The secular canons, with their wives and children, were driven out by Bishop William, and replaced by the monks of the newly restored monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow.

To this course, in which he was supported by both papal and royal authority, the bishop was moved by the appalling state of desolation to which his diocese had been reduced.

The few inhabitants who survived were in a state of penury; the country lay wild and waste; and even the church itself was plundered and neglected.

The bishop, anxious for the restoration alike of religion and of civilization in his diocese, and finding on inquiry that St. Cuthbert, whether living or dead, had ever been served by monks, determined to found a monastery in the place where the saint's body lay; and in the end carried out his design, though not without some remonstrance from the ejected canons, only one of whom could be induced to take the monastic vows and remain in his former home.

[5] After the Benedictine monastery was dissolved, the last Prior of Durham, Hugh Whitehead, became the first dean of the cathedral's secular chapter.