Even in Mercia itself heathendom was dead with Penda.

"Being thus freed," Baeda tells us, "the Mercians with their King rejoiced to serve the true King, Christ." Its three provinces, the earlier Mercia, the Middle-English, and the Lindiswaras, were united in the bishopric of the missionary Ceadda, the St.Chad to whom Lichfield is still dedicated.
Ceadda was a monk of Lindisfarne, so simple and lowly in temper that he travelled on foot on his long mission journeys till Archbishop Theodore with his own hands lifted him on horseback.

The old Celtic poetry breaks out in his death-legend, as it tells us how voices of singers singing sweetly descended from heaven to the little cell beside St.Mary's Church where the bishop lay dying.

Then "the same song ascended from the roof again, and returned heavenward by the way that it came." It was the soul of his brother, the missionary Cedd, come with a choir of angels to solace the last hours of Ceadda.
[Sidenote: Cuthbert] In Northumbria the work of his fellow missionaries has almost been lost in the glory of Cuthbert.

No story better lights up for us the new religious life of the time than the story of this Apostle of the Lowlands.