Mr. J. R. Green ("Making of England,") says--"The first missionaries to the Englishmen, strangers in a heathen land, attached themselves necessarily to the courts of the kings, who were their earliest converts, and whose conversion was generally followed by that of their people. The English bishops were thus at first royal chaplains, and their diocese was naturally nothing but the kingdom. The kingdom of Kent became the diocese of Canterbury, and the kingdom of Northumbria became the diocese of York. So absolutely was this the case that the diocese grew or shrank with the growth or shrinking of the realm which it spiritually represented, and a bishop of Wessex or of Mercia found the limits of his see widened or cut short by the triumphs of Wolfhere or of Ine. In this way two realms, which are all but forgotten, are commemorated in the limits of existing sees. That of Rochester represented, till of late, an obscure kingdom of West Kent, and the frontier of the original kingdom of Mercia might be recovered by following the map of the ancient bishopric of Lichfield."
After describing in detail some of the subdivisions made by Archbishop Theodore (A.D. 669-672), he adds--"The see of Lichfield thus returned to its original form of a see of the Mercians proper, though its bounds on the westward now embraced much of the upper Severn valley, with Cheshire and the lands northward to the Mersey."
Notwithstanding this error with regard to the southern boundary of Northumbria at that period, the Roman road, in all probability, was utilised by the contending forces, and some portion of the main battle was, doubtless, fought in its immediate vicinity. On the other hand, it is equally probable, as the two larger tumuli are situated on the north-west bank of the Ribble, that the chief conflict occurred in their neighbourhood. On this hypothesis, Wada and his allies, on leaving Waddington, crossed the Hodder, at the ford nearest its mouth, met the King's army on the banks of the Ribble, and the possession of Bullasey-ford was the immediate object of the encounter in which the rebellious chieftain was discomfited. Or the route may have been reversed. Wada may have crossed the Ribble, at the Bungerley "hyppyngstones," to the north-west of Clitheroe, or the Edisford, to the south-west, and after penetrating the southern portion of the present county, had to fall back before the advance of the King's army, and, unable to retrace his steps he made for the nearer ford at Bullasey, where he was defeated and pursued across the river. As the slaughter is generally greater when a discomfited enemy is routed, perhaps the two large tumuli, named "lowes," mark the spot where the greatest carnage ensued. This, however, of course, is merely conjecture. Its value cannot be tested unless a thorough investigation of the contents of these huge mounds should throw additional light upon the subject.