated made him a dangerous subject, and the bishops thought that he had abused the great position which he had achieved by his victory at Whitby, to secure for himself an unfair share of the new riches of the Church. Whatever view may be taken of the struggle, the very fact of its existence and of the somewhat sordid interests at stake shows us how far we have already travelled in less than two generations from the days of Oswald and Aidan. The victory of the Roman Easter was not all pure gain to the churches of northern Britain. CHAPTER XIII. THE LEGISLATION OF KING INE.