It was commenced in the year 674, the monastery being at first only built of wood, but the church was planned on a more magnificent scale. Bennet, who thought nothing of a long journey in pursuit of his cherished designs, crossed over to France to seek out good masons, and brought them back with him to Wearmouth, where they built him a very handsome church of hewn stone. The fame of this noble structure spread far and wide, and Naitan, king of the Picts, sent ambassadors imploring that the French masons might be sent to build an exactly similar church in his dominions. As soon as the walls of his church were up, Bennet sent over once more to France for glass-makers, who glazed all the windows both of the church and monastery. Bede tells us that these were the first artificers in glass who had been seen in England. “It is an art,” he says, “not to be despised, because of its use in furnishing lamps for the cloisters and other kinds of vessels.” The church being now finished and furnished, the books were stored up in the library, and four years were spent by the abbot in collecting the spiritual stones of his edifice. The result of his labours was so satisfactory that King Egfrid desired to see another monastery of similar character founded in his kingdom, and in 682 the saint obtained a second grant of land at Jarrow-on-the-Tyne, about five miles from Wearmouth. “The spot has no claim to beauty,” says a modern writer, “yet it is calculated to produce an impression of solemn quiet. The church and crumbling walls of the old monastery standing on a green hill sloping to the bay, the long silvery expanse of water, the gentle ripple of the advancing tide, the sea-birds perpetually hovering on the wing or dipping in the wave, and the distant view of Shields harbour with its clouds of smoke and forests of masts, form no ordinary combination.”[52] And we may add that no ordinary feelings stir in the heart of the visitor who sees in those grey crumbling walls, with their vestiges of Norman and Saxon ornament, the remains of that monastic seminary which nurtured the genius and the sanctity of the Venerable Bede. Here arose the monastery of St. Paul’s; and if you look in the eastern wall of the church you may still see the inscription, of unquestioned antiquity, which preserves the memory of its dedication. It is cut on a small tablet in good Roman letters, and tells you that the church was dedicated on the eighth of the kalends of May, in the fifteenth year of Egfrid the king, and during the abbacy of Ceolfrid.