In keeping with either mood of nature, the ancient Priory of Tynemouth,
standing on the sandstone cliffs on the northern bank of the Tyne,
rearing its grey and roofless walls above the harbour mouth, strikes a
note that is symbolic of the Northumbria of old and the Northumberland
of to-day--the note, that is, of the intimate commingling of the romance
of the warlike past and the romance of the industrial present. Here,
above the mouth of the river on which so many of the most noteworthy
advances in industrial science have been made, and out of which sail the
vessels which are often the last word of the moment in marine
engineering and construction, stand calmly looking down upon them all
the fragments of a building which was a century old when John signed
Magna Charta, and which stands upon the site of another that had already
braved the storms of nearly five hundred years.

Looking upon the Priory of St. Mary and St. Oswin we are carried back to
the days when Edwin, the first king of Northumbria to embrace
Christianity, built a little church here, in which his daughter took the
veil. King Oswald had the first wooden structure replaced by a stone
one; and here, in 651, the body of another good king--Oswyn--was brought
for burial from Gilling, near Richmond in Yorkshire, where, disbanding
his army, he sacrificed his cause and his life to Oswy of Bernicia, with
whom he had been about to fight.

[Illustration: THE PRIORY, TYNEMOUTH.]

When the pirate ships of the Danes swept down upon our coasts, the
Priory of St. Oswin, conspicuous on its bold headland, could not hope to
escape their ravages. It was destroyed by the fierce invaders; but King
Ecgfrith[1] of Northumbria restored the shattered shrine. Again, in the
year 865, it was sacked and burnt, and the poor nuns of St. Hilda, who