Coal, lime, and iron; timber, glass, and chemicals; ship stores, ship fittings, and fishing, are the businesses to which modern Sunderland, Bishop Wearmouth, and Monkwearmouth, chiefly give mind and time. It was very different when they first began to be mentioned in history. The little harbourage at the mouth of the Wear was a shelter for ships, but it was also a place of refuge for studious and pious men. We hear of it first in the seventh century, when, soon after Aidan became Bishop of Lindisfarne, St. Hilda, or Bega, obtained a grant of land on the north side of the river and founded the convent of St. Bee's. Biscopius, a Saxon knight in the service of King Oswyn of Northumberland, resolved to renounce war and the world, and having prepared himself by making a pilgrimage to Rome, whence he brought back many precious books and relics, he obtained from the pious King Ecgfrith a grant of land near the nunnery--the modern Monkwearmouth--and set to work in 674 to build the monastery of St. Peter's; and a few years later he founded St. Paul's, at Jarrow. It has to be noted that Biscopius, who took the name of Benedict, brought over from France masons and glaziers to instruct the natives in these arts, and that glass-making has ever since flourished on the Wear and Tyne. All this we know from the Venerable Bede, who, when quite a young boy, resided in St. Peter's, under the Abbot Ceolfrid, before he took up his abode for life in the sister monastery at Jarrow. It is thought by archæologists that part of the original building is to be seen to this day in the west porch and west wall of the old church of Monkwearmouth. Sunderland already existed at that date; and the name was probably confined to the peninsula between the natural harbour on the south side of the Wear and the sea. Of Bishop Wearmouth, or "the delightful vill of South Wearmouth," as it was called, we do not hear until Alfred's time, when large additional grants were made to Benedict's monastery, partly in exchange for a "Book of Cosmogony," which had been brought from Rome. The Danes, the pest, and the Scots troubled much the place, and reduced the number of the inmates of the house. Sometimes these were as many as six hundred; sometimes they were like to have perished altogether, and for two centuries the place lay "waste and desolate." Malcolm was here on a plundering excursion when St. Margaret and her brother, the Atheling, happened to be in the Wear, waiting for a fair wind to carry them to Scotland--a meeting that probably changed the rude monarch's life and the national history. In 1083 the brethren of both Wearmouth and Jarrow were removed to Durham, and, as we have seen, both houses were reduced to cells dependent on the monastery of St. Cuthbert.