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Updated: May 14, 2025
"Our brows are bound with spindrift, and the weed is on our knees, Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas; From reef, and rock, and skerry, over headland, ness, and voe, The coastwise lights of England watch the ships of England go." The largest, Farne Island, is the nearest to the coast, and is the one to which St. Aidan retired, and on which St.
The same Aidan liued not past 12 daies after the death of the said Oswin, whome he so much loued, departing this world the last daie of August, in the seuenteenth yeare after he was ordeined bishop. His bodie was buried in the Ile of Lindesferne.
It founded schools and partially educated the rough people, but it produced no lasting literature. The other, under the leadership of the saintly Aidan, came from Ireland, which country had been for centuries a center of religion and education for all western Europe. The monks of this school labored chiefly in Northumbria, and to their influence we owe all that is best in Anglo-Saxon literature.
Bede tells us, too, how Aidan wandered, preaching from place to place, haunting King Oswald's court, but owning nothing of his own save his church, and a few fields about it; and how, when death came upon him, they set up a tent for him close by the wall at the west end of the church, so that it befell that he gave up the ghost leaning against a post, which stood outside to strengthen the wall.
Being unable to do it of his own authority, he thought of having the measure carried in the assembly of Drumceit, convened for the chief purpose of settling peacefully the relations of Ireland with the Dalriadan colony established in Western Scotland a hundred years before. Columba came from Iona in behalf of Aidan, whom he had crowned a short time previously as King of Albania or Scotland.
Success, too, attended Columcille's ministrations among the Dalriadans, and on the death of their king, Aidan Gabhran, who succeeded to the throne, sought regal consecration from the hands of Columcille. In 597 the saint died, but not before he had won a whole kingdom to Christ and covered the land with churches and monasteries.
Not long after this, Aidan was at Bamburgh, when he was seized with sudden illness, and died with his head resting against one of the wooden stays of the little church. Penda came again the next year, and this time both village and church were burnt, all except, says tradition, the beam of wood against which Aidan had rested in his last moments.
A sense of coming ill weighed on Northumbria, and its dread was quickened by a memory of the curses which had been pronounced by the bishops of Ireland on its king, when his navy, setting out a year before from the newly-conquered western coast, swept the Irish shores in a raid which seemed like sacrilege to those who loved the home of Aidan and Columba.
Those who visit Melrose will take a peep at the gravestone of Tom Purdie, who sleeps amid a long line of the dead, reaching from the days of Aidan to our own, as alive he filled a little niche in the regard! of a master who has given to both high and low so many niches in the temple of immortality. By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co.
Francis Aidan Gasquet, a Benedictine monk, in his valuable work on "Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries," says of Cromwell: "No single minister in England ever exercised such extensive authority, none ever rose so rapidly, and no one has ever left behind him a name covered with greater infamy and disgrace."
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