# Hexham Abbey

Grade I listed place of Christian worship in Hexham, Northumberland, England, UK

Hexham, United Kingdom

Sacred place. 674 CE – 1537 CE

## Story

• Hexham Abbey is the parish church of Hexham, dedicated to Andrew the Apostle, and a church has stood on the site since the 670s.
• Queen Æthelthryth gave the land to Wilfrid, whose crypt of Roman stone from Corbridge, and whose stone chair, still survive.
• The church was a cathedral until about 821, was sacked in the Danish attacks of 875 or 876, and was refounded as an Augustinian priory in 1113 or 1114.
• Scottish raids, the Battle of Hexham in 1464, and the dissolution under Henry VIII each struck the house, and the choir and transepts remained as the parish church.
• A panel found in 2017 may belong to the medieval Dance of Death, and a 2025 excavation in the nave uncovered medieval stonework above the crypt.

## Visiting

Opening hours are 10:00 to 16:00 from Monday to Saturday, and 11:30 to 16:00 on Sunday. On Good Friday the church closes at 14:00. Admission is free, and donations are welcome. Dogs are not allowed inside, except assistance dogs.
The crypt has an entry fee of £3.50 for adults and £1 for children. The crypt is open daily when services and events allow.

## History

Hexham Abbey is the parish church of Hexham in Northumberland, dedicated to Andrew the Apostle, whom later tradition calls Saint Andrew. A Benedictine monastery was founded here in the 670s by Wilfrid, on land given by Queen Æthelthryth, and the church of Saint Andrew was finished by 678, or built between 675 and 680. The crypt, made of Roman stone from Corbridge, is the surviving part of that church, and a sandstone seat in the quire, the Frith Stool, is probably the seventh-century bishop's chair.

Wilfrid had argued for the Roman date of Easter at the Synod of Whitby in 664, and Theodore of Tarsus restored him to York before dividing the northern diocese in 678. Hexham was a cathedral until about 821. Eata, Cuthbert, John of Beverley, Wilfrid again, and Acca were among its bishops, and Acca was buried by the east wall. In 875 or 876 a Danish army associated with Halfdan Ragnarsson sacked the monastery, and one account says the church was burned.

A hoard of Northumbrian stycas, hidden around 850, was found in 1832 or 1833 when a grave was dug beside the north transept.

After a long ruin, archbishops of York refounded the house in 1113 or 1114 for Augustinian canons. The choir, transepts, and night stair were built across the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Scottish raids burned the priory in 1296 and 1297, spared the priests in 1311, and destroyed the nave in 1346. In May 1464 the Battle of Hexham ended significant Lancastrian resistance in the north, and Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, was executed in the town and buried in the church.

In the 1530s Henry VIII dissolved the smaller monasteries. The canons met the commissioners in arms and joined the Pilgrimage of Grace, and they were executed. The choir and transepts were kept as the parish church, replacing the old church of Saint Mary in 1538, while the domestic buildings passed to Sir Reynold Carnaby. The crypt was found again in 1725.

John Dobson rebuilt the east end in the nineteenth century, and Canon Edwin Sidney Savage, also recorded as Edwin Sidney Savage, oversaw the rebuilding of the nave by Temple Moore, consecrated on 8 August 1908.

The organ rebuild of 1905 had Frederick Bridge as consultant. George Agnew Reay and Alfred Southcott Morrish were among the organists, and Caleb Rotheram was buried in the south aisle in 1752. A panel found in the triforium in 2017 was examined in 2018 and may be a missing Dance of Death painting. In November 2025 trial pits in the nave found medieval stone above the crypt passage, which the excavators recommended leaving in place.

## Photographs

- [Hexham (Northumberland, England, UK) - Abbey church - General view from East — Benjamin Smith](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Hexham_-_Abbey_church_-_01.jpg)
- [Church Row Passageway alongside Hexham Abbey between The Sele (or Seal) and the Market Square. — Mike Quinn](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Church_Row_-_geograph.org.uk_-_544226.jpg)
- [Hexham Abbey (2) — Mike Quinn](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Hexham_Abbey_%282%29_-_geograph.org.uk_-_634505.jpg)
- [Hexham Abbey (from Hallstile Bank) — Mike Quinn](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Hexham_Abbey_%28from_Hallstile_Bank%29_-_geograph.org.uk_-_633056.jpg)
- [Blocked archway in the north wall of the Chancel, Hexham Abbey. See 749756 for the general location; and 748679 for a view of the interior at this point. — Mike Quinn](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Blocked_archway_in_the_north_wall_of_the_Chancel%2C_Hexham_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_749763.jpg)
- [Hexham abbey The abbey illuminated by floodlights in the evening. — Helen Wilkinson](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Hexham_abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1177875.jpg)
- [Hexham Abbey Founded in 674AD, the church today dates mainly from about 1170-1250. — Rod Allday](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Hexham_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1265041.jpg)
- [Hexham Abbey — John Firth](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Hexham_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1399228.jpg)
- [Christmas / farmers market, Hexham — hayley green](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Christmas_-_farmers_market%2C_Hexham_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1617707.jpg)
- [THE PRIORY CHURCH OF ST ANDREWS' — Vallan](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Exterior_of_Hexham_Abbey.jpg)

## Sources

- [A Brief History](https://hexhamabbey.org.uk/brief-history/) — Hexham Abbey
- [Timeline](https://hexhamabbey.org.uk/heritage/timeline.htm) — Hexham Abbey
- [Saxon Crypt](https://hexhamabbey.org.uk/saxon-crypt/) — Hexham Abbey
- [The Frith Stool](https://heritage.hexhamabbey.org.uk/heritage/Articles/FrithStool.html) — Hexham Abbey
- [Night Stair](https://heritage.hexhamabbey.org.uk/heritage/Articles/NightStair.html) — Hexham Abbey
- [Visitor information](https://hexhamabbey.org.uk/) — Hexham Abbey
- [Hexham Abbey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexham_Abbey) — Wikipedia
- [Wilfrid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfrid) — Wikipedia
- [Æthelthryth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86thelthryth) — Wikipedia
- [Acca of Hexham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acca_of_Hexham) — Wikipedia
- [Eata of Hexham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eata_of_Hexham) — Wikipedia
- [John of Beverley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Beverley) — Wikipedia
- [Battle of Hexham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hexham) — Wikipedia
- [Halfdan Ragnarsson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfdan_Ragnarsson) — Wikipedia
- [Theodore of Tarsus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_of_Tarsus) — Wikipedia
- [Dissolution of the monasteries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries) — Wikipedia
- [Possible lost Dance of Death painting discovered at Hexham Abbey](https://newsroom.northumbria.ac.uk/pressreleases/possible-lost-dance-of-death-painting-discovered-at-hexham-abbey-3381381) — Northumbria University
- [Hexham Abbey, Northumberland: Archaeological Trial Investigations Associated with Proposals for Accessibility Improvements to the Nave North Aisle](https://doi.org/10.5284/1143368) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Hexham - Abbey church - 01.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hexham_-_Abbey_church_-_01.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Church Row - geograph.org.uk - 544226.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Church_Row_-_geograph.org.uk_-_544226.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hexham Abbey (2) - geograph.org.uk - 634505.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hexham_Abbey_(2)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_634505.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hexham Abbey (from Hallstile Bank) - geograph.org.uk - 633056.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hexham_Abbey_(from_Hallstile_Bank)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_633056.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Blocked archway in the north wall of the Chancel, Hexham Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 749763.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blocked_archway_in_the_north_wall_of_the_Chancel,_Hexham_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_749763.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hexham abbey - geograph.org.uk - 1177875.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hexham_abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1177875.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hexham Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 1265041.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hexham_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1265041.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hexham Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 1399228.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hexham_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1399228.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Christmas - farmers market, Hexham - geograph.org.uk - 1617707.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christmas_-_farmers_market,_Hexham_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1617707.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Exterior of Hexham Abbey.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Exterior_of_Hexham_Abbey.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Hexham Abbey stands in the market place of Hexham, in Northumberland, in the north-east of England. It is the parish church of the town, in the diocese of Newcastle and the province of York, and it is still used for worship. The church is dedicated to Andrew the Apostle. Later tradition knows him as Saint Andrew. He was a fisherman from Bethsaida in Galilee, a son of Jonah and the brother of Simon Peter, and one of the twelve chosen by Jesus. In the Gospel of John he begins as a disciple of John the Baptist, recognises Jesus as the Messiah, and brings his brother to him, which is why Eastern churches call him the first-called. The monastery at Hexham took his name in the seventh century, and the dedication has not left the church.

The building that visitors enter is mostly a medieval priory church, with a nave finished in the early twentieth century. Beneath it, a seventh-century crypt remains in use. The place has been a Benedictine monastery, a cathedral, a ruined church served by hereditary priests, an Augustinian priory, and, since the sixteenth century, the parish church. One account calls the architecture Romano-Gothic. The choir, transepts, and cloisters belong to the decades from about 1170 to 1250, in the Early English style, while the east end and the nave are later rebuildings. In 1951 the priory church was designated at the highest grade of listing. The remains of the medieval priory and the Anglo-Saxon monastery under and around the church and its precincts are a scheduled monument.

The man who founded the monastery was Wilfrid, a Northumbrian noble born about 633. As a boy he left home after a quarrel with his stepmother and found a patron in Queen Eanflæd, wife of King Oswiu. She sent him to Lindisfarne, the island monastery recently founded by Aidan, where he learned the psalter. He then went to Canterbury, and between 653 and 658 he travelled toward Rome with Benedict Biscop, the first pilgrimage to Rome known to have been made by Englishmen. He stayed at Lyon with Archbishop Annemund, learned in Rome how the Roman church calculated Easter, and studied the Roman habit of collecting relics. He returned to Northumbria about 658. Shortly before 664, Alhfrith, sub-king of Deira and son of Oswiu, gave him the new monastery at Ripon. Wilfrid expelled the abbot Eata, who would not follow Roman customs, and Cuthbert went with Eata. Wilfrid claimed to be the first person in England to set a monastery under the Rule of Saint Benedict. That claim comes from the Life written soon afterwards by Stephen of Ripon, and the Life does not say where Wilfrid learned the Rule or which form of it he used.

The argument that made his career was the Synod of Whitby in 664. The churches of Rome and the churches of Britain and Ireland calculated Easter differently. At Oswiu's court that split the year in two: the king, raised in the Irish tradition, might still be fasting for Lent while his wife Eanflæd and his son Alhfrith were already feasting. Oswiu called the council at Whitby. Wilfrid spoke for the Roman date, and he interpreted for Bishop Agilbert, who did not speak the local language. Bede presents Wilfrid as charging that those who kept the other reckoning were committing a sin. The Roman practice was adopted. Colmán of Lindisfarne left for Iona with monks who would not accept the decision. Eata, unlike Colmán, accepted it. Regional tension sat under the theology. Bernicia tended toward the Irish date and Deira toward the Roman one, and Oswiu and Alhfrith were already at odds. Alhfrith appointed Wilfrid bishop of the Northumbrians. Wilfrid went to Gaul to be consecrated, because he did not think the bishops then in England had been consecrated validly. While he was away, Alhfrith seems to have rebelled against Oswiu and failed. Oswiu appointed Ceadda in Wilfrid's place. Wilfrid came home to find the see taken.

Theodore of Tarsus changed that. Born in Tarsus in 602, he had fled the Persian and then the Muslim conquest of his city, studied in Constantinople, and was living in Rome when Pope Vitalian chose him for Canterbury. He was consecrated on 26 March 668, arrived in England on 27 May 669, and found Ceadda's position at York irregular. Theodore deposed Ceadda and restored Wilfrid. For nine years Wilfrid built churches, among them the monastery at Hexham, and he kept control of Ripon and Hexham while he was bishop. He was the first Saxon to hold York. He sent to Kent for a singing master, named Æddi or Eddius and surnamed Stephen, to teach the Roman style of antiphonal singing. Bede knew Wilfrid, and Stephen of Ripon wrote the Life soon after Wilfrid's death. The Life is a defence of Wilfrid's career and is highly favourable to him. Bede's history is more measured. Historians still divide over the man. Some see a champion of Roman custom against British and Irish practice, and others an advocate of monasticism. He lived ostentatiously and travelled with a large retinue.

The land at Hexham came from a queen. Æthelthryth, also called Etheldreda or Audrey, was an East Anglian princess, a daughter of King Anna, born on 4 March 636. She married Tondberct of the South Gyrwe about 652, kept a vow of virginity, and after his death in 655 held the Isle of Ely as her morning gift. In 660 she was married again, for political reasons, to Ecgfrith of Northumbria, then about fourteen or fifteen. After Ecgfrith became king in 670 she wished to become a nun. Wilfrid was her confessor, and that wish fed his quarrel with the king. One account says that about 672 Ecgfrith asked Wilfrid to enforce his rights as a husband, that Wilfrid persuaded the king to let her live for a time at Coldingham, the house of Ecgfrith's aunt Æbbe, and that she then fled to Ely. Ecgfrith later married Eormenburg and expelled Wilfrid in 678. Æthelthryth founded a double monastery at Ely in 673 and died of a neck tumour on 23 June 679. Bede says she took the tumour as a correction for the heavy necklaces she had worn when young. Her sister Seaxburh later found the body uncorrupted and moved it into a white marble coffin taken from Roman ruins at Grantchester.

Against that quarrel, the gift of Hexham is dated in more than one way. One account says that in 671 or 672 Æthelthryth gave Wilfrid the site, and that the church was built from 675 to 680. Another says that in 672 to 674 she granted him the lands of Hexhamshire for a Benedictine monastery, and that the church of Saint Andrew was completed in 678. A third dates the grant to 673 or 674 and the completion of the church to 678. The monastery is also said to have been founded about 674. What the accounts share is the queen, the bishop, a Benedictine house, and a stone church of Saint Andrew raised in the 670s.

Wilfrid built in stone because he had seen stone churches in Rome and in Merovingian Gaul, and because he wanted the same in Northumbria. Northumbrian craftsmen are said to have lacked the skill to quarry and dress new stone, but a few miles down the river, at Corbridge, stood the ruins of a Roman fort and town, Coria. One account says the church was constructed almost entirely of material salvaged from nearby Roman ruins. Another says it was probably built entirely from stones taken from Corbridge. The crypt is the only part of that church that survives intact, and it is described as largely unchanged across about 1,350 years. It is a plain structure of four chambers: a chapel with an ante-chapel at the west, two side passages with enlarged vestibules, and three stairways. The chapel and ante-chapel are barrel-vaulted. Relics were shown there. The stones are Roman work, and many are carved or inscribed. Frieze patterns remain in the walls, and a leaf-and-berry design on some blocks is taken to show that they came from an important house. Two inscribed stones sit in the roof. One dedicated a granary. The other is a fragment of an altar to Maponus Apollo, a Celtic god merged with a Roman one.

A longer inscription, partly erased, names the emperor Lucius Septimius Severus Pius Pertinax and his sons, the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Pius Augustus and Publius Geta Caesar, and says that cohorts and detachments made the work under a commander whose name is lost. The erased words are the point of the stone. After Publius Septimius Geta was murdered by his brother Caracalla, an edict at Rome ordered that wherever the two names stood together, Geta's was to be cut out. That condemnation of his memory was carried out on this slab, and carried out badly enough that the name can still be read. The crypt may also have been where Wilfrid placed relics he had brought back from the continent.

In the quire stands the Frith Stool, a solid block of sandstone worn smooth by hands. It was made into a seat in the earliest days of the church, probably in the seventh century, and it was broken in two in the nineteenth century and cemented together again. Wilfrid may have had it made soon after the foundation, copying the stone and wooden seats he had seen in Gaul, where bishops and abbots presided. Straight lines mark the outline, and an interlace on the arms ends in a triquetra. A similar pattern appears in a Canterbury manuscript of Saint Matthew, painted perhaps about 750, but the design is simple enough to belong to almost any date. The block itself may have been quarried by Roman workmen and hollowed by Wilfrid's own masons. The seat seems to have stood against a wall, among stone benches for other clergy. Hexham was a cathedral, the seat of a diocese, from about 678 until about 821, and the chair may have been the bishop's official cathedra. It is also called a frith stool of the seventh or eighth century, and a seventh- or eighth-century throne.

The diocese was Theodore's work, and it was made against Wilfrid's will. The first diocese of Lindisfarne had been merged into York in 664. In 678 Theodore divided York and created a bishopric for the country between the rivers Aln and Tees, with a seat at Hexham, at Lindisfarne, or at both. Wilfrid's diocese was huge, and Theodore wanted smaller sees. Wilfrid had quarrelled with Ecgfrith. After the king expelled him from York, Wilfrid appealed to Rome. Pope Agatho ruled for Wilfrid, but Ecgfrith imprisoned him on his return and then exiled him. Wilfrid spent the next years at Selsey, where he founded a see and converted the South Saxons. He and Theodore were later reconciled. Aldfrith, the next Northumbrian king, let him return, expelled him again in 691, and faced another papal appeal. A council at Austerfield in 702 tried to confiscate Wilfrid's possessions. His opponents excommunicated him. The papacy upheld him, and he regained Ripon and Hexham. He died at Oundle in Northamptonshire in 709 or 710. One account gives the day as Thursday 24 April 710 and calls him the incumbent bishop of Hexham. Another says he died in 709 as bishop of Hexham. He was afterwards treated as a saint.

The succession at Hexham is not told in one sequence. One account makes Eata the first bishop, called bishop of Bernicia, with his seat at Hexham or Lindisfarne or both, dying in 685 and followed by John of Beverley. It places Trumbert at Hexham in 682, at the same time as Trumwine's installation, while Eata continued at Lindisfarne. It then has Cuthbert in 685, after Trumbert's deposition, moving his seat to Lindisfarne. Another account says that in 678 Theodore split Northumbria and made Eata bishop of Bernicia, that Hexham and Lindisfarne were the two sees of that diocese, that Eata held both for three years, and that Hexham then went to Trumbert and Lindisfarne to Eata. On that telling, Cuthbert was elected to Hexham, did not want to leave his hermitage on Inner Farne, was consecrated at York at Easter 685, and exchanged sees with Eata, who died of dysentery at Hexham in 685 or 686 and was buried in the abbey. A further account says that in 681 the priory became a cathedral and that Trumbrith was consecrated the first bishop. Eata had been a boy under Aidan at Lindisfarne, one of twelve monks sent to found Melrose, abbot of Melrose from 651, and the founder of the first community at Ripon, which he lost to Wilfrid. Bede called him gentle and greatly revered. He accepted the Roman decision at Whitby when Colmán did not.

John of Beverley followed at Hexham. One account gives him the years 685 to 705. Another says Theodore consecrated him on 25 August 687, and that he was bishop of Hexham from 687 until 705, then bishop of York from 705 until 718, dying at Beverley on 7 May 721. Bede, who says that John ordained him deacon and priest, presents John's teaching of a deaf boy to speak as one of the earliest accounts of that kind of instruction, and Bede took it for a miracle. John had been at Whitby under Hilda, and he may have studied at Canterbury under Theodore or Hadrian. He founded a monastery at Beverley and retired there. He was canonised in 1037. His banner was later carried in Yorkshire levies, and Henry V credited him with the victory at Agincourt, which was fought on the anniversary of the translation of his relics. That cult belongs to Beverley. At Hexham his memory is the long episcopate between Eata and Wilfrid's last years.

Wilfrid's successor in 709 was Acca, born about 660. Acca had served in the household of Bosa, later bishop of York, and had attached himself to Wilfrid, possibly as early as 678. He travelled with Wilfrid, and he told Bede of their stay at Utrecht with Willibrord. On the return from a second journey to Rome in 692, Wilfrid was reinstated at Hexham and made Acca abbot of the monastery of Saint Andrew there. Acca succeeded him in 709 as abbot and bishop and served until 732. Bede called him a most experienced cantor, learned in the sacred writings, and familiar with the rules of church custom. Acca brought north a cantor named Maban, who had learned in Kent the Roman psalmody said to descend from Gregory the Great through Augustine of Canterbury. Bede praised Acca's library as large and most noble. Acca persuaded Stephen of Ripon to write the Life of Wilfrid, and he lent Bede materials for the Ecclesiastical History. Bede dedicated scriptural works to him. The only writing of Acca's that survives is a letter to Bede. In 732 he either withdrew or was driven from the diocese, for reasons that are not known. One local tradition says he became bishop of Whithorn. Another says he founded a see at the place later called St Andrews and brought relics from his Roman journey, including relics of Saint Andrew. A third says he fell out with the Northumbrian king, lived in exile on a remote Irish coast, and returned to Hexham. He was buried at Hexham near the east wall. Two carved crosses were set at the head and foot of the grave, and a fragment of one of them survives. He was treated as a saint at once. His body was moved at least three times: in the early eleventh century by Alfred of Westow, sacrist of Durham; in 1154, when the church was restored and the relics of the Hexham saints were gathered into one shrine; and again in 1240. His feast is 20 October, and the translation is remembered on 19 February. On 10 July 1936 the cross was reconstructed and set up in the south transept. For many years it had stood in the library of Durham Cathedral.

After Acca the bishops were Frithubeorht from 734 to 766, Eahlmund from 767 to 781, Tilbeorht from 781 to 789, Æthelberht from 789 to 797, previously of Whithorn, Heardred from 797 to 800, Eanbehrt from 800 to 813, and Tidfrith, the last of the line, who died about 821. Six of the eleven bishops after Eata were regarded as saints. No successor was appointed in 821, because the country was too unsettled. One account says the church was downgraded from a cathedral in 821 owing to the threat of Viking raids. The bishopric merged back into Lindisfarne. That see moved to Chester-le-Street in 883 and to Durham in 995. Ælfwald I of Northumbria is among those later named as buried at Hexham, with Eata, Frithubeorht, Acca, and Alchmund.

The Danish attack is dated both to 875 and to 876, and it is not described in the same way. One account says that in 876 Halfdan Ragnarsson and his Danes ravaged the whole of Tyneside, that Hexham was sacked, and that Wilfrid's church was plundered and burned to the ground. Another says that in 875 a Danish army occupied the mouth of the Tyne and that the monasteries at Hexham, Jarrow, and Monkwearmouth were attacked and partly destroyed. Halfdan's own career is told on a wider scale. He was a commander of the Great Heathen Army that landed in East Anglia in 865, took York in 866 during the civil war between Ælla and Osberht, and later fought in Mercia and Wessex. In 875 he sailed up the Tyne, sacked the monasteries at Tynemouth and Jarrow, and camped at Gateshead. He was called king of Jorvik from 876, and he was killed at Strangford Lough in 877 while trying to retake Dublin. The two Hexham dates sit inside that campaign: a burning of Wilfrid's church in 876, and a partial destruction of the monastery in 875, alongside the Tyne raid of the same year.

Before or around those years, someone buried a hoard of Northumbrian stycas on the hill beside the church. The hiding is placed about 850, and also between about 845 and 860. The coins belong to the reigns of Eanred, Æthelred II, and Redwulf, and include coins of two archbishops, Eanbald and Wigmund. They were found when a grave was dug near the north transept, on Campey Hill, also called Campy Hill. One account gives the discovery as 1833 and the hoard as about 8,000 coins. Another gives Monday 15 October 1832, when William Errington's grave was dug seven feet deep. Many coins were dispersed by the finders, and about 9,000 were collected. The vessel was a brass container. The hoard is the strongest material trace of the ninth-century church between the last bishop and the later provosts.

A period of disorder followed the Danish devastation. About 995 the bishop of Durham appointed a provost to administer Hexham and a priest to serve the church. In 1071 the provost Uhtred transferred Hexhamshire to the archbishop of York, and the manor became the administrative centre of a large district. From the late eleventh century until 1545, Hexhamshire was a detached portion of Yorkshire. In 1079 a Scottish army under Malcolm III threatened the town. One account says that prayers by Eilaf the Elder, and a fog, saved it. About 1050 an Eilaf, treasurer of Durham, was put in charge and told to rebuild the church, which lay in utter ruin, though he may never have gone there. His son, Eilaf II, is said to have finished the work, probably in a Norman style. About 1083 Eilaf quarrelled with the bishop of Durham and placed the church under the archbishop of York. Archbishop Thomas I renewed the appointment and allowed the church to be restored.

The Augustinian refoundation is dated to 1113 and also to 1114. One account says that in 1113 Thomas II, archbishop of York, replaced Wilfrid's abbey with an Augustinian priory and endowed it with land and property. Another says that in 1114 Archbishop Thurstan refounded the church as a priory of Canons Regular of Saint Augustine, also called Austin Canons. The canons studied and meditated in the cloisters. Their night stair still rises in the south transept: thirty-five worn stone steps to a gallery and three doorways, probably built early in the thirteenth century. The dormitory, now gone, would have run from the present song school toward what is now Beaumont Street. The rule required the canons to pray in the quire seven times a day, beginning as soon as they rose. The bell woke them long before daylight, at midnight or about two or three in the morning, the hour changing with the season and across the centuries. A younger canon carried a candle or lantern, and they came down the stair to sing Matins. For the later hours, Prime, Terce, Mass, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline, they entered from the cloister by a door at the foot of the stair, now blocked. Only the early services used the stair.

The new church rose over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A gateway and, it is presumed, a precinct wall were put up from about 1150. The chancel, transepts, tower, and domestic buildings are placed between 1180 and 1280, and the present church is also said to date largely from about 1170 to 1250. King John visited Hexham three times, in 1202, 1205, and 1212. Nothing of the earlier church was left above ground. The canons kept the ancient chair. Prior Richard, who led the new community in its early years and was the first historian of Hexham, called it the frith stool, the chair of peace. Frith meant peace, security, and freedom from molestation. Great churches placed such seats near the high altar. A fugitive in civil war, or a wrongdoer in flight, could claim the protection of the church until a full trial. Anyone who seized or killed a refugee inside the church faced a fine of ninety-six pounds. Prior Richard writes that if the victim reached the stone chair next to the altar, the breach was beyond pardon, and the culprit faced excommunication or death. In the border wars, deserters and petty thieves became grithmen under the priory's protection. In the reign of Edward III the king authorised the recruitment of such men into the army. How much safety the chair actually gave is not certain. Under Henry VIII the right of sanctuary was strictly limited, and soon afterwards it was abolished. The chair then became an awkward piece of furniture, moved to the north aisle, the south transept, and from one side of the high altar to the other. It was probably during a move in 1830 or 1859 that it broke. In 1830 it was placed in the north aisle and broken into two pieces.

The priory stood on a road used by Scottish armies. In 1138 the Scots were defeated at the Battle of the Standard at Northallerton, and a period of peace followed. In 1296 a Scottish army burned the priory after destroying Lanercost. Two hundred scholars in the conventual school are said to have died in the fire. Shrines, books, and the relics of the saints were destroyed. Only the walls survived. Scorch from the melted lead of the roof can still be seen on the stone floor. In 1297 William Wallace raided Hexham and destroyed what the previous year had left. In 1298 the canons had lost the deeds to their lands. Edward I confirmed those lands by a great charter of inspeximus. In 1311 Robert the Bruce ravaged Tynedale but spared the priests from slaughter. In 1346 the abbey was sacked again by the Scots under David II, and the nave was completely destroyed. The chancel roof had probably been rebuilt by about 1360, and the transept roofs by about 1440. In 1429 Roger Thornton of Newcastle left four hundred marks to rebuild the nave, and it is not certain that the work was ever begun. Three bells are dated 1404. One account says the church received its first six bells in that year. The Ogle chantry was built about 1410. Sir Robert Ogle had died on 31 October 1409. He is among those buried in the church, with members of the Umfraville family, including Robert Umfraville, who died in 1145, Odinel Umfraville, Gilbert de Umfraville, Gilbert de Umfraville the earl of Angus, and Matilda, countess of Angus.

In the later fifteenth century the house gained two priors whose dates have been corrected. Rowland Leschman was prior across 1480 to 1499, and not, as was thought before August 2022, only from 1491. His chantry is in the north arcade of the chancel. Thomas Smithson was prior from 1499 to 1524, and not from 1491. During his priorate the rood screen was erected, a solid screen carrying a loft reached by winding stairs. It was one of the last additions before the dissolution. Around 1500, painters made a series of wooden panels of the Dance of Death, in which a skeletal Death visits the powerful: a cardinal, a king, an emperor, and the pope. Four panels survive. They are regarded as some of the most important medieval English panel paintings left, a kind of picture especially exposed to destruction in the religious changes of the sixteenth century. For centuries a fifth panel was suspected, an introducer or caller, on the evidence of a sketch made in the 1790s by the antiquary John Carter. Charles Clement Hodges later set down a visit by a Mr Hutchinson in 1774, who admired the panels at the north end of the church and said that the five centre ones were scenes from the Dance of Death. It is not known whether the sequence was originally longer than the panels that remain at Hexham.

The Battle of Hexham, on 14 or 15 May 1464, was fought in that same landscape. It belongs to the Wars of the Roses rather than to the daily life of the canons, except that the church received the body of the defeated commander. After Towton, the Lancastrians could not stop a Yorkist peace with Scotland in 1463, and their northern base was threatened. They campaigned through Northumberland in late April 1464 under Henry Beaufort, third duke of Somerset, before Edward IV could bring a large army north from Leicester. On 25 April Lord Montagu, John Neville, beat them at Hedgeley Moor. The armies met again near Hexham. Montagu had about three thousand to four thousand men. The Lancastrian camp was near Linnels Bridge over the Devil's Water, south of the town. The Yorkists crossed to the south bank of the Tyne on the night of 12 to 13 May and by the morning of the 14th were placed to attack. Somerset rushed his men to a meadow by the Devil's Water and drew them up in three bodies, hoping to catch the Yorkists before they passed him into the town. The Yorkists charged downhill. The right body, under Lord Roos, also called Baron Ros, turned and fled across the water into Hexham before a blow was struck. The rest were hemmed in. Yorkist troops came through the opening at the east end of the meadow. The Lancastrians were pushed into the Devil's Water. Men drowned, or were crushed on the steep banks, or were trapped in West Dipton Wood and forced to surrender. The fight is thought to have been relatively bloodless, and the details of numbers and ground are sketchy. The date is given as 15 May in one telling and as a meeting on 14 May in the course of the same events. Neville had thirty leading Lancastrians executed in Hexham on the evening after the battle, among them Somerset and Lord Roos. One account says the duke was taken, beheaded in the market place, and buried in the abbey. Thomas de Ros, ninth baron de Ros, is also named among the burials. William Tailboys was caught soon after, trying to carry two thousand pounds of the war chest of Henry VI north, and was executed. Henry VI was kept away from the field. He hid in northern houses, was betrayed at Waddington Hall in Lancashire, and was captured on 13 July 1465. With the northern leadership and the money gone, only a few castles held out, and they fell later that year. Edward IV was not seriously challenged again until the Earl of Warwick changed sides in 1469. The battle marked the end of significant Lancastrian resistance in the north in the early part of his reign.

What the canons lost in 1536 and 1537 was the monastery, not the church. Between 1536 and 1541 Henry VIII disbanded the religious houses of England, Wales, and Ireland, took their wealth, and dispersed or destroyed libraries and relics. Most of the houses he closed had been founded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as this priory had been. By the sixteenth century, religious houses controlled appointment to about two-fifths of parish benefices, disposed of about half of ecclesiastical income, and owned about a quarter of the landed wealth of the country. Thomas Cromwell built the administration. An act against the smaller houses gave the king power to dissolve communities whose income was under two hundred pounds a year, with discretion to exempt any of them. Commissioners in 1536 made inventories. At least two houses, Norton in Cheshire and Hexham, tried to resist by force. Henry treated that as treason and demanded brutal punishment. At Hexham the commissioners, come to close a house under the income threshold, were met by armed men led by the Master of Ovingham, and they retreated. The canons then joined the Pilgrimage of Grace, the rising of 1536 in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire against the first suppressions, and they were executed. The duke of Norfolk came to Hexham under the king's orders in 1537 and put the rising down. One account dates the dissolution here to 1536 and says the chancel and transepts survived because the parish would need them. Another places that survival in 1537, and says the priory, including the chancel and transepts, was kept because it was needed as a parish church. In 1538 this building became the parish church in place of the old church of Saint Mary, south of the market place. The other buildings and the monastic land went to Sir Reynold Carnaby, the king's representative in Hexhamshire. The canons were pensioned. The dormitory fell into decay and was pulled down in the following century.

The night stair survived because it also led to the spiral stair of the clerestory, the tower, and the bell chamber, and to a room over the market-place doorway once called the sanctuary chamber. In most other English monasteries the night stair led nowhere and was removed. At Fountains, Rievaulx, and Finchale only the opening in the transept wall remains. At Hexham the stair itself remains. Carnaby built an extension north of the prior's house in 1539 and died in 1543 without a son, leaving three daughters. The estates returned to the Crown. Elizabeth I granted them to Sir Christopher Hatton, with the tithes, on condition that he pay the curate of Hexham thirteen pounds, six shillings, and eight pence a year. In 1545 the archbishop of York exchanged the manor of Hexham for manors in Yorkshire, and he kept ecclesiastical control until 1836. Hexhamshire was transferred from Yorkshire to Northumberland between 1571 and 1589. The Carnaby daughters conveyed their shares of the abbey to Sir John Forster at different dates: Mabel in 1574, Katherine in 1576, and Ursula in 1589. The manor and the abbey passed through the Fenwick family. In 1690 Sir John Fenwick sold the manor to Sir William Blackett of Newcastle. In 1625 Richard Fishborne, a London mercer, left two thousand eight hundred pounds for church purposes in the north, administered by the Mercers' Company. Eight hundred and eighty pounds of that money bought corn tithes and a house to endow a lectureship, so that a sermon could be preached here every Sunday. Not every clergyman was licensed to preach. In 1703 the curacy received four hundred pounds under Queen Anne's Bounty and became a perpetual curacy.

The fabric was altered, neglected, and rebuilt across the next two centuries. In 1725 the tower needed support on the west, where the nave had stood. Workmen digging foundations for a buttress rediscovered Wilfrid's crypt. It had not been mentioned since Prior Richard in the twelfth century. The nave had been walled off at the crossing, and the ground above the crypt, covered with several metres of soil, had been used as a graveyard. In 1740 Sir Edward Blackett built a gallery at his own expense. Other galleries went up at the same time, and the canopies and pinnacles of the stalls were cut down to make room. In 1742 six broken bells were recast into eight by Thomas Lester of London. In 1810 the lead was stripped from the transept roofs and sold, and the roofs were covered with Westmorland slates. In 1821 a clock with four dials, each eight feet across, was set in the tower. On 9 September 1828 part of the east wing fell, broke through the roof of the old school, formerly the eastern chapels, and destroyed the town lamps stored there. In 1829 John Dobson of Newcastle rebuilt the upper east end. In 1830 the church was closed for repairs, heating was introduced, the church was repewed, and the frith stool was moved and broken.

In 1858 Dobson rebuilt the east end again, at the cost of Wentworth Blackett Beaumont, who also paid for Beaumont Street. The work removed nearly all the ancient fittings of the quire. The eastern aisle and the eastern chapels were destroyed, a three-light window in the east bay of the south aisle of the quire was destroyed, and the Leschman chantry was taken apart, shortened, and set in the south transept. Hodges later called the clearance a permanent disgrace. One account dates the start of that restoration to 1857, and the rebuilding of the east end to 1858. In 1860 a warm-air drain, six feet wide and six feet deep, was cut the length of the north transept, through layers of coffins, and a small copper-gilt burial chalice was found under the transept floor. In 1865 the church acquired a second-hand organ from Carlisle Cathedral, built in 1804, set up by Nicholson of Newcastle and opened on 19 October 1865. In 1905 Norman and Beard rebuilt it, with Frederick Bridge as consultant. He was Sir John Frederick Bridge, organist of Westminster Abbey from the 1870s until the end of his career, a composer and teacher born at Oldbury on 5 December 1844. He had been organist of Manchester Cathedral before Westminster, and he directed the music at two coronations. He died on 18 March 1924.

The nave returned during the incumbency of Canon Edwin Sidney Savage, the same priest recorded as Edwin Sidney Savage. Born at Port Elizabeth on 28 February 1862, he was rector of Hexham from 1898 to 1919, and he was instituted on 14 August 1898. His tenure is also closed in 1918. He oversaw the rebuilding. In 1899 Charles Clement Hodges and Temple Moore reported a plan to complete the nave and to restore the quire to its layout from before 1858. The nave was rebuilt in 1907 and 1908 on the thirteenth-century plan, with a single aisle on the north, the walls taking in some of the earlier church. The quire floor was raised, the chantries of Ogle and Leschman were put back, the sedilia were restored, the frith stool was fixed again, and the nave was consecrated on 8 August 1908. When the quire floor was relaid, Hodges and J P Gibson found the foundations of an apsidal east end, with burials outside it. The stool was cemented over the centre of that apse, on the assumption that this was the east end of Wilfrid's church. It is now thought that the apse belonged to a small chapel, perhaps a mausoleum for saints and bishops, whose west end lay under the later rood screen, and that Wilfrid's main church stood further west, under the present nave. The foundations can still be seen under trapdoors below the carpet. The stool has stayed in that place since 1910, and there is no intention of moving it. Savage also built the Abbey Institute in Gilesgate, opened on 8 August 1900 and later used as a community centre. In 1907 he published a record of the works undertaken since January 1899. Electric light was installed in 1910. He later served in the Mediterranean during the First World War and died at Bexhill on 26 October 1947.

Four windows are the work of Henry Thomas Bosdet, a stained-glass artist born in Jersey and commissioned for this church. The east window was installed about 1907. Two smaller windows followed. The large west window was installed in 1918 and dedicated to Charles William Chipchase Henderson, who lived from 1847 to 1914. In June 1931 an earthquake fractured the north quire arch, the crypt, and the tower. In 1974 a new organ by Lawrence Phelps of Pennsylvania was installed, a two-manual mechanical-action instrument of thirty-four stops. His wife, Gillian Weir, gave the opening recital. In 1979 a floating floor on steel girders was laid in the nave so that the weight would not bear on the crypt roof. In 1992 new choir stalls and a circular altar were placed at the crossing. In 1996 a chapel was made at the east end of the north choir aisle and named for Wilfrid, as a place for prayer. In 1999 and 2000 two bells, Peace and Millennium, were cast by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, bringing the ring to ten. On 14 October 2014 the former monastic buildings, long used as a court and once occupied by the police, opened again as a visitor centre, with an exhibition of the church's history and a refectory. The site was joined together for the first time since the Reformation.

The music of the church has its own succession. George Agnew Reay was born in York in 1798 and died in 1879. He was appointed organist early, the years given as 1820 until about 1828, and he married Eleanor Spraggon at Hexham on 24 December 1821. He later worked as an organ builder in Alnwick and Morpeth. The succession continues with William Turner, John Nicholson, and James Price, then Thomas Simpson Camidge from 1882 to 1889, Richard Seaton, Ronald Richardson Potter from 1909 to 1911, Newell Smith Wallbank, Hubert Henry Norsworthy in 1918, Reginald Tustin Baker from 1928 to 1929, and Thomas Christy from 1933 to 1945. Alfred Southcott Morrish held the post from 1945 to 1948. He was born at Aldershot on 13 December 1906, studied the organ at Exeter Cathedral, took his fellowship in 1936, and died in 1978. He wrote for choir and organ, and he wrote a string quartet in F. Marcus Wibberley held the post from 2011 to 2017. Among the clergy, Thomas Henry Sparshott was a temporary junior curate in 1876.

Caleb Rotheram, a dissenting minister and tutor, was buried in the south aisle. He was born at Great Salkeld on 7 March 1694, kept a dissenting academy at Kendal, took a doctorate at Edinburgh in 1743, and held Arian opinions. In 1751 his health failed. He went to Hexham to stay with his eldest son, a physician, and he died there on 8 June 1752. A mural monument marked the grave.

Roman sculpture came back to light in the same century as the coin hoard. The tombstone of Flavinus, a Roman standard-bearer and cavalry officer who died at the age of twenty-five in the first century, is one of the most significant Roman finds in Britain. It stands in front of a blocked doorway at the foot of the night stair. The slab is thought to have stood near the fort of Coria at Corbridge, and to have been brought as building stone in the twelfth century. It was laid face upward in the foundations of the cloister. In 1881 it was found in an ancient foundation running across the slype. The carved face had been hidden in the wall.

Two recent investigations have gone back into that fabric. In 2017 a wooden panel that had not been seen since the 1990s was found in the triforium, a part of the church rarely entered. The surface was heavily discoloured. In 2018 the heritage scientist Charis Theodorakopoulos examined it with the church's conservation group, using a multispectral camera that reads from the near ultraviolet into the infrared without taking a sample. Merged images showed a figure in Tudor dress, the figure thought to be the caller of the Dance of Death. Comparison with known pigments supported a link with the other panels, and a statistical treatment simulated the removal of the darkened varnish. The examination was set out in April 2025. The panel is treated as a possible, not a certain, missing part of the series.

In November 2025 excavators from the Archaeological Practice Ltd dug two trial pits in the north-east corner of the nave, to test the ground before an access ramp. In the first pit, a row of large sandstone blocks ran east to west up to the north-west pier of the tower, at a shallow depth. They are undiagnostic and may be reused, and they are thought likely to belong to high medieval flooring, or perhaps to the great buttress of 1725. Directly beneath them, at about a third of a metre below the present floor, further stone matches the position and the depth of the east return of the crypt's north passage, as drawn on a plan and section of 1899, and it is read as the roof or capping of that passage. More stone at the east end of the pit, running from the north face of the pier, is also thought likely to be high medieval. In the second pit a possible medieval cross-wall extends only about half a metre from the north wall of the nave aisle, and much of the trench is modern rubble and cement from the nave works of 1907 and 1908. A chamfered block, of the twelfth century or possibly earlier, lies under the thirteenth-century north respond, a little over a metre south of the thirteenth-century north wall. That position has been taken to suggest a narrower twelfth-century aisle, or a respond belonging to it. The recommendation is that suspected high medieval and earlier fabric be left in place, and that the modern fill of 1907 and 1908 may be removed under archaeological supervision if a new sloping floor requires it.

The stake, across thirteen centuries, was never only the building. In the seventh century it was which Easter the Northumbrian court would keep, and whether one bishop at York would hold the whole north or whether Hexham would be a see of its own. Wilfrid won the argument at Whitby, lost the great diocese to Theodore's division, and died holding this church. The crypt and the chair are what that argument left in stone. In the ninth century the stake was whether the monastery would survive the Danish army on the Tyne. The bishopric ended, the church was burned or partly destroyed, and a container of coins was buried beside the transept. In the twelfth century the stake was whether York would revive a ruined Anglo-Saxon church as a house of regular canons, and the priory that followed held lands, a school, relics, and a sanctuary chair through repeated Scottish attacks. In 1464 the stake on the meadow by the Devil's Water was the Lancastrian hold on the north, and the church received the duke who lost it. In the 1530s the stake was whether a house below the income threshold, whose canons had met the commissioners with weapons and then joined a rising, would be wiped away. The canons were executed and pensioned, the domestic buildings passed to a royal servant, and the choir and transepts were kept because the town needed a parish church. That is the change that still governs the place. The monastery did not return. The church did not become a ruin. A parish has worshipped in Wilfrid's crypt and in the canons' quire ever since, and the nave finished in 1908 stands on the ground where the thirteenth-century nave, and before that Wilfrid's church, had stood.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/hexham-abbey