Above : Picture of St Aidan

St. Aidan was the most celebrated of the missionaries trained at St. Columcille’s monastery at Iona. The son of Lugair, an Irish Saint of the same lineage as St. Brigid, Aidan studied at Innis Scattery under St. Senanus, and became a monk at Iona about 630. When King Oswald sent to Iona for missionaries, the first monks sent in answer to his call obtained but little results. They said on their return, after the failure of their mission, that success was impossible amongst the barbarous and stubborn people of Northumbria. Aidan, who was listening, asked if the cause of their failure was due to the stubbornness of the people or to the severity of the monks. ” Did you forget God’s word,” he asked, ” to give them the milk first and then the meat?” All those assembled thereupon considered Aidan as fittest to undertake the abandoned mission, and he set out in obedience to their election, and fixed his home at Lindisfarne. Thence from his monastery preachers went forth in all directions through th<j kingdom of Northumbria and the North. One group of missionaries went to the Valley of the Tweed. Aidan himself went on foot preaching to the people of Bernicia. King Oswald, who had spent some time with the Irish monks at Iona, acted as interpreter to the Irish missionaries in their effort to convert his thegns. The piety of Aidan was seconded by the zeal of Oswald. Churches were built and the Northumbrian people came in great numbers to hear the new teachers. Aidan lived the life that he preached to others. The gifts which he received from the king and the thegns were at once given to the poor, and his time was spent in study and preaching. He afterwards went as a missionary into the kingdom Deira, and there he exercised over King Oswini the same influence which he had held over Oswald in Northumbiia. Aidan’s mission in the North succeeded splendidly where the previous mission from Italy under Paulinus had failed, and Lindis­farne became a focus and centre where some of the highest art and best literary culture of the period were cherished and cultivated. He found a school in which boys of the Angles were to be taught the Christian polity. One of his pupils, Eata, became afterwards Abbot of Lindisfarne. Another was the famous Bishop St. Chadd. A third was his equally famous brother Bishop Cedda, and Diuma, first Bishop of Mercia, was a fourth. St. Aidan died in the year 651, and it is related that, when he felt death approaching, he had a hut built against the western wall of his church at Bamborough, and expired there, leaning against a post which had been erected to buttress the wall.