Thus were King Edwin of Deira and his _Witan_ converted to the true religion, and the temple which contained the heathen altars destroyed. Coifi himself sought permission to be the first to cast down the idols it contained, and the king granted him weapons and a horse for the purpose. Riding to the temple, he first cast his spear against the altar, and then called to his companions that they should pull down the idols and burn them. ‘The place is yet pointed out,’ wrote Bede one hundred years later, ‘not far east from Eoferwic beyond the river Derwent, and is to-day called Godmundingaham, where the high priest, through the inspiration of the true God, cast down and destroyed the altars which he himself had previously hallowed.’ ‘Not far east from York, beyond the river Derwent’—such was Bede’s description of the place of this memorable deed. GODMUNDINGAHAM, he says, was its new name, and GOODMANHAM it is in our own day. Tradition says further that the present church, dedicated to All Saints, stands on the exact site of the heathen temple which Coifi, the heathen high priest, was the first to profane. But whether tradition speaks true we have no means of knowing. [Illustration: GOODMANHAM CHURCH. (_From an old Engraving_). ] * * * * * The immediate results of the adoption of Christianity at Goodmanham were the building of a wooden church at York, and the baptism in it of King Edwin on Easter Day 627. This wooden church, dedicated to St. Peter, was shortly afterwards succeeded by a larger and loftier church of stone, which, in its turn, was destined to be succeeded by another yet larger and loftier—the Minster that we count to-day as one of the glories of Northern England. Six years later King Edwin was slain in battle against Penda, the heathen king of Mercia, and Cadwallon, a British king, ‘more fierce and cruel than the heathen, for he was a barbarian.’ The head of Edwin was taken to York and buried in the stone church of St. Peter which he had begun to build; and Paulinus, the first Archbishop of York, fled by sea southwards to Kent with Edwin’s widowed queen and their two children. Then for the whole of an ‘unhappy and godless’ year Northumbria was wasted by Cadwallon. At the end of the year Edwin’s nephew Oswald, with an army small but strengthened by belief in Christ, fought against Cadwallon. Now Oswald was ‘a man dear to God,’ and before the battle he caused to be made a hastily-constructed cross of wood, which was erected in a pit dug in front of his army. With his own hands he set up this cross and held it till his men had made it firm with heaped-up soil. Then did Oswald call to him all his men and gave them his command: ‘Let us all bend the knee and together ask the almighty, living, and true God to defend us with His mercy from this proud and cruel foe; for He knows that we are justly fighting for the safety of our people.’