But from what world she came, what use or weal
On her departure waits, no tongue hath shown;
This mystery if the Stranger can reveal,
His be a welcome cordially bestowed!"
THE FIRST ENGLISH BISHOP After this the king gave Paulinus permission to preach the Gospel openly, and he himself renounced idolatry, and in April 627, with a large number of his people, he was baptized at York in the little church which was the first to be built on the site of York Minster. After this Paulinus baptized in the river Swale, and later he came to the province of "Lindissi," and spent some time in Lincoln, converting Blaecca the "Reeve" of the city, and baptizing in the presence of the king a great number of people in the Trent either at Littleborough or Torksey.
He appears to have spent some time in Lincoln, and to have come back to it after 633, for early in 635 he consecrated Honorius the successor to Justus, and fifth Archbishop of Canterbury. The ceremony taking place probably in the little "church of stone" that he had built, possibly where St. Paul's Church now stands. It was probably thatched with reeds, for eighty years later Bede speaks of it as being unroofed. If St. Paul's church really was originally the church of Paulinus, it helps to remove the stigma that though Paulinus preached and baptised with effect, unlike Wilfrith, he founded nothing.
In 633 King Ædwin and both his sons were killed after a great battle against Penda King of Mercia and Coedwalla King of the Britons, at Haethfelth near Doncaster, and Christianity in Northumbria came to an abrupt end; though, when Paulinus left, to escort the widowed queen back to Kent, his faithful deacon James remained behind him, whose memorial we probably have in the inscribed cross shaft with its unusual interlaced pattern at Hawkswell near Catterick. To York Paulinus never returned; but on the death of Romanus, who had been sent by Archbishop Justus on a mission to the Pope but was drowned in the Bay of Genoa, he took charge of the See of Rochester, and there he remained till his death on October 10, 644, after he had been Bishop at York for eight and at Rochester for eleven years. Archbishop Honorius, who was consecrated just a year before the death of a Pope of the same name, ordained Ithamar to succeed Paulinus. He was a native of Kent and the first Englishman to be made a bishop. After the death of Paulinus in 644, more than four centuries passed before
