Two inscribed stones have been found here which give strength to the opinion that Jarrow was a Roman station. One of them, now at Somerset-house, is shewn in the wood-cut. As Brand observes, it is interesting as containing the name of our island at length. It has been read—
DIFFVSIS PROVINCIIS IN BRITANNIA AD VTRVMQVE
OCEANVM EXERCITVS FECIT.—
The army erected this, on the extension of the Roman dominion in Britain, from the western to the eastern sea.
The other stone has formed part of an altar erected in honour of the adopted sons of Hadrian.
The church of Jarrow is a simple building, but it contains some undoubted Saxon work. Within the walls of the ancient monastery, some portions of which exist, the venerable Bede passed his useful and unostentatious life. Of him, Surtees, the Historian of Durham, observes—
The lamp of learning, trimmed by the hand of a single monastic who never passed the limits of his Northumbrian province, irradiated from the cell of Jarrow, the Saxon realm of England with a clear and steady light; and when Bede died, history reversed her torch, and quenched it in deep night.
This venerable man died, A.D., 735, in the act of completing a translation into Anglo-Saxon of the Gospel of St. John. His name would have been worthy of all reverence, even had he done nothing more than give to his countrymen the Scriptures in their vernacular tongue. It must however be confessed that ‘he fell on evil times,’ and that his works embody many of the errors and superstitions of the period.
WARDLEY.