Historians no longer refer to the seventh century as the "Dark Ages," and the life and accomplishments of Saint Benet Biscop help to show why. Benet Biscop's career, first as a warrior and later as an abbot, reveals a vibrant, multicultural world. He served the king at Northumbria, visited Rome, became a monk in France, and worked as a translator at Canterbury for an abbot from Tarsus (St. Paul's hometown). He built the great monasteries as Wearmouth and Jarrow, employing craftspeople from France and a choirmaster from Rome. Perhaps most important of all, he helped nurture the foremost intellectual of his time, the Venerable Bede, whose history of the English church gives us our best information about this remarkable man of the seventh century.

1. The chancel of the present church at Jarrow is all that remains of the original seventh-century structure. Clicking on the picture of the remains at the first website below links you to an article about the construction of early English churches. The second shows several pictures of Jarrow, and points out that part of the original church was built with Roman stone, either from Hadrian's wall or from a Roman fortification.
   http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~snlrc/britannia/earlychurch/jarrow.html
   http://www.ursuline.edu/faculty/ahilfer/jarrow.htm
2. An informative short article on Benet Biscop, with clickable links, is available at
   http://www.bedesworld.co.uk/people/biscop.htm
3. An artist's rendering of what the monastery at Jarrow may have looked like is found at
   http://www.dartmouth.edu/artsci/engl/engl18/img/misc/jarrow_recon.jpg
4. Take a virtual tour of a monastery, Bardney Abbey, founded about the same time as Jarrow and Wearmouth; note especially the architectural plan of this English establishment.
   http://www.lincsheritage.org/abbeys/bardney/bardney.html