Some while after this, there was a little boy in the monastery who had been seriously troubled by ague. One day he was anxiously awaiting the hour of an attack, when one of the brothers came in to him and said: ‘My boy, shall I tell you how you may be cured of this complaint? Get up, and go to Oswald’s tomb in the church. Remain there quietly and mind you don’t stir from it until the time that your fever is due to leave you. Then I will come and fetch you.’ The boy did as the brother advised, and while he sat by the saint’s tomb the fever dared not touch him: furthermore, it was so completely scared that it never recurred, either on the second or the third day, or ever after. A brother of that monastery who told me this story added that the boy who had been so miraculously cured was by then a young man and still living in the monastery. But it need cause no surprise that the prayers of this king, who now reigns with God, should be acceptable to him, since when he was a king on earth he always used to work and pray fervently for the eternal kingdom.
It is said that Oswald often remained in prayer from the early hour of Lauds until dawn, and that through his practice of constant prayer and thanksgiving to God he always sat with his hands palm upwards on his knees. It is also said, and has become proverbial, that his life even closed in prayer; for when he saw the enemy forces surrounding him and knew that his end was near, he prayed for the souls of his soldiers. ‘God have mercy on their souls, said Oswald as he fell’ is now a proverb. As I have already mentioned, his bones were taken up and buried in the Abbey of Bardney; but the king who slew him ordered that his head and hands with the forearms be hacked off and fixed on stakes. The following year, Oswald’s successor Oswy came to the place with his army and removed them, placing the head in the church at Lindisfarne, and the hands and arms in his own royal city of Bamburgh.