partly to exterminate it that the Gallic Church. sent over St. Germanus. He preached in Denbigh and Anglesey we know, and it is far from unlikely that he founded the churches in Denbighshire which are dedicated to St. Hilary, in spite of the usage of the British Church, which only permitted dedication to St. Mary, St. Michael, or the founder; and I submit it as possible that he or one of his disciples founded Wallasey, and perpetuated once. more the name of the then popular Saint.

But the British rule was shortly to come to an end. For a century and a half the English invaders had been encroaching gradually on the territory of the Britons, and if you will look at Mr. Green's map of Britain in 580, in his Making of England, you will see that, roughly speaking, England was divided from north to south by a line drawn from Berwick to the Isle of Wight, to the east of which lay the English, and to the west the stillunconquered Britons. This line represents the natural barrier of hills that runs through England like a backbone, and that had long held the English at bay; and it was not until 613 that Æthelfrith, the Northumbrian king, anticipating by nearly 500 years the famous march of the Norman William, broke through the boundary and pushed over the bleak moors of Ribblehead, to sweep down on what we now call Southern Lancashire. His object was to break in two the long unwieldy British confederacy that stretched north and south along our western coast, and he chose as striking point Chester, the capital of Gwynedd, a district which then embraced the greater part of the present North Wales. At the news of the danger of Chester, Brocmail, the Prince of Powys, marched from Shrewsbury to its rescue. Two thousand monks from the huge monastery of Bangor Iscoed, after a three days' fast, made their

66

way to the field, to pray for the success of the British arms. King Ethelfrith, says Bede, being informed of the occasion of their coming, said, "If, then, they cry to their God against us, in "truth, though they do not bear arms, yet they fight against us, because they oppose us by their prayers." He therefore commanded them to be attacked first, and then destroyed the rest of the "impious army," not without much loss to his own. forces; and, continues Bede, there made a very great slaughter of that "perfidious nation." This victory was followed by the capture of Chester itself, while the district around it fell into the hands of the Northumbrians; and so the Wirral passed into the possession of our English forefathers, and I doubt not there are many living in our midst to-day in whose veins runs the blood of the victors in the Battle of Chester.

With the Anglian conquest of Wirral came, in all probability, a wave of heathenism, and it may be-but this is, of course, the merest conjecturethat all the British churches, with one exception, of which I shall speak in a moment, were desolated and forgotten; so that when for a second time the Gospel was brought to us, either by St. Aidan or St. Chad, or by their missionaries (who can tell?) the original dedications having been forgotten, fresh churches were built on or near the old foundations, and new and English dedications found for them. Thus when the new church was reared at Landican, or Woodchurch as it soon became, the old British saint's name being lost, the new dedication to the Holy Cross was made.

The one exception to which I alluded a moment ago is Wallasey. The Northumbrians, holding Chester as a base, probably had but little difficulty in subduing the great part of Wirral, which possesses few natural features that could be turned

I

to account in a scheme of defence. The triangle of Wallasey, however, must have been nearly impregnable, backed as it was on two sides by the sea, and protected on the third by the Pool and the impassable morass which is now Bidston Moss. Here the Britons made their last desperate stand, and it would seem to have been a successful one, since the English conquerors have dubbed it Wallasey, the Welshman's Island. The English probably found that even a Briton, when he got his back to the wall and could retreat no further, was not a creature to be played with; and so, surfeited with the extent of their gains, they settled down, content to acknowledge the existence of the plucky band in the low, rock-crowned hill across the marsh. And here we find what we might expect, that the old dedication was not forgotten, and St. Hilary to day is perhaps the only local example that we have of a church that can claim an unbroken history of fourteen hundred years.

And whence did the preachers come who brought the Gospel a second time into our neighbourhood? Did St. Chad, or St. Cuthbert, or St. Äidan preach to our English forefathers, for all three were at different times within a few miles of Wirral? or did one or other of them send missionaries to us? One likes in imagination to dwell on the picture of one of this noble trio, with a devoted band, landing from over-seas, perchance, at the north-western corner of the Wirral, and planting the Cross on some rising ground, and there preaching to the hardy English settlers as they crowded round to see the strangers; and are there not, in West Kirby Museum yonder, some scraps of the stone cross which soon rose to mark the spot where the throng first gathered?

Whoever may have brought the message back again among us, it is clear that very soon churches, minute ones and insignificant no doubt, began to rise in different spots throughout the peninsula. From the presence of a monumental inscription in runes at Overchurch, near Upton, asking for the prayers of the passer-by for Æthelmund, it may be fairly deduced that when this monument was reared, in the seventh century, there was a church there. Further, the name itself, which means the church. on the shore (i.e., the shore of the lake or mere that at this early period probably covered all the flat land from what is now Great Meols Station to the foot of Wallasey and Bidston Hills) must have been given to it prior to the ninth century, when the Norsemen landed and settled here. Again, in 642 King Oswald fell at Maserfield, near Oswestry, fighting against Penda, the heathen king of the Mercians, and within a short time of his death was canonized and, as St. Oswald, became one of the most popular Northumbrian saints. Now in Wirral we have two churches dedicated to his name, at Bidston and Backford; yet about 660 Wirral must have passed from the hands of the Northumbrians and become part of the kingdom of Mercia; so that it looks as if these churches must have risen between the two dates.

Between this time and the coming of the Norsemen at the end of the ninth century, the life of the Church in Wirral doubtless flowed on with little to agitate or disturb it; and when the wild heathen did pour from over-seas, though they may have spread famine and desolation around, they have preserved for us, in the name they gave to Wallasey (Kirkby, or the Church town), the fact that at their coming, at all events, they found a church there. It would be interesting to know whether it were they who gave the dedication to

the parish church of West Kirby, St. Bridget, or whether this marks the work of the earlier Irish missionaries of whom I have already spoken. The fact that the Norsemen called it West Kirkby, to differentiate it from Kirkby in Wallasey, looks as if it were later, but it may be that they conquered Wallasey first, and not knowing of the church on Caldy Hill, gave Wallasey the distinctive title.

That the Norse settlement in Wirral must have been a very complete one, is obvious to anyone who looks at the map. Its completeness is shewn by the fact that the Norsemen actually introduced their own system of local government, and met at one common centre, at Thingwall, where the business of the district was transacted, new laws promulgated, and their annual "thing" or parliament held. The more carefully one looks into the matter, the more complete appears to have been the occupation. In addition to the Norse place-names (as Irby, Greasby, Frankby, Pensby, and so on) we find, on more detailed examination, that the whole countryside teems with Norse names, names of fields, brooks, and lanes; and even in the common speech of the countryfolk we find many words to which a Norse origin must be assigned.

One wonders whether the Norsemen were Christian when they came. It is impossible to say, but the probability seems to be that if they were not, they became so very shortly after their final settlement, the date of which may probably be placed towards the end of the ninth century.

We have seen Wirral, and with it our parish churches, pass successively through the hands of Briton, Angle, and Norseman, and now it is to change its lords once more, and, let us trust, for the last time. Angle and Norseman, closely related as they were, must very soon have become welded into one common family, and formed together that