At the Dissolution, as its income was less than £200 per annum, the Priory was treated as one of the lesser monasteries and suppressed in 1536, when the site was granted to the Bishop of Durham, and the buildings were left neglected; but their ruin was hastened by being treated as a stone-quarry. It does not appear that the Priory was ever purposely damaged otherwise, and it remains, after three centuries of neglect, a more perfect and picturesque ruin than many of higher importance and more beautiful architecture. MONKWEARMOUTH AND JARROW BY THE REV. D. S. BOUTFLOWER, M.A. It is almost impossible for the student of history to dissociate the two names. In their earliest origin, in the ups and downs of their long existence, and almost, if not quite, in their present conditions, the sister churches have met with one and the same experience. Their foundations were laid within the short period of ten years; they have arisen and decayed and revived (and that more than once) almost simultaneously. They have shared together honour and neglect, wealth and poverty. In all things and at all times the supreme desire of their great founder has been fulfilled, and Monkwearmouth and Jarrow have been one. Planted long ago as outposts of religious culture brought oversea to the mouths of the Wear and the Tyne, the Churches of St. Peter and St. Paul are now the centres of populous districts. Like other churches around them, they have their own busy church life; but, unlike to and above the rest, these two stand as witnesses of the antiquity and continuity of the Christian faith in England. The churches where Bede worshipped are still, at least in part, the churches of the twentieth century. The Gospels which he expounded are heard at their Communion services to-day. Much of their history must be sought for and read in the buildings themselves. The first thing they will tell us is that they belong to a very early period of Saxon art. We have other evidence to assure us that these were [Illustration: MONKWEARMOUTH CHURCH.] among the first stone churches in England, and to tell how masons were brought from the Continent to erect them. The singular height of the church at Monkwearmouth would lead us to the same conclusion. They were thus churches of quite a peculiar type, a type destined to undergo many modifications in later times. In Monkwearmouth and Jarrow you are face to face with the earliest form of English ecclesiastical architecture.