136 HEN'S HOLE IN CHEVIOT 



And if Edwin was really baptized by a Welsh prince, 

 the son of Urien and nephew of Llew Loth, there must 

 have been some approximation between the Saxons and the 

 Cumbrians, whether his Christianity was the price he paid 

 for Lothian or not. 



The indications that it was are, naturally enough, not to 

 be found in Scotch history, nor in Northumbrian history 

 either ; but nevertheless the record remains. Supposing St. 

 Helena to be a British dedication, I had been struck by the 

 incongruity of her name occurring in three different places 

 just outside the frontier of the Cumbrian Britons ; at 

 Lindean, on the east side of the Ettrick, below Selkirk, 

 where the Catrail is recorded at least as running along the 

 hill on the west side of the river ; on the frontier of Lothian 

 proper, in the angle between the Sea and the Pease Dean ; 

 and at a well at Darnick, about a mile west from Melrose, 

 where the Tweed to the north is the boundary of Wedale, 

 the district between the Gala and the Leader, which seems 

 to have belonged to Cumbria. 



And then I saw that they were Saxon dedications, and 

 probably marked the advance of Edwin of Deira, whose 

 name remains at Lessudden, spelt Lessedwyn till the 

 eighteenth century. The exactly parallel cases are those of 

 the Mercian Kings. Mr Kerslake of Bristol worked out the 

 dedications to St. Werburgh— a well-known Saxon saint, 

 an abbess of the Mercian royal family — as coinciding, in 

 about half the known cases, with the recorded proceedings 

 of Ethelbald of Mercia; and, what is further to the purpose, 

 of a certain number out of the very numerous dedications 

 to St. Helena in Englaml, with those of Oifa of Mercia. 



If she had previously been Edwin's patron saint, which 

 she naturally would be, as connected with York, it would 

 account for Offa's adopting her. And I subsequently noticed 

 the line of Edwin's dedications towards the north ; that is 

 to say, Gibson's Camden (and I imagine Camden himself) 

 mentions a Helen's Chapel at Condon, on the northern Roman 

 Wall, some way north-west of Falkirk ; that is, on the 

 northern boundary of Lothian, as that on the Pease Dean 

 is on the southern limit. It is not, I think, denied that 



