# Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey

Benedictine monastery

Sunderland, United Kingdom

Sacred place. 601 CE – 1536 CE

## Story

• Benedict Biscop founded St Peter's at Monkwearmouth in 674 on land given by King Ecgfrith, and St Paul's at Jarrow followed within about ten years as the other half of one monastery.
• Masons and glassmakers from Francia raised some of the first new stone churches in the kingdom, and the house became the home of Bede and of the Codex Amiatinus.
• Raiders struck the monastery in 794, Danes destroyed it about 860, and the community was abandoned by the late ninth century.
• Monks returned after the Norman Conquest and again as small cells of Durham, until both houses were dissolved in 1536.
• The churches still stand, with the dedication stone at St Paul's, glass from the excavations, and a new dig in Drewett's Park opened in 2025.

## Visiting

Admission to the monastery ruins at Jarrow is free, the ruins are open any reasonable time during daylight hours, and smoking, vaping, barbecues and naked flames are not permitted. St Paul's Church is open to visitors from mid-February to mid-December, with winter opening hours from 11:00 to 15:00 Monday to Saturday and from 14:00 to 15:30 on Sunday. Summer opening hours at St Paul's Church run from 10:30 to 15:30 Monday to Saturday and from 14:00 to 16:00 on Sunday. Group visits to St Paul's Church must book in advance.
St Peter's Church at Monkwearmouth is open from 10:30 to 14:30 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and the same church is also open from 10:30 to 14:30 from Monday to Friday. St Peter's Church is closed on Thursdays until further notice, is closed on bank holidays, and is not open for tours on Sunday. A Saturday visit to St Peter's Church must book in advance, and groups of ten or more must book in advance.

## History

The twin monastery of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow was founded in the kingdom of Northumbria while that kingdom was at its strongest. In 674 King Ecgfrith gave Benedict Biscop seventy hides beside the Wear for a stone church of St Peter, and within about ten years he gave land at Jarrow for a sister church of St Paul. Benedict, who had taken vows at Lérins and served at Canterbury under Theodore, required the two houses to remain one monastery in two places. He brought masons and glassmakers from Francia because the kingdom had neither, and he filled the house with books and with Roman chant.

Ceolfrith led the move to Jarrow and, with the boy Bede, kept the daily office going through the plague of 686. By 716 the two houses had six hundred monks and had made three great one-volume Bibles, of which the Codex Amiatinus was carried toward Rome as a gift for Pope Gregory II. Bede, given to the monastery at seven, lived almost all his life at Jarrow, wrote more than sixty works, and finished the Ecclesiastical History of the English People about 731. The same community answered a Pictish king on how to date Easter, and Bede's way of counting years from the birth of Christ spread far beyond Northumbria.

Raiders struck the monastery in 794, Danes destroyed it about 860, and the site was abandoned by the late ninth century. After the Norman Conquest, monks from Evesham began to rebuild at Jarrow, and in the fourteenth century each house became a small cell of Durham until both were dissolved in 1536. The churches remained. St Peter's keeps its early tower, and St Paul's keeps its Anglo-Saxon chancel, the dedication stone of Ecgfrith's fifteenth year, and glass recovered from the ruins.

Excavation from the middle of the twentieth century uncovered the Anglo-Saxon plans, painted plaster, opus signinum floors and coloured window glass. A new season opened in Drewett's Park in 2025. A bid for World Heritage status was withdrawn in 2012, but the chapter house at St Peter's received twelve windows by Rachel Welford and Adrian Riley, made from Bede's writing on the reckoning of time.

## Photographs

- [St Peter's Church, Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, Durham, Great Britain — R J McNaughton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/St_Peter%27s_Church-Monkwearmouth.jpg)
- [Notera Av dokumentationsskäl har originalbeskrivningen från Riksantikvarieämbetet behållits. Tillrättalägganden och alternativa beskrivningar bör införas — Berit Wallenberg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Wearmouth-Jarrow_Abbey_-_KMB_-_16001000128504.jpg)
- [Notera Av dokumentationsskäl har originalbeskrivningen från Riksantikvarieämbetet behållits. Tillrättalägganden och alternativa beskrivningar bör införas — Berit Wallenberg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Wearmouth-Jarrow_Abbey_-_KMB_-_16001000128584.jpg)
- [Notera Av dokumentationsskäl har originalbeskrivningen från Riksantikvarieämbetet behållits. Tillrättalägganden och alternativa beskrivningar bör införas — Berit Wallenberg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Wearmouth-Jarrow_Abbey_-_KMB_-_16001000128604.jpg)
- [Information board for St Peter's Church, Monkwearmouth — Alexander P Kapp](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Information_board_for_St_Peter%27s_Church%2C_Monkwearmouth_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2437954.jpg)
- [St Peters Chapterhouse windows designed by Rachel Welford and Adrian Riley. (detail) — Electric angel](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/St_Peters_Chapterhouse_Welford_Riley.jpg)
- [Ancient seat in the priory church of St Paul, Jarrow, Tyne and Wear, traditionally said to be Bede's chair — Jerrye & Roy Klotz, MD](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/MONKWEARMOUTH_-_JARROW_ABBEY_-_ST._PAUL_CHURCH.jpg)

## Sources

- [Monkwearmouth–Jarrow Abbey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkwearmouth%E2%80%93Jarrow_Abbey) — Wikipedia
- [Bede](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bede) — Wikipedia
- [Benedict Biscop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict_Biscop) — Wikipedia
- [Ceolfrith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceolfrith) — Wikipedia
- [Ecgfrith of Northumbria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecgfrith_of_Northumbria) — Wikipedia
- [Codex Amiatinus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Amiatinus) — Wikipedia
- [Anglo-Saxon architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_architecture) — Wikipedia
- [Norman Conquest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Conquest) — Wikipedia
- [Amlaíb Cuarán](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amla%C3%ADb_Cuar%C3%A1n) — Wikipedia
- [Adrian Riley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Riley) — Wikipedia
- [Monkwearmouth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkwearmouth) — Wikipedia
- [Eosterwine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eosterwine) — Wikipedia
- [Hwætberht](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hw%C3%A6tberht) — Wikipedia
- [Kingdom of Northumbria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Northumbria) — Wikipedia
- [Synod of Whitby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Whitby) — Wikipedia
- [St Paul's Monastery, Jarrow](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/st-pauls-monastery-jarrow/) — English Heritage
- [St Paul's Church, Jarrow](https://parishofjarrowandsimonside.info/our-churches-and-congregations/st-pauls) — Parish of Jarrow and Simonside
- [St Paul's Church, Jarrow](https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/13705/) — A Church Near You
- [St Peter's Church, Monkwearmouth](https://monkwearmouthcofe.com/st-peters) — Parish of Monkwearmouth
- [St Peter's Church, Monkwearmouth: visitor opening times](https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/13729/find-us/) — A Church Near You
- [Wearmouth and Jarrow World Heritage bid withdrawn](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/wearmouth-and-jarrow-world-heritage-bid-withdrawn) — Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
- [Decision 36 COM 8B.37, Twin Monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow](https://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/4808/) — UNESCO World Heritage Centre
- [Jarrow Archaeological Mission](https://jarrowhall.com/jam/) — Jarrow Hall
- [Archaeologists return to world-famous Jarrow site](https://www.culturednortheast.co.uk/p/archaeologists-return-to-world-famous) — Cultured North East
- [Excavations at the Saxon monastic sites of Wearmouth and Jarrow: an interim report](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/details.xhtml?recordId=3188476) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Wearmouth and Jarrow Monastic Sites, Volume I](https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1698269/wearmouth-and-jarrow-monastic-sites-vol-i) — Durham University
- [St Peter's Church-Monkwearmouth.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Peter%27s_Church-Monkwearmouth.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Wearmouth-Jarrow Abbey - KMB - 16001000128504.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wearmouth-Jarrow_Abbey_-_KMB_-_16001000128504.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Wearmouth-Jarrow Abbey - KMB - 16001000128584.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wearmouth-Jarrow_Abbey_-_KMB_-_16001000128584.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Wearmouth-Jarrow Abbey - KMB - 16001000128604.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wearmouth-Jarrow_Abbey_-_KMB_-_16001000128604.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Information board for St Peter's Church, Monkwearmouth - geograph.org.uk - 2437954.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Information_board_for_St_Peter%27s_Church,_Monkwearmouth_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2437954.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [St Peters Chapterhouse Welford Riley.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Peters_Chapterhouse_Welford_Riley.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [MONKWEARMOUTH - JARROW ABBEY - ST. PAUL CHURCH.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MONKWEARMOUTH_-_JARROW_ABBEY_-_ST._PAUL_CHURCH.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

The Abbey Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Monkwearmouth–Jarrow, was a Benedictine double monastery in the Kingdom of Northumbria. Its first house, dedicated to Peter, was founded at Monkwearmouth on the River Wear in 674 or 675, on land given by King Ecgfrith. Its second house, dedicated to Paul, was founded at Jarrow on the River Tyne in 684 or 685. Benedict Biscop asked that the two sites work as one monastery in two places. They stood about seven miles apart, Monkwearmouth in what is now Sunderland and Jarrow on the south bank of the Tyne, both in Tyne and Wear. After monastic life ended, the churches remained in use as parish churches. At Jarrow the later domestic ranges survive as ruins beside St Paul's. Each house is a scheduled monument, and the standing church at Monkwearmouth, together with the church and the ruins at Jarrow, is listed at the highest grade.

Northumbria was the early medieval kingdom north of the Humber. The name means the people or province north of that estuary. It began as two kingdoms, Deira in the south and Bernicia in the north. Fighting in the first half of the seventh century ended with the murder of the last king of Deira in 651, and Bernician kings then ruled a single realm. At its extent the kingdom ran from the Humber, the Peak and the Mersey to the Firth of Forth, and for much of its life it also held Lindsey, south of the Humber. It ceased to be an independent kingdom in the middle of the tenth century, when Deira fell to the Danes and became the kingdom of York. The earldom of Bamburgh held Bernicia for a time. The land north of the Tweed later passed into the kingdom of Scotland, and the land south of the Tweed into England as Northumberland and the county palatine of Durham.

The church inside that kingdom was arguing about how to be Roman. In 664 King Oswiu, father of Ecgfrith, held the Synod of Whitby at Hilda's double monastery of Streonshalh, later called Whitby. He decided that his kingdom would date Easter and cut the monastic tonsure in the Roman way, not in the way of the Irish monks of Iona and of the houses that looked to Iona. The decision did not silence the older party. It did tell a Northumbrian nobleman what kind of monastery a king might want: a house that took its rule, its chant, its books and its buildings from Rome, in a countryside that had been taught from Melrose and Iona.

Ecgfrith was born about 645 to Oswiu and Eanflæd. At about ten he was a hostage with Queen Cynewise, wife of Penda of Mercia, until Oswiu killed Penda at the battle of the Winwaed and Northumbrian power jumped. To hold other English kingdoms, Oswiu married Ecgfrith to Æthelthryth, a daughter of Anna of East Anglia. Ecgfrith was king of Deira from 664 and king of Northumbria from 670 until he was killed on 20 May 685. He ruled while Northumbria was at its strongest, and he died in a defeat that Bede took as the moment the kingdom began to fail.

In 671 he beat the Picts at the battle of Two Rivers, and Northumbrians controlled Pictland for about fourteen years. Around 672 Æthelthryth persuaded him to let her become a nun. She entered Coldingham, under his aunt the abbess Æbbe, and a year later she was the founding abbess of Ely. That departure fed a long quarrel with Wilfrid, bishop of York, which ended with Wilfrid driven from his see. Ecgfrith's second wife, Eormenburg, became Wilfrid's enemy. In 674 Ecgfrith pushed back the Mercian king Wulfhere and took Lindsey. In 679 he fought again, this time against Wulfhere's brother Æthelred, who was married to Ecgfrith's sister Osthryth, at the battle of the Trent. Ecgfrith's own brother Ælfwine was killed. Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, made peace, and Lindsey returned to Mercia. Northumbria never regained the dominance in the middle of Britain that it lost that year.

In June 684 Ecgfrith sent a raiding party to Brega in Ireland under his general Berht. The party took many slaves and sacked churches and monasteries. The reasons are unclear. He acted against the warning of Ecgberht of Ripon, and Bede and other churchmen condemned the attack. In 685, against the advice of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, he led a force against the Picts of Fortriu, ruled by his cousin Bridei mac Bili. On 20 May the Picts drew him into the hills by a pretended flight, and he was killed, aged about forty, at the battle of Dun Nechtain, also called Nechtansmere. The place is put either at Dunnichen in Angus or at Dunachton in Badenoch. Most of his army died with him. He was buried on Iona. His illegitimate half-brother Aldfrith succeeded him. Bede dated the decline of Northumbria from this death, and wrote that the hopes and strength of the English kingdom then began to waver and to slip backward. The north of Britain, lost in 685, was not recovered. Even so, Northumbria stayed one of the stronger kingdoms of Britain and Ireland well into the Viking age. Ecgfrith seems to have been the first Northumbrian king, and perhaps the first Anglo-Saxon ruler, to issue the silver penny. His pennies, thick coins cast in moulds, were made in quantity, after an earlier and rarer gold coinage copied from Merovingian Francia.

This same king paid for the monastery. Like his father, he supported Benedict Biscop. In 674 he gave Benedict seventy hides near the mouth of the Wear for a house of St Peter. About ten years later he gave forty hides on the Tyne at Jarrow for a sister house of St Paul. Other accounts put the Jarrow gift in 681, or in 682, and the opening of St Paul's in 685. The dedication stone still kept in the church records the dedication of the basilica of St Paul on the ninth day before the Kalends of May, in the fifteenth year of King Ecgfrith and the fourth year of Abbot Ceolfrith, the founder of that church under God's guidance. The day is read as 23 April 685, and it has also been read as 687. The parish treats the surviving chancel as the free-standing chapel of 681, the room in which Bede later worshipped. Benedict Biscop remains the founder of the twin house as a whole.

Benedict Biscop, also known as Biscop Baducing, was born about 628 and died on 12 January 690. He came from a noble Northumbrian family. It has been suggested that the name Baducing is the Biscop Beding of a Lindsey king-list, son of a Beda and an ancestor of Alfred, but that is a suggestion, not a settled pedigree. As a young man he was a thegn of King Oswiu of Bernicia. At about twenty-five, around 653, he set off on the first of his journeys to Rome with his friend Wilfrid. Wilfrid was held at Lyon on the way, and Benedict finished the journey alone. He came home full of fervour for the good of the English church. Twelve years later he went again. Alchfrith of Deira, a son of Oswiu, meant to travel with him, and the king refused permission. On the way back Benedict stopped at Lérins, a monastic island off the coast of Provence that had adopted the Rule of St Benedict. He stayed from 665 to 667, took vows, and took the name Benedict. He then made a third journey to Rome. Pope Vitalian charged him to bring Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus home to Canterbury in 669. Theodore appointed him abbot of St Peter and St Paul at Canterbury, and he served for two years.

He collected books on the road. The second Roman journey was especially a buying trip. The library he assembled has been estimated at about two hundred and fifty titles, mostly service books, with scripture, classical works and other secular books among them. He is credited with six journeys to Rome, and also with five overseas voyages made to stock that library. With Ecgfrith's land in 674 he set out to build a model monastery for England. He crossed the sea for masons who could raise a church in the pre-Romanesque manner, because the kingdom had no such craftsmen. He wanted glazed windows, then a rarity, and he brought glassmakers from Francia as well. They had a workshop at Monkwearmouth, on the Wear beside the monastery. Written evidence places the arrival of Gaulish glaziers in 675. In 679 he travelled again for books, relics, masons and glaziers, and for a grant from Pope Agatho giving the house certain privileges. A papal letter of 678 is also said to have freed the monastery from external control. He brought material from Rome and from Lérins, and he persuaded John, the archcantor of St Peter's in Rome, to come and teach Roman chant. He wrote a rule for his own community from the Rule of Benedict and from the customs of seventeen monasteries he had visited.

The churches were among the first stone buildings raised in an English kingdom since the Romans. Anglo-Saxon architecture, from the middle of the fifth century until the Norman Conquest, used timber and thatch for ordinary houses and halls. Of hundreds of settlement sites dug in England, only about ten have shown masonry in domestic buildings, and then only in special cases. The old explanation was that the builders could not manage stone. The explanation now preferred is that timber was a choice, bound up with the meaning of the material. The word for a building was the word for timber. Royal halls stayed in wood even when a king could have paid for stone. Churches were the exception. Bede is clear, in the history and in his lives of the abbots, that the masonry of churches, including his own at Jarrow, was done in the manner of the Romans, set against the timber habit. He even thought Augustine's cathedral at Canterbury had been a repaired Roman church, when it had in fact been newly built out of Roman materials. The belief was that the church was Roman, and that a stone church was therefore a Roman building. In Northumbria the early churches of the Irish mission were timber. Stone churches became prominent late in the seventh century with Wilfrid at Ripon and Hexham, and with Benedict Biscop at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow. The northern plans had long naves and small square-ended chancels, rather than the apses of the early churches in Kent. Glass in the windows was new in seventh-century England.

In 682 Benedict appointed Eosterwine as his coadjutor at Monkwearmouth. The king was so pleased with St Peter's that he gave the Jarrow land and pressed for a second house. Benedict built St Paul's there and set Ceolfrith over it. Ceolfrith left Wearmouth with monks of the first community, twenty of them in one account, and the boy Bede among them. Benedict was himself the first abbot. In 686, when he left England for Rome, he put Ceolfrith in charge at Jarrow and Eosterwine at Monkwearmouth. Before he died he insisted that the two places remain one monastery. For his last three years he was confined to bed. He died on 12 January 690. A sermon of Bede, his seventeenth homily, shows that a public cult of Benedict was already under way. His feast on 12 January is kept by the Catholic Church, the Church of England and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Wider fame waited until his relics were translated to Thorney under Æthelwold around 980. He was buried at the monastery. Eosterwine and Sigfrith were later laid beside him near the main altar at Monkwearmouth, during the time of a later abbot.

Eosterwine, also called Easterwine, was born in 650 and died on 7 March 686. He was of the highest Northumbrian stock, a cousin of Benedict, and as a young man a soldier in Ecgfrith's army. At twenty-four he gave up arms and entered Wearmouth, taking his share of the heavy work. He was ordained priest in 679. In 682 Benedict made him abbot of Wearmouth beside himself. Praise of him says that when he had to correct a fault he did it with such gentleness that the monk could not bear to darken that face again. In 686 the pestilence reached the community, and he died of it on 7 March, about thirty-six years old, while the monks were singing Matins. He had taken leave of them the day before. Benedict was away in Rome. The monks chose Sigfrith to follow him. Eosterwine is not known to have written anything. His feast is 7 March.

Ceolfrith, or Ceolfrid, was born about 642 and died in 716. Little is known of his early years. His wish to be a monk is linked to his brother Cynefrith, and his entry into monastic life is dated around Cynefrith's death in 660. A cousin, Tunbert, was the first abbot of Hexham. Ceolfrith spent his first four years at Gilling, in what is now North Yorkshire, where Cynefrith had also been, and he was remembered as a man given over to reading, labour and discipline. He then looked for a stricter house and joined the company of Wilfrid at Ripon. At twenty-seven he was ordained priest. Between Ripon and Wearmouth he spent time with Abbot Botolph, whom he credited with a grace of spirit and with teaching him humility. He had grown tired of rank and jealousy in the house he was leaving, and he had thought of going back to Ripon, when Benedict's invitation came.

Benedict wanted him as his most zealous assistant from the first foundation at Wearmouth. One account puts Ecgfrith's first grant at about 672 or 673 and says the Wearmouth buildings took eight years. When Jarrow was finished, Ceolfrith became abbot of St Paul's. Reports differ on whether he received the house only after it was built, or whether he directed the building himself. The friendship with Benedict was close enough that the founder could leave the new house in his hands.

In 686 the plague struck Northumbria and both houses. A life of Ceolfrith written around 710 says that only two people left in the community could sing the full daily office. One was Ceolfrith. The other was a boy, his pupil, almost certainly Bede, then about fourteen. The two of them kept the hours until more voices could be trained. Another telling says the pair were spared, nursed the sick, and held the preaching when fear had taken hold, and that when the sickness passed they rebuilt the life of the house. Bede then stayed at Jarrow for most of his life. On one reckoning he never travelled more than seventy miles from the monastery.

By Ceolfrith's death in 716 the two houses counted six hundred monks between them. He had kept up Benedict's programme of study and, above all, of book-making. A distinctive half-uncial grew into a house style. His largest work was three pandect Bibles, each a single volume of the whole text, one for the church of St Peter, one for the church of St Paul, and the third a gift for the pope. Of the two that stayed at home, one is entirely lost and the other survives only in fragments, the leaves known as the Ceolfrid Bible. The pope's copy is the Codex Amiatinus, kept at the Laurentian Library in Florence. It is also called the Jarrow Codex. Made around 700 at this monastery, it is the earliest complete one-volume Latin Bible to survive, the León palimpsest alone being older, and it is the oldest Bible in which the canon stands in the Vulgate text. It is treated as the best surviving witness to Jerome's Vulgate for the New Testament and for most of the Old. As in Vulgate bibles before the ninth century, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah are absent, Lamentations runs on from Jeremiah, Ezra and Nehemiah form one book, and Samuel, Kings and Chronicles are each a single book. The psalms are Jerome's third version, from the Hebrew, not the old Roman psalter nor the Gallican psalter that later became usual. Those psalms are a weaker witness than the rest of the book, and their headings, shared with the Cathach of Columba, show that an Irish psalter lay behind them.

A further grant of land in 692 was secured so that two thousand cattle could be raised for the vellum. The finished book is an immense object, about nineteen and a quarter inches high, thirteen and three eighths wide and seven inches thick, weighing more than seventy-five pounds. It has 1,030 or 1,040 leaves of smooth vellum, in gatherings of four sheets, though more than a third of the gatherings use two single leaves in place of one folded sheet. A count of about 515 cattle for the skins is offered only as a rough figure. The writing is large, regular uncial, in two columns of forty-three or forty-four lines, with little space between words and no punctuation. The reader was guided by the breaking of the lines into clauses. There is some decoration, including two full-page miniatures, but they show little of the usual Northumbrian insular manner and are copied from late antique pictures. One of them, a portrait of Ezra at the start of the Old Testament, has been called the oldest English painting that can be given a firm latest date, because it cannot be later than 716. A Christ in Majesty with the four evangelists stands at the start of the New Testament. The arrangement, and perhaps the pictures, followed the older Latin Codex Grandior of Cassiodorus, which the monastery owned. Bede is thought very likely to have worked on the text. It has been suggested that the pandects were partly written, and in places corrected, by him, and that his hand may be on the page.

Ceolfrith knew his life was ending. He resigned, and Hwaetberht was chosen in 716 or 717. Ceolfrith then sailed for Rome to give the Codex Amiatinus to Pope Gregory II. He got as far as Langres in Burgundy, died there on 29 September 716, and was buried there. One account says that his companions carried the book on, presented it to Gregory II, and brought the pope's thanks back to Hwaetberht. Another account says there is no official record that the book reached Rome. It next appears in the ninth century at the abbey of San Salvatore on Monte Amiata in Tuscany, which is why it is called Amiatinus. A relic list of 1036 describes an Old and New Testament written in the hand of the blessed Pope Gregory. The dedication had been changed, so that the giver, Ceolfrith of the English, became Peter of the Lombards. The book stayed at San Salvatore until 1786, when it moved to Florence. The Laurentian librarian Angelo Maria Bandini then argued that a follower of Benedict of Nursia named Servandus had made it at Monte Cassino in the 540s. That view held for about a hundred years. In 1888 Giovanni Battista de Rossi showed that it belonged with the Bibles Bede described, and with a fragment now in the British Library. Taking a hundred and fifty years off its supposed age still left it the oldest complete Vulgate. During the arguments of the sixteenth century it mattered because its Latin was older than any Hebrew manuscript then known. In 1587 Pope Sixtus V called it to Rome for the Sixtine edition of the Vulgate, but the editors made little or no use of its readings, and the later official text preferred medieval copies that had mixed in non-Vulgate wording. The Amiatinus New Testament, as edited in the nineteenth century, does not contain the passage known as the Johannine comma.

Sometime after 711, Nechtan mac Der-Ilei, king of the Picts, asked Ceolfrith how to reform the Easter cycle so that his kingdom would keep the feast in harmony with Rome. By 716 the Picts, and the Columban clergy of Iona, had taken that Catholic Easter. The house that had been founded to plant Roman custom in a region of Iona's influence was, by Ceolfrith's last year, sending that custom back toward Iona itself.

Hwaetberht, who died in the 740s, had been a monk of the monastery before his election. Bede reports that Hwaetberht had gone to Rome under Pope Sergius I, between 687 and 701, and had stayed a long while, learning and copying what he needed. Bede dedicated On the Reckoning of Time to him and thought well of him. In the preface to the fourth book of his commentary on the first part of Samuel, Bede links him with the Latin name Eusebius, and a collection of sixty Latin riddles, the Enigmata of Eusebius, written to follow forty riddles by Tatwine, archbishop of Canterbury, has been taken to be Hwaetberht's. A letter from Boniface of about 747 asks Hwaetberht to send the treatises of the monk Bede, and also a cloak for the road, and offers a coverlet of goat hair in return. The letter puts Hwaetberht's death after that year. It was in his time that the bodies of Sigfrith and Eosterwine were moved to rest with Benedict Biscop by the altar at Monkwearmouth.

Bede was born in 672 or 673 on the lands of this monastery. He says so in the last chapter of the Ecclesiastical History, and he says nothing about his parents. His dealings with men of noble birth, and the occurrence of the names Biscop and Beda in a Lindsey king-list of about 800, have been read as signs that his family was prosperous. A tradition puts his birth at Monkton, about two miles from where Jarrow was later built. His name is an Old English short form on the root of a verb meaning to bid or command. At the age of seven his family gave him to Monkwearmouth as a child offered to the house, to be taught by Benedict Biscop and afterwards by Ceolfrith. He does not say whether they already meant him to be a monk. The sister house at Jarrow is dated to 682 in the account that has him move there with Ceolfrith in that year. The dedication stone was still in place in 1969, and because a boy in the house would have had ordinary labour to do, it is possible that he helped to build the first church. That is a possibility drawn from the custom of the place, not a statement that he laid a particular stone.

When he was about eighteen, Adomnán, abbot of Iona, visited Monkwearmouth and Jarrow. Bede would probably have met him, and the meeting may have turned Bede toward the Easter question. In about 692, in his nineteenth year, John, bishop of Hexham, later called John of Beverley, ordained him deacon. The canonical age was twenty-five. The early ordination may mean that his gifts were thought exceptional, or that the age was often ignored. There may have been lesser orders below the diaconate, but there is no record that he held them. In his thirtieth year, about 702, the same bishop ordained him priest.

Around 701 he wrote his first works, On the Art of Metre and On Figures and Tropes, both for teaching. He continued to write for the rest of his life and finished more than sixty books, most of which survive. Not every text can be dated, and some may have been in hand for years. The last work that survives is a letter of 734 to Ecgbert of York, who had been his pupil. He was a teacher as well as a writer. He enjoyed music and was said to sing well and to recite poetry in the vernacular. A phrase in the introduction to his verse life of Cuthbert is translated either as a healing of his tongue or as the guidance of his tongue, and it is not certain which he meant. A sixth-century Greek and Latin manuscript of the Acts of the Apostles, believed to be one he used, survives in the Bodleian Library as the Codex Laudianus. He may also have worked on the Latin Bibles copied at Jarrow.

In 708 some monks of Hexham accused him of heresy in his book On Times. The common scheme of world history was the six ages, and the accepted count, taken from Isidore of Seville, put more than five thousand years between the creation and the birth of Christ. Bede had done the sum himself and made it 3,952 years. The charge was spoken at a feast, in the presence of Bishop Wilfrid, by monks who were drunk. Wilfrid did not reply. A monk who was there told Bede, and within a few days Bede wrote a defence and asked that it be read to Wilfrid. He had another meeting with Wilfrid between 706 and 709, when he asked about Æthelthryth, abbess of Ely. Wilfrid had been at the lifting of her body in 695, and had been her adviser. Bede wanted the circumstances of the body and more of her life.

In 735 Bede went to York to visit Ecgbert, then bishop of York. The see was raised to an archbishopric in 735, and the two men are likely to have talked about that plan. Bede had hoped to visit again in 734 and was too ill to travel. He also went to Lindisfarne, and at some point to a monastery known only because a monk named Wicthed lived there, a visit mentioned in a letter to that monk. His correspondence implies other meetings, but the places and dates are not known. He did not visit Rome. He would have said so in the autobiographical chapter if he had. Nothhelm, who found documents for him in Rome, did visit him, at a date that can only be placed after Nothhelm's own Roman journey. Apart from a few trips to other monasteries, the life was the office, the discipline, and the scriptures.

He died at Jarrow on the feast of the Ascension, 26 May 735, and was buried there. His disciple Cuthbert, probably though not certainly the man who was later abbot, wrote to a Cuthwin of whom nothing else is known, and described the end. Bede fell ill before Easter, with frequent breathlessness and almost no pain. On the Tuesday, two days before he died, his breathing grew worse and his feet swelled. He went on dictating. He spent the night awake in prayer and dictated again the next day. At three o'clock he asked for a box and shared among the priests of the house what he called a few treasures: some pepper, napkins, and incense. That night he dictated a final sentence to a boy named Wilberht, and died soon afterwards. Cuthbert is clear that the death came after sunset. By the reckoning Bede himself used, the day changed at sunset, not at midnight, so the last dictation belonged to 26 May even if a modern clock would still have called that evening 25 May. The box had been brought on the Wednesday afternoon. Cuthbert's letter also preserves a five-line poem in the vernacular, Bede's Death Song. It is the most widely copied Old English poem, surviving in forty-five manuscripts. Not every copy names Bede, and the copies that do are later than the copies that do not, so it is not certain that the poem is his.

The book finished about 731 is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in five books. Albinus, abbot of St Augustine's at Canterbury, helped him gather it. The first book opens with a geography and then with Caesar's invasion of 55 BC, sketches Christian life in Roman Britain including the martyrdom of Alban, and tells Augustine's mission of 597. The second begins with the death of Gregory the Great in 604, follows the church in Kent and the first missions to Northumbria, and ends that effort in disaster when Penda of Mercia killed the newly Christian Edwin at Hatfield Chase in about 632. The third book tells the recovery under Oswald and under Oswiu, and its climax is Whitby, long treated as a turning point in English history. The fourth opens with Theodore's consecration as archbishop of Canterbury and includes Wilfrid's work in Sussex. The fifth brings the story to Bede's own day, with the mission in Frisia and the conflict with the British church over Easter. A preface dedicates the work to Ceolwulf, king of Northumbria, who had asked for a copy and had already been sent a draft. The exchange shows that the monastery had lines into the Northumbrian nobility, and it assumes that the king could follow Latin.

The library Benedict and Ceolfrith had built made the house a known centre of study. In Bede's time it is estimated at about two hundred books. For the years before 597 he used earlier writers, among them Solinus. He had Eusebius in Latin, Rufinus for the church history and Jerome for the chronicle, not the Greek. He knew Orosius, Gregory of Tours, the pagan historian Eutropius, and Constantius of Lyon's life of Germanus. His account of the English settlement leans on Gildas. He knew Stephen of Ripon's life of Wilfrid, an anonymous life of Gregory, and a life of Cuthbert. He drew on Josephus and on Cassiodorus, and the house owned a copy of the Liber Pontificalis. He quotes Cicero, Plautus and Terence, perhaps from a grammar rather than from the works themselves, and he knew Virgil and Pliny's natural history, and Dionysius Exiguus. Correspondents filled the gaps. Albinus and Nothhelm supplied the Roman letters of Gregory about Augustine's mission, and almost all Bede says of Augustine comes from those letters. Daniel, bishop of Winchester, wrote to him about Wessex. He wrote to Lastingham about Cedd and Chad. An abbot Esi informed him about East Anglia, and Bishop Cynibert about Lindsey. Some material was oral, including a description of the face of Paulinus of York, who had died nearly ninety years before the history was finished.

He dated events above all by the year of the Lord, the method of Dionysius Exiguus, though he still sometimes used the fifteen-year indiction or the regnal year of a king. He did not invent the year of the Lord. His use of it, and his Easter table in On the Reckoning of Time, are the main reason it became the common count. The history was copied throughout the Middle Ages. About one hundred and sixty manuscripts survive, about half of them on the Continent rather than in Britain, besides about a hundred copies of only part of the work. Most of the eighth- and ninth-century copies come from the north of the Carolingian empire. It was first printed between 1474 and 1482, probably at Strasbourg. His aim was to show one church growing through the English kingdoms, and to give the reader examples and stories. The Britons, whose church had outlived the Roman province, draw his anger for refusing to help convert the Anglo-Saxons. The Easter dispute, closed at Whitby in his telling, is a large part of that plot of unity. He is quiet about Wilfrid, perhaps because Wilfrid's wealth sat badly with a monastic writer, or because Wilfrid's quarrels did not fit a story of harmony. He is a Northumbrian in his silences. He has less to say of Mercia and of Wessex, omits Boniface, and is sparing with Aldhelm. He was hostile enough to Mercia, in one historian's view, to consult no Mercian informants. He leaves kings aside except where a moral can be drawn or the church explained. Later medieval histories used him, and so did both sides of the religious wars of the sixteenth century. For a long time early English history was essentially a retelling of his book. More recent work has looked as hard at what he left out.

Other books made in the house sit beside the great Bibles. The St Cuthbert Gospel belongs to about 710. The Saint Petersburg Bede belongs to the years between 731 and 746. A Moore Bede is placed about 735. The Codex Grandior and the nine volumes called the Novem Codices were part of the library and had been written in Italy.

What the monastery was for can be stated from these lives. After Whitby, a king at the top of his power gave land so that a community could keep the Roman rule, sing the Roman chant, and copy Roman books inside churches built in the Roman way. The three pandects, and the one sent toward the pope, said that this northern house belonged to that wider church. The letter to Nechtan said that the same house could teach a Pictish king how to keep Easter. Bede's history then told the English past as the past of that church, and the copies carried the telling into the Carolingian north. The kingdom that had endowed the house was already smaller when he wrote. Lindsey had gone back to Mercia in 679. The northern overlordship had died with Ecgfrith. The monastery, even so, could still number six hundred monks and could still lend a king a draft of a history.

The raids began in the 790s. The monastery of Lindisfarne was sacked on 8 June 793. Iona was attacked in 795 and in 802. Monkwearmouth-Jarrow was raided in 794. Danes destroyed the abbey about 860, and the community seems to have been given up by the late ninth century. Coloured window glass dug from the destruction debris belongs to buildings that, in the excavation report, were abandoned in the middle of that century. The kingdom changed with the houses. By the middle of the tenth century Deira was the Danish kingdom of York.

Amlaíb Cuarán stands in that later north, not at the founding of the monastery. He was Amlaíb mac Sitric, a Norse-Gael who died in 980, called Óláfr kváran in Norse, the sandal, and in English Olaf Cuaran or Anlaf Sihtricson. He was the last of the Uí Ímair dynasty to play a major part in Britain and Ireland. He ruled York from 941 to 944, at first with his cousin Ragnall, and again from 949 to 952, in a Northumbria fought over with Edmund, Eadred and Eric Bloodaxe. He ruled Dublin from 945 to 947 and again from 952 until his death. He was a renowned warrior and a ruthless pillager of churches, and he ended his days in retirement at Iona Abbey, where he was buried. His life shows the kind of power that held the north in the century after this monastery had emptied: Norse kings in York, the plundering of churches as a weapon, and Iona, once the teacher that Whitby had set aside, as a place where such a king could go to die. No account of him ties his hand to the stones of Jarrow or of Monkwearmouth. The connection is the kingdom those stones had served, and the storm that had cleared the monks out of them.

A claim that the Scottish king Malcolm III raided Wearmouth and Jarrow was already doubted by the Durham antiquary Robert Surtees, because the times and the places do not fit. Symeon of Durham, writing nearer Malcolm's lifetime, says nothing of such a raid. Symeon says instead that from the Danish attacks until the monastery was revived, the site of the convent of Wearmouth lay waste and desolate for two hundred and eight years.

The Norman Conquest of England was the invasion of 1066. Edward the Confessor died in January and Harold Godwinson succeeded him. Harald Hardrada of Norway invaded the north, won at Fulford on 20 September, and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Three days later, on 28 September, the fleet of William, duke of Normandy, landed at Pevensey. On 14 October Harold was killed at Hastings, and William became king. He was not secure on the throne until after 1072. He took the lands of the English lords who resisted, raised castles, and by 1086 had the great survey. In the early 1070s, inside that new rule, Aldwin, prior of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, was moved by Bede's history to tour the places of the Northumbrian saints. At Jarrow he said mass in the Anglo-Saxon ruins. He and twenty-three brothers from Evesham began to build a monastery again. The southern and western ranges were still unfinished when the community was recalled to the cathedral priory at Durham in 1083. The new plan ignored the Anglo-Saxon layout. Excavation found Norman walls set without regard to the older ones.

Early in the fourteenth century both Monkwearmouth and Jarrow were founded again, each as a cell of Durham Priory. One or two monks lived in each, under a master. It was a thin community beside the six hundred of 716, and it lasted until the crown took the houses back.

Under Henry VIII, Parliament passed the act against the smaller religious houses in 1535, and in 1536 Monkwearmouth and Jarrow were dissolved and surrendered. In 1545 the crown granted the house and site of the late cell of Monkwearmouth, worth about twenty-six pounds a year, to Thomas Whitehead, a relative of Hugh Whitehead. Hugh had resigned as prior of Durham in 1540 and became the first dean of the new cathedral. The Monkwearmouth estate passed afterwards to the Widdringtons and then to the Fenwicks. In the reign of James I the remains of the monastic buildings there were taken into a private mansion. The house burned in 1790. No trace of that monastery survives above ground, and the parish registers, except for some late entries, were destroyed in the fire.

The churches are what a visitor still enters. St Peter's at Monkwearmouth stands on the north bank of the Wear and keeps the ancient porch and tower. The tower was built in phases from the seventh century into the tenth. The church is one of the oldest in Britain still in use, and it is one of three churches in the parish of Monkwearmouth. It stands beside the St Peter's campus of the University of Sunderland and beside the National Glass Centre. Monkwearmouth is the district on the north side of the river mouth, one of the three original settlements on the Wear, with Bishopwearmouth and Sunderland. It was later a centre of shipbuilding and of coal. Wearmouth Colliery closed in December 1993 after more than a hundred years, and the Stadium of Light opened on the site in July 1997. The railway station closed in 1968 and is now a museum, and a metro station a short distance south has served the area again since 2002. That town grew up around the church. It is not the monastery.

At Jarrow the Saxon and Norman nave collapsed and a Victorian nave replaced it. The Anglo-Saxon chancel remains. The parish calls it a direct survival from the seventh century. The dedication stone is cemented into the wall of the tower. A small window holds excavated fragments of coloured glass. One account dates those fragments to about the year 600 and calls the reset window the oldest of its kind in the world. The excavations also recovered window glass of the seventh and eighth centuries. At Monkwearmouth in 1969 a complete quarry of amber glass, decorated with white trails, was found, together with two millefiori settings, and a composite rod of the same kind of glass came from Jarrow. Hundreds of fragments from the earlier digs were used to glaze the round window in St Paul's. Apart from the chancel, nothing of the seventh-century monastery stands above the turf. Slabs set in the ground mark where the buildings were. The ruined walls south of the church are the medieval monastery, re-founded on Bede's site.

Rosemary Cramp directed the modern excavation of both houses. The monograph that publishes the work covers 1959 to 1988, and presents the plans as the most coherent evidence for the layout of a monastery of the seventh and eighth centuries in Europe. Before that digging, almost nothing archaeological was known of the places where Bede had lived. The interim report on the seasons from 1959 to 1967 describes, on the south side of the church at Monkwearmouth, a south porticus, a lay cemetery, an oval building interpreted as a mausoleum, and a gallery that may have been the west side of a cloister. The gallery had a floor of opus signinum, walls with painted plaster, and a roof partly covered in lead sheet. The debris included window glass and, less certainly, baluster shafts. Later Saxon and Norman structures, hearths, and a pit eighteen feet deep cut these buildings. At Jarrow the work confirmed part of a church plan drawn in 1769. Parallel to the church on the south were two large buildings of the first phase. One, read as a refectory, had a stone frieze and buttresses. Both were plastered inside and outside, and both kept fragments of opus signinum floors and of window glass. Further south, in an area of industry, stood timber buildings. The Norman rebuilding took no account of that Saxon plan. The same campaigns are also dated from 1963 to 1978, with a last excavation in 1984. They revealed early Anglo-Saxon buildings and glass of the seventh and eighth centuries. Local wheel-thrown pottery occurs in the Middle Saxon period. The plans of the communities that followed, from the eleventh century to the sixteenth, were recovered as well.

Many of the objects went into a museum that opened in Jarrow Hall House in the 1970s, expanded as Bede's World in 1993, and became Jarrow Hall in 2016. The ground covers eleven acres. It holds a display of Bede's lifetime and of Anglo-Saxon culture, a collection from those centuries down to the post-medieval, much of it dug at St Paul's, a herb garden, the listed house that gives the place its name, and a working replica of an Anglo-Saxon farm. The farm includes three timber buildings copied from Northumbrian evidence, and animals bred to resemble the stock of that time. It is a reconstruction beside the ruins, not a surviving range of the abbey.

In May 2025 the charity that runs the hall, Groundwork South and North Tyneside, was awarded £249,188 by the National Lottery Heritage Fund for the Jarrow Archaeological Mission. The dig reopened investigation around the monastic site for the first time since Cramp's campaigns. Durham and Newcastle universities had already found evidence of buried structures in Drewett's Park, the open ground next to the church that the older trenches had left out. In September 2025 a four-week season, led by Marco Romeo Pitone and Lucy McLay, worked that park with local groups, residents, students and volunteers. Finds from the season were taken into post-excavation over the winter. A longer season on the same ground was set for 2026, again with room for local people, students and schools. A separate report of the restart spells the lead archaeologist's surname with a hyphen, as Romeo-Pitone, and quotes him on following Cramp by looking at the land around the monastery rather than only at the church.

A nomination of the twin monastery for the list of World Heritage places was made in 2011, and a bid was launched in 2012. The argument put forward was that the sites gave evidence of ordered communal monasticism arriving in Britain in the seventh century, of the Roman way of building revived, and of an early cloister of the sort that became standard in Europe north of the Alps and was later carried further. In 2012 an international evaluation recommended that the site not be inscribed. The nomination was withdrawn that year at the request of the state. The preparation of the bid left a mark on the ground. The footprint of the abbey was set out again, and the chapter house at St Peter's received twelve contemporary stained-glass windows designed by the artists Rachel Welford and Adrian Riley, drawn from Bede's treatise on the reckoning of time. Adrian Riley, born in Leeds in 1971 and working from Scarborough, made a series of twelve windows there with Rachel Welford, based on historical research into Bede and the twin monasteries. They were fabricated at the National Glass Centre, across from the church, by methods described as new to a church interior. The scheme won a Northern Design Award in 2016, and a report of April 2017 marks the restoration as complete.

Bede's remains are said to have been moved from Jarrow to Durham Cathedral around 1020 and placed in the tomb of Cuthbert, then moved in 1370 to their own shrine in the Galilee chapel. The shrine was destroyed in the Reformation. The bones were buried again in the chapel, uncovered in 1831, and laid in the tomb that is still there. The tomb was looted in 1541, and the contents were probably put back in the Galilee. York, Glastonbury and Fulda have also claimed relics. There is no evidence of a cult of Bede in England in the eighth century, perhaps partly because he died on the feast of Augustine of Canterbury. On the Continent, Boniface and Alcuin spread his works and his name. Alcuin had been taught in the school that Bede's pupil Ecgbert established at York. By the monastic revival of the tenth century the cult was prominent in England, and by the fourteenth century it had reached many cathedrals. The title Venerable was attached to him by the ninth century, at councils in Aachen in 816 and 836 and in the usage of Paul the Deacon, and it was commonplace by the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A legend says that an angel supplied the missing word in an unfinished epitaph. In 1899 he was named a Doctor of the Church, the first native of Britain to be so designated, and the only Englishman until John Henry Newman was named in 2025. His day is 27 May in the Roman calendar, because 26 May belonged to Augustine, and other churches keep 25 or 27 May. Since 1958 a Jarrow Lecture has been given at St Paul's. The history written in the monastery is still the account that later writers of early England have to face, including the gaps he chose to leave.

The twin foundation changed what could be built and what could be read. It put some of the first new stone churches and some of the first coloured windows into an English kingdom. It produced a Bible large enough to be a gift for a pope, and it housed the scholar who made a local church into a history of the English people and a way of counting years that the Latin west adopted. The community was broken by the raids, revived only in part after the Norman Conquest, reduced to a pair of tiny cells, and then dissolved. The two churches, the stone of 685, the glass set back in the window, the slabs in the grass at Jarrow, and the books in Florence and in scattered leaves are what that work left behind.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/monkwearmouth-jarrow-abbey