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CHAPTER VIII.
In tracing the history of the Northumbrian Church
during the whole of the period from the arrival of
Paulinas to the commencement of Egbert's episcopate,
we have had the guidance of Venerable Bede,
the indefatigable student, the careful chronicler of the
events of his own time, and the faithful narrator of
the traditions of the generation which preceded him.
But for him we should have known little of the
establishment and progress of Christianity in Northumbria.
" The lamp of learning, trimmed by the
hand of a single monastic who never passed the
limits of his Northumbrian province, irradiated from
the cell of Jarrow, the Saxon realm of England, with
a clear and steady light; and when Bede died.
History reversed her torch, and quenched it in deep
night."' Bede died in 735. As an historian he left
no successor, and the times were such as to afford
little encouragement to quiet study and research. In
little more than half a century after his death Lindisfarne
was pillaged and burnt by the Northmen, and
the defenceless inmates of the monastery promiscuously
slaughtered. The Danes were constantly
making incursions in different parts. In 866, during
the reign of Ethelred I., they first entered East Anglia,
and in the year following the ' cyules ' of the invaders
'
Surtees' " History of Durham," ii. p. 69.