A hundred and fifty years before, in the days of King Oswald who had summoned Aidan to found Lindisfarena, the other German kings, of the Mercians, the East Angles, the Kentish, and the West, East and South Saxons, recognised the Northumbrian ruler as their bretwalda; a great hall was built inland at ad-Gefrin, and Bebbanburh, not distant Lunden, was the capital of German Britain. But the times were turbulent. Northumbria was repeatedly invaded by British and Germans, Christians and pagans. And Oswald himself was killed by a scion of a rival dynasty, Oswiu.

To cement his position Oswiu, a British Christian, took as his wife a queen who followed the teachings of Rome, and called a synod. After much intense debate the Roman way was chosen over the British. Britain was left with a unified Church, though the country itself remained disunited.

Oswiu’s son Ecgfrith was a warrior king. Ecgfrith needed a strong bishop at Hagustaldasea, a town on the Roman Wall, and he turned to Lindisfarena, where a priest called Cuthbert lived in exemplary eremitic austerity in the British tradition, in contrast to the Roman bishops in their extravagant pomp.

Ecgfrith, ambitious and expansionist, launched assaults on the Irish and the Picts; he was defeated and killed, and Northumbria was never so strong again. But in the century since Ecgfrith Northumbrian scholarship had become the envy of Europe: Bede had been famous, it was said, throughout the known world.

‘So,’ Aelfric said with mounting interest, ‘when Ecgfrith came to Cuthbert, a king really did come to a hermit, on an island which is not an island ...’

‘Now you see,’ Boniface whispered. Just as it says in the fourth stanza.’

‘And the date? Does the Menologium predict that too?’

‘Oh, yes. Look at the first stanza: the “men of gold”, the “great king”. We know that this refers to the coming of the Saxons at the invitation of the British great king, the Vortigern.’

‘The brothers Hengist and Horsa,’ she recited obediently, ‘and their three ships.’

He snorted. ‘Two legendary brothers, like Romulus and Remus. Two names which mean “horse” and “gelding”. Remarkable how quickly history transmutes to myth! But the story is in Bede, even if he qualifies it ... Using Bede and other sources we have dated this revolt to the four hundred and fifty-first year after the birth of Our Lord. We use the system of dating devised by the Scythian scholar Dionysius Exiguus, and made popular by Bede himself - although as Bede well knew that calculation incorporates errors.’

‘Anno Domini four hundred and fifty-one,’ Aelfric said. ‘Then that is the date of the first stanza. Then the second, which follows nine-hundred and fifty-one months later—’