The twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow are described as Ecgferth’s minster, because King Ecgfrith of Northumbria, 670-85, gave land to Benet Biscop to found a monastery at the mouth of the Don, now called the Wear, and some years later another portion of land for the twin monastery of St. Paul, Jarrow. Later in Biscop’s life he purchased two additional pieces of land from the next king, Aldfrith, giving for the first two royal robes, or palls, made all of silk, worked in an incomparable manner, which he had bought in Rome. For the second, a much larger piece, he gave to the king a manuscript collection of geographical writings, of beautiful workmanship. We in the south-west must always remember that Benedict Bishop first brought his vast ecclesiastical treasures to the court of Wessex, but finding his royal patron dead went up north with them. But for the death of the King of Wessex, we should have had Wearmouth and Jarrow here as well as Malmesbury, Bede as well as Aldhelm, and it may be Alcuin too. We have letters of Alcuin to King Ethelred, to Higbald the Bishop of Lindisfarne, and to the monks of the twin monastery of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, on this catastrophe. The letter to Ethelred comes first:— [Sidenote: Ep. 22. A.D. 793.] “To my most loved lord King Ethelred and all his chief men the humble levite Alchuine sends greeting. “Mindful of your most sweet affection, my brothers and fathers and lords honourable in Christ; deeply desiring that the divine mercy may preserve to us in long-lived prosperity the fatherland which that mercy long ago gave to us with gratuitous freedom; I therefore, comrades most dear, whether present, if God allow it, by my words, or absent by my writings under the guidance of the divine spirit, do not cease from admonishing you, and by frequent repetition to convey to your ears, you who are citizens of the same fatherland, those things which are known to pertain to the safety of this earthly realm and to the blessedness of the heavenly home; so that things many times heard may grow into your minds with good result. For what is love to a friend if it keeps silence on matters useful to the friend? To what does a man owe fidelity if not to his country? To whom does a man owe prosperity if not to its citizens? By a double relationship we are fellow-citizens of one city in Christ, that is as sons of Mother Church and of one native country. Let not therefore your humanity shrink from accepting benignly what my devotion seeks to offer for the safety of our land. Think not that I am charging faults against you: take it that I aim at warding off penalties.”