Henry de Pudsey, who may be regarded as the founder of Finchale, was Bishop Pudsey’s eldest illegitimate son, and must have been born some long time before his father succeeded to the see as the Bishop had other children younger than Henry. His mother was Adelaide de Percy from whom he appears to have inherited a good deal of land in Craven, as well as the manors of Wingate and Haswell, with which he afterwards endowed Finchale. At some period not long before the death of Godric he seems to have been engaged in founding a small establishment for Austen Canons at a place called Bakstanford not far from Neville’s Cross to which the monks of Durham seem to have objected as an intrusion of a foreign order within their immediate sphere of influence. Whether it was in consequence of their protests or at the wish of his father is uncertain, but he suspended his operations and transferred his endowments to Finchale; and there he erected new monastic buildings for the accommodation of a colony of Benedictines from Durham who, under Thomas the Sacrist as Prior, took possession of the convent in 1196, a year after the death of Bishop Pudsey. It was apparently the intention also of Henry to rebuild Godric’s church in a more suitable manner, but in 1198 he became involved in some political troubles and went crusading in 1201 from which he did not return until 1212; and he left the rebuilding of the church to be carried out by the community. [Illustration: PISCINA IN CHOIR.] The building of a new church seems to have been taken in hand in 1242, a year memorable in the annals of Durham Cathedral as the one which saw the beginning of the great eastern transept of the "Nine Altars," under the auspices of Prior Thomas of Melsamby, of whom Canon Greenwell says: "He was one of the greatest men who have sat in the prior’s chair at Durham." The subservient position which Finchale held to the Durham convent necessitated the assent of its Prior to so important an undertaking; and it is not improbable that he may have pointed out the necessity of the work and that his architect, Richard de Farnham, was responsible for the design. Although of but modest dimensions for a priory church, and but little longer and wider than the chapel which the Brus family had recently built near by at Hartlepool, it was still on too ambitious a scale for the limited resources of the convent; and the work dragged on for a number of years, and was never completed in its entirety. Its chief internal dimensions were--total length of nave and choir 194 feet and of the transepts 99 feet; the widths of the nave and choir were 23 feet and of the transepts 21 feet, while the width across the unbuilt aisles would have been 52 feet. But the aisles would seem never to have been finished, and though Mackensie Walcot pathetically says that "it was the hand of the monk which pulled down the chapel of the transept and the aisles of the choir and nave" it seems more than