St Bees

St Bees, a coast village of Cumberland, 4½ miles S. of Whitehaven by rail and 3 SE. of St Bees Head (300 feet). A nunnery founded here about 656 A.D. by an Irish princess, St Begha, appears to have been destroyed by the Danes, and to have been reconstituted as a Benedictine priory in the reign of Henry I. St Bees College was established in 1816 by Dr Law, then Bishop of Chester, to supply a systematic training in divinity to candidates for ordination whose means were inadequate to defray the expenses of a university. The bishops of the province of York had previously been compelled to ordain a number of such men as literates, the poverty of many of the northern benefices not securing a sufficient supply of graduates. A portion of the ruined priory church of St Bees was fitted up by the Earl of Lonsdale as lecture-rooms, library, &c. On the recommendation of the bishop, an incumbent was selected for the perpetual curacy of St Bees by the patron, the Earl of Lonsdale, with a view to his holding the position of principal of the college. The expenses were defrayed from the fees paid by the students—£10 each term; and the college course extended over two years. Standard English divinity works, with the Greek Testament, were chiefly studied. The average number of students was long about 60, but had for many years been diminishing, when in 1896 the college was closed. Near the church is a grammar-school founded by Archbishop Grindall in 1587, and reconstituted in 1881. St Bees is in some repute as a sea-bathing place.