The art of glass-making was introduced to the Saxons in the seventh century, and ordinary window-glass was first used for building purposes at the great monasteries at Monkwearmouth, on the river Wear, and at Jarrow-on-the-Tyne; although we have already seen that window-glass was used in the Roman city of Uriconium. The Venerable Bede, in the seventh century, relates that his contemporary, the Abbot Benedict, sent for artists beyond seas to glaze the Monastery of Wearmouth; and such was the change made in their churches by the use of glass, instead of other and more obscure substances for windows, that the unlettered people avowed a belief, which was handed down as a tradition for many generations, "that it was never dark in old Jarrow Church." By a singular coincidence, the first manufactory of window or crown glass in Great Britain was established at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, within a few miles of these monastic establishments. In the year 1616 Admiral Sir Robert Maunsell erected glassworks at the Ouseburn, Newcastle, which were carried on without interruption till nearly the middle of the present century, when they were closed. The art of making woollen cloth, which was known to the Britons, was, by this time, brought to perfection in England, especially in the south. This seat of manufacture must have been handy to the fuller's-earth pits of Nutfield, where fuller's-earth has been for centuries dug:--"While Bradford was still the little local centre of a wild hill tract in pastoral Yorkshire, the 'grey cloths of Kent' kept many a loom at work in the homesteads of Tenterden, and Biddenden, and Cranbrook, and all the other little mediæval towns that dot the Weald with their carved barge-boards and richly-moulded beams." (_Saturday Review_, No. 182.) The distaff and the spindle, which appear to have been anciently the type, and symbol, and the insignia of the softer sex in nearly every age and country, were in the Saxon times still more conspicuous as the distinguishing badge of the female sex. Among our Saxon ancestors the "spear-half" and the "spindle-half" expressed the male and female line; and the spear and the spindle are to this day found in their graves.