The name of Finchale must have been well known in the ninth century if we accept the common and reasonable belief that it was a place of meeting of two or three important councils concerned with the affairs of Northumbria. Its position in reference to the great road passing to the South, its accessibility to the neighbouring town of Chester-le-Street only three or four miles distant, and its comparative seclusion in the great surrounding forest made it particularly suitable for such meetings, which were held, as Bishop Stubbs says in his _Constitutional History_, generally on the confines of states whence those assembled might easily retire at nightfall to safer places. The councils held in Northumbria during the latter part of the eighth century met at a time when the country was not only disturbed by internal troubles, but already threatened by the Danish pirates along the coast; and the forest depths of Durham were safer for such meetings than the more open lands of Northumberland or Yorkshire. The affix of "hale," the Saxon "hal," signifies the existence of a hall or some building, perhaps the remains of a Roman villa, which would have served as a temporary shelter for the members of a council, of which all traces have long since disappeared; but, taking all the circumstances together, we may fairly assume that Finchale was the place in which these Northumbrian councils met, and the name still lingered in the locality when St. Godric established himself within its glades on the banks of the rushing Wear.