Tynemouth Castle and Priory

Tynemouth Castle and Priory stands on a steep-sided headland at the mouth of the River Tyne, where the river meets the North Sea. The medieval Benedictine priory was dedicated to Saint Oswine and the Virgin Mary, and it was protected by walls, towers, and a gatehouse. The headland was a natural stronghold. It commanded the entrance to the river, and for that reason it remained a coastal fortress long after monastic life had ended.

Three kings were buried here, and the arms of the metropolitan borough of North Tyneside carry three crowns in their memory.

The earliest evidence of people living on the promontory is the trace of two circular wooden houses. The larger is of a kind used in the two centuries before the Roman invasion of AD 43, and it has been associated with the Votadini. It measured about 11.5 metres, or 38 feet, in internal diameter. Its outer wall was a line of close-set uprights set in a trench cut into rock or sand, up to eighteen inches wide and the same in depth.

The doorway lay on the south, where the wall trench ended on the east side in a large post hole. Shallow post holes about two feet outside the wall trench have been read as eaves supports, giving the house an overall diameter of about 46 feet. No clear occupation layer belonged to the house itself. Roman pottery lay above the wall trench, which suggests that the building had gone out of use before the late second century AD.

Native pottery of pre-Roman or Roman Iron Age date was scattered widely across the site. The smaller house was about 4.5 metres across and may have flourished in the Roman period, in the second century. The larger house may have belonged to an Iron Age settlement, and that settlement may have been a fort, with a rampart and ditch across the neck of the headland on the line later used by the priory gatehouse.

A monastery was probably sponsored by one of the Anglian kings of Northumbria. It was already in existence in the early eighth century. Heribald, an abbot of Tynemouth, died in 745, and the house was well enough established in 792 to receive the burial of Osred II, king of Northumbria. A later medieval tradition placed the foundation in the middle of the seventh century and tied it to Saint Oswine, a king of Deira.

That tradition says Oswine was the first king buried at Tynemouth, and that his killer, Oswiu, a king of Bernicia, founded the convent there in penance. The firmer early record is the eighth-century abbey and the burial of Osred II. Oswine’s own death belongs to 651, and the story of how his body came to the headland was told in more than one way.

Oswine, also called Oswin or Osuine, died on 20 August 651 at Gilling in Yorkshire. He had succeeded Oswald of Northumbria, probably around 644, after Oswald’s death at the Battle of Maserfield. Oswine was the son of Osric. His succession, perhaps the choice of the people of Deira, split the kingdom of Northumbria.

Oswiu held Bernicia to the north. After seven years of peaceful rule, Oswiu made war on Oswine. Oswine refused battle. He sent his army home from a place called Wilfaresdun, or Wilfar’s Hill, about ten Roman miles northwest of the village called Cataract, which is Catterick, and went with one trusted soldier, Tonhere, also called Tondhere, to the house of Earl Humwald, also called Hunwald, whom he thought a friend.

Humwald betrayed him. Oswiu’s commander Ethilwin, also called Ediluin, killed Oswine and the soldier. One reading of the hill places the killing at Diddersley Hill in North Yorkshire. The day was the thirteenth of the kalends of September, in the ninth year of Oswine’s reign.

In Anglo-Saxon custom the nearest kinsman of a murdered person was expected to seek vengeance or a payment, the wergild, for the killing. Oswine’s nearest kinsman was Oswiu’s own wife, and Oswiu himself was related to the dead king. To meet the justice that was thought to be owed, Oswiu founded Gilling Abbey, a monastery staffed in part by relatives of both families, and charged it with prayers for his own salvation and for Oswine’s soul. It was from that house, years later, that Oswine came to be claimed as a saint.

A twelfth-century homilist said he had died, if not for the faith of Christ, at least for the justice of Christ. His feast is 20 August. He was buried at Tynemouth, but the grave was later forgotten. It is said that the place was shown by an apparition to a monk named Edmund.

No building of the early monastery survives above ground. Fragments of Anglo-Saxon crosses have been found on or near the headland, and archaeologists have traced five rectangular timber buildings which may have belonged to it. One timber building, with a semi-circular west end, is earlier than the Norman church and may have been made for a religious purpose. Other rectangular timber buildings are of uncertain date and use, but they are almost certainly earlier than the Norman foundations.

In the winter of 1963 George Jobey directed an excavation north of the priory church. It found the early timber buildings of Iron Age and Roman native settlement, the pre-Conquest timbers, and later monastic and military structures. A sculptured stone found in that work was studied by R. J.

Cramp together with the pre-Conquest stones already known from Tynemouth. An incomplete grave-marker of medium-grained yellow sandstone, dated to the tenth century, came from the rubble core of a post-medieval building north of the north transept. Its surface is largely lost and no carving can be seen. A reused stone that had once been part of an Anglo-Saxon cross-shaft was found in a wall of the priory.

The same excavation recorded a sacristy, probably of the fourteenth century, a priest’s house, a byre, a lime kiln, and buildings put up after the suppression and associated with later military occupation. There is also a note, from that work, on the Tudor fortifications at the place called Spanish Battery.

Through the ninth century the monastery was a target of raids. Raids are recorded in 800, 832, 865, and 870. In 875 Vikings under Halfdan Ragnarsson sailed into the Tyne, sacked the monasteries at Tynemouth and Jarrow, and camped at Gateshead. That attack destroyed the monastery at Tynemouth.

A monastic community was not re-established for more than two hundred years.

In the middle of the eleventh century a chaplain of Tostig, earl of Northumbria, recorded a towered parish church of Saint Mary on the site. William the Conqueror destroyed that church during the Harrying of the North. In 1065 a corpse thought to be Saint Oswine was exhumed at the ruined monastery, in the church of Saint Mary on the headland, and the relics were moved to an honorable place. Another account says that in 1103 Ranulf Flambard, bishop of Durham, translated the remains from the chapel at Tynemouth, which had fallen into disrepair, to Saint Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire.

A further account places the ceremonial transfer on 20 August 1110, when the shrine was brought from Jarrow into the new church at Tynemouth, marking the completion of the east end while work on the nave went on.

In 1083 Turchil, a monk of Jarrow, refounded the monastery at Tynemouth. Jarrow itself had been refounded in 1074 and had become a subsidiary of the Benedictine priory of Durham, so Durham claimed jurisdiction over Tynemouth. In 1090 Robert de Mowbray, earl of Northumbria, granted his lands in and around Tynemouth, including the headland, to the abbey of Saint Albans. The new house became a priory, ruled by a prior but subordinate to the abbot of Saint Albans.

Durham and the local monks did not give up their claim, and the dispute with Saint Albans lasted for generations. Around 1090 building began on a church dedicated to Saint Oswine and the Virgin Mary. The shrine became a place of pilgrimage.

Robert de Mowbray was a Norman, earl of Northumbria from 1086 until 1095, and he died in 1125. He was the son of Roger de Mowbray and the nephew of Geoffrey de Montbray, bishop of Coutances. The family name is an English form of Montbray, in the Manche in Normandy. Aubrey de Coucy had been made earl in 1080 and, probably that same year, had resigned and returned to Normandy, losing his English lands.

He was not replaced until Robert’s appointment in 1086. In 1088 Robert joined his uncle in the rebellion against William II, called William Rufus, on behalf of Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy. Both were pardoned, and Robert remained earl. In November 1093 Malcolm III of Scotland, later called Malcolm Canmore, invaded Northumbria for the second time since 1091 and attacked Alnwick.

Malcolm had besieged Durham in May 1091. Rufus had led a large army north, Malcolm had retreated, and a truce had been made. The next year Rufus had strengthened his hold on Cumbria. The events that led to the 1093 invasion are unclear, but Malcolm brought an army into Northumbria and besieged Alnwick.

Mowbray did not have a force large enough to meet the Scots in open battle. He set out to relieve Alnwick and arrived on 13 November, Saint Brice’s Day. His knights caught the Scottish army by surprise and attacked before the ramparts. Malcolm and his son Edward were killed.

A spring near the place of their death was afterwards called Malcolm’s Spring, or Malcolm’s Well. The Scottish army, left without its leader, went back to Scotland. The bodies of Malcolm and Edward were buried at Tynemouth, and Malcolm became the third king buried on the headland, after Oswine and Osred II. Alexander I later arranged for his father’s body to be reburied at Dunfermline Abbey.

It is also said that it is uncertain whether that reburial took place. Malcolm’s queen, Margaret, died soon afterwards. The succession was disputed between Malcolm’s surviving sons and his younger brother Donald Bane. Donald became king, and a civil war followed as Malcolm’s sons tried to displace him.

The lack of a strong and undisputed king in Scotland suited William Rufus. A rough stone once marked the battlefield north of Alnwick. In 1774 it was replaced by Malcolm’s Cross, set up by the Duchess of Northumberland. This fight is the Battle of Alnwick (1093).

Earlier in 1093 Geoffrey de Montbray had died, and Mowbray had inherited his uncle’s large estates, becoming one of the most powerful barons in the kingdom. In 1095 he married Matilda de l’Aigle, daughter of Richer de l’Aigle and niece of Hugh d’Avranches, earl of Chester. That same year he joined a conspiracy to take the crown from the sons of the Conqueror and give it to Stephen of Aumale. Several barons seem to have been involved, but when the moment came most of them abandoned the plan, leaving Mowbray and William of Eu exposed.

The incident that brought the plot into the open was Mowbray’s seizure of four Norwegian vessels lying in the Tyne. The merchants complained to the king. Mowbray was ordered to the Curia Regis to explain himself. He did not attend, and he ignored further summonses.

William II led an army against him. Mowbray shut himself in Bamburgh Castle. The king besieged it and built a temporary siege castle beside it, called Malvoisin, or evil neighbour.

During that siege Mowbray left Bamburgh with a small force, about thirty followers, and was pursued. He took refuge in the stronghold at Tynemouth. This is the first evidence that the priory was also a fortification, a character it kept for the rest of its history. The defenders held out for six days.

Mowbray was wounded in the leg and captured, and he was taken back to Bamburgh, where his wife was still resisting. She surrendered when the besiegers threatened to blind her husband. Mowbray forfeited his estates and was imprisoned for life, at first in Windsor Castle. Florence of Worcester wrote that he grew old without offspring.

He was later allowed to become a monk at Saint Albans Abbey. His fellow conspirators were treated more harshly. William of Eu was castrated and blinded, and William of Aldrie was condemned to death. Orderic Vitalis described Mowbray as powerful, rich, bold, fierce in war, and haughty, a man of great stature, strong, swarthy, and hairy, daring and crafty, stern and grim, more given to thought than to speech, and scarcely ever smiling in conversation.

Pope Paschal II annulled Mowbray’s marriage to Matilda on the ground of consanguinity. Sometime after 1107 she married Nigel d’Aubigny, a kinsman of her former husband, who also received the Montbray lands that Robert had forfeited. The couple had no children. In 1118 Nigel divorced Matilda and married Gundred de Gournay, daughter of Gerard de Gournay and Edith de Warenne.

Their son Roger inherited the estates Robert had lost. On Henry I’s instruction Roger took the name Mowbray. The name continued, but not in Robert’s bloodline.

On 20 August 1110, as one account has it, the shrine of Saint Oswine was brought into the new church. In 1105 Queen Matilda gave the church of the Holy Trinity at Old Bewick to Tynemouth Priory. In 1150 a fire destroyed the thatched dormitory, the refectory, and the guesthouse. The dispute between Durham and Saint Albans was settled again in 1174, and Tynemouth remained a daughter house of Saint Albans.

At that time the priory received rights, privileges, and extensive lands, which Richard I confirmed in a charter in 1189. The estate became known as Tynemouthshire, or the Liberty of Tynemouth. The prior and convent drew rents, produce, and coal from it. That wealth paid for a long campaign of building from about 1190 to 1260.

The choir and presbytery were rebuilt, and the tall lancet windows of the east wall remain an example of early Gothic architecture. Baldwin, a goldsmith from Saint Albans, came to gild the shrine of Oswine. The nave was extended and given a new west front, of which the west front is a major survival from work of about 1220 to 1250. Windows in the refectory were repaired, and the chapter house was remodelled.

By 1260 the monastic buildings included the chapter house.

The standing remains show several phases. The first is the Norman priory of about 1090 to 1140, with alterations of 1140 to 1195 and 1195 to 1220, and major changes in the early thirteenth century. Further work belongs to the later thirteenth century, the fourteenth century, the fifteenth century, and the sixteenth century and after. Some foundations of the first phase were exposed by excavation.

At the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth the church was largely rebuilt. The claustral ranges stand south of the church and include the cloister, the chapter house, a communal hall, and a warming house. South of the cloister, the prior’s lodgings, with a hall and a chapel, survive almost to their full height. North of the church the outer court held two large yards and the buried remains of storehouses, barns, and stables.

In the early thirteenth century the prior developed North Shields as the priory’s port on the Tyne. That threatened the monopoly the burgesses of Newcastle had held over coal, wool, and fish carried and sold along the river. In 1270 the mayor of Newcastle led armed men and burned the new fishing village. The priory was also seeking independence from Saint Albans.

The abbot, together with the mayor and burgesses of Newcastle, persuaded Edward I to suspend Tynemouth’s trade and to revoke the Liberty in 1290. In 1294 the abbot of Saint Albans raided the priory and arrested the prior and his associates. Within about a decade the house was back in royal favour. Edward I and Margaret of France visited often and had a private oratory built for their use.

In return for the monks’ hospitality the Liberty was restored and trade was allowed to continue. Economic rivalry with Newcastle did not disappear, but the priory went on building. A Lady Chapel, described as new in 1336, and the Percy chapel of the mid-fifteenth century, were paid for out of that prosperity.

The reason the headland was fortified in stone belongs to the English invasion of Scotland (1296). Edward I was the fourth son’s father, a king who had suppressed baronial revolt in the 1260s, joined the Ninth Crusade, and conquered north Wales in the 1280s. After Alexander III of Scotland died in 1286, the crown passed to his granddaughter Margaret, then a small child. She died in 1290 on her way to Scotland.

The Guardians, fearing civil war, asked Edward I to judge the competitors for the throne, a process called the Great Cause. John Balliol, by primogeniture, was acknowledged king on 17 November 1292 and inaugurated at Scone on 30 November, Saint Andrew’s Day. Edward had required recognition as Lord Paramount of Scotland, the feudal superior of the realm, as the price of that arbitration.

By 1295 John and the Scottish Council of Twelve believed Edward meant to subjugate Scotland. He required appeals from cases decided by the guardians of the interregnum to be heard in England. In a case brought by Macduff, son of Malcolm, earl of Fife, Edward demanded that John appear in person before the English parliament. John refused and sent Henry, abbot of Arbroath, instead.

Edward also demanded that the Scottish magnates serve in his war against France. Scotland answered by seeking an alliance with Philip IV of France. Embassies went in October 1295, and the Treaty of Paris followed in February 1296.

When that alliance became known, Edward ordered an English army to muster at Newcastle upon Tyne in March 1296, at the river whose mouth Tynemouth commands. He also demanded the border castles of Roxburgh, Jedburgh, and Berwick. A Scottish army under John Comyn, earl of Buchan, invaded England on 26 March 1296 and attacked Carlisle. Robert de Brus, earl of Carrick and governor of Carlisle Castle, held the siege for four days.

The Scots withdrew after setting fire to the town. They had no siege engines. They also burned Tindale. From 8 April another Scottish force raided Northumberland, burned Corbridge and two monasteries, and besieged Harbottle Castle.

The English army crossed the Tweed on 28 March 1296 and stayed overnight at the priory of Coldstream, then marched on Berwick, then Scotland’s most important trading port. William the Hardy, lord of Douglas, commanded the garrison. Robert de Clifford led the English into the town. Contemporary accounts of the people killed in the sack range from 4,000 to 17,000.

Douglas then surrendered Berwick Castle on condition that his life and the lives of his garrison were spared. Edward stayed at Berwick for a month, strengthening its defences. On 5 April he received John’s renunciation of homage. The Scottish army was defeated at the Battle of Dunbar.

Edward subdued Scotland, forced John’s surrender, and returned to England with the Scottish regalia and many of the nobility as prisoners.

In that year of invasion the prior of Tynemouth received a royal licence to crenellate. A high perimeter wall with towers let soldiers defend the priory in war and in times of lawlessness. The curtain walls were raised on an earth embankment across the neck of the promontory. That bank may go back to the Norman defences, or to the late Iron Age settlement.

The walls once encircled the whole monastery. They were strengthened by Whitley Tower, overlooking King Edward’s Bay, and by East Mount Tower, towards Prior’s Haven. The stone circuit extended defences that had already existed as early as the reign of Henry II. The ever-present chance of war with Scotland, the exposure of Northumberland to border raids, and the value of the Tyne as a base for English campaigns were the reasons for the grant.

Edward II was born on 25 April 1284 and died on 21 September 1327. He is also called Edward of Caernarfon. He was king of England from 1307 until he was deposed in January 1327. He was the fourth son of Edward I and of Eleanor, countess of Ponthieu, who came from the Castilian royal family.

Edward I was king of England, lord of Ireland, and ruler of Gascony as a vassal of the king of France. Edward became heir after the death of his elder brother Alphonso. From 1300 he went with his father on campaigns in Scotland, and in 1306 he was knighted at Westminster Abbey. He succeeded in 1307.

In 1308 he married Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France, as part of a long effort to ease the tension between the English and French crowns.

Piers Gaveston had joined Edward’s household in 1300. Whether they were friends, lovers, or sworn brothers is not certain. Gaveston’s arrogance, and his power as the king’s favourite, angered the barons and the French royal family, and Edward was forced to exile him. When Gaveston returned, the barons pressed Edward into the Ordinances of 1311.

The barons then banished Gaveston again. Edward revoked the reforms and recalled him. Led by the king’s cousin Thomas, second earl of Lancaster, a group of barons seized Gaveston and executed him in 1312. Years of armed confrontation followed.

In 1312 Edward II took refuge at Tynemouth Castle with Gaveston, then fled by sea to Scarborough Castle despite the pleas of his wife, Isabella. English forces were pushed back in Scotland. At the Battle of Bannockburn, on 23 and 24 June 1314, Robert the Bruce defeated Edward II in a decisive battle of the First War of Scottish Independence. The war had begun in 1296.

Edward I had won at Dunbar and at the capture of Berwick, and John Balliol had been removed, but the Scots had beaten the English at Stirling Bridge in 1297, and Edward I had answered at Falkirk in 1298. By 1304 Scotland had been conquered. In 1306 Robert the Bruce seized the kingship. In 1313 he demanded that everyone still loyal to the ousted John Balliol acknowledge him or lose their lands.

Stirling Castle, a royal fortress held by the English, was under Scottish siege. Edward II gathered what was called the largest army ever to invade Scotland, summoning 25,000 infantry and 2,000 horses from England, Ireland, and Wales, against about 6,000 Scots.

Bruce divided his army into four schiltrons. He commanded one. His brother Edward Bruce commanded another. His nephew Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray, commanded a third.

Sir James Douglas and the young Walter the Steward commanded the fourth together. Angus Og Macdonald, lord of the Isles, brought Islesmen, including galloglass, and Bruce gave them the place of honour beside him, with the men of Carrick and Argyll. On the first day Bruce killed Sir Henry de Bohun, and the English withdrew. That night Sir Alexander Seton, a Scot serving with Edward, defected and told Bruce that English morale was low and that the Scots could win.

Bruce attacked the next day and used the schiltrons as offensive units, which William Wallace had not done. The Earl of Gloucester and Sir Robert Clifford were killed. The Earl of Hereford was captured. The victory was a turning point.

Fourteen years later the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton restored Scottish independence in law. After Bannockburn, Robert the Bruce attacked Tynemouth. A garrison of eighty men-at-arms held the priory. In 1318 the king appointed a custodian of the priory fortifications.

Famine followed Bannockburn, and criticism of Edward II grew. The Despenser family, and especially Hugh Despenser the Younger, became close advisers. In 1321 Lancaster and many barons seized the Despensers’ lands and forced the king to exile them. Edward then led a short campaign, captured Lancaster, and had him executed.

Edward and the Despensers revoked the Ordinances of 1311, executed enemies, and confiscated estates. Unable to make progress in Scotland, Edward at last signed a truce with Robert. Opposition grew. In 1325 Isabella was sent to France to negotiate a peace and refused to return.

She allied with the exiled Roger Mortimer and invaded England with a small army in 1326. The regime collapsed. Edward fled into Wales and was captured in November. In January 1327 he gave up the crown to his son, Edward III.

He died at Berkeley Castle on 21 September, probably murdered on the orders of the new regime. Contemporaries condemned his failures in Scotland and the oppression of his later years. Some nineteenth-century writers argued that the growth of parliament under him was, over the longer term, a gain for England. Argument has continued over whether he was a lazy and incompetent king or a reluctant and unsuccessful one.

His tie to Gaveston later inspired Christopher Marlowe’s play of 1592, and many later plays, films, and novels, often focused on whether the two men were lovers.

Adam FitzRoy was an illegitimate son of Edward II. His mother is unknown. He is thought to have been born about 1307, and the payments made for him suggest a birth somewhere between about 1303 and 1309, so that he was in his teens in 1322. In the king’s wardrobe account for that year he is named Ade filio domini Regis bastardo, Adam, bastard son of the lord king.

Between 6 June and 18 September 1322 he was given thirteen pounds and twenty-two pence, in five instalments, to buy equipment and other necessaries for Edward’s Scottish campaign that autumn. The money was paid either to Adam or to his tutor, Hugh Chastilloun. He accompanied his father and died on 18 September 1322, of causes that are not recorded. He was buried at Tynemouth Priory on 30 September 1322, and his father paid for a silk cloth worked with gold thread to be laid over the body.

No other reference to him has been found. Medieval records sometimes used the phrase son of the king loosely, for a ward or a royal dependent, and it has been thought possible, though unlikely, that Adam was the bastard son of an earlier king. As the wardrobe account stands, he is the son of Edward II, and Tynemouth is the place of his burial.

From the thirteenth century it was common for the abbots of Saint Albans to send difficult monks to Tynemouth as a punishment. The headland seemed cold and comfortless beside their southern abbey. A letter of the mid-fourteenth century, perhaps from one of those exiles, is the first known written description of the priory. It says the house sat on the top of a high rock, with the sea on every side but one, and that the approach ran through a gate cut in the rock, so narrow that a cart could hardly pass.

Waves broke day and night and undermined the cliff. Thick sea fog wrapped the place in gloom. The writer speaks of dim eyes, hoarse voices, and sore throats, of frequent shipwrecks, and of grey birds that nested in the rocks and fed on the drowned, their cry a sign of a coming storm. In spring the sea air blighted the blossom of stunted fruit trees.

The same letter says the church was of wondrous beauty and lately completed, and that within it the body of the martyr Oswine lay in a silver shrine decorated with gold and jewels. It says he protected murderers, thieves, and seditious people who fled to him, and changed their punishment to exile, and that he healed people no doctor could cure. The monks, the letter says, were well supplied with fish, of which they grew tired. The church of that description is the Lady Chapel, built before 1336.

The Percy chapel, also called the Percy Chantry, was added in the middle of the fifteenth century. It is a small vaulted chapel at the east end, restored in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its elaborate vault, crowded with carved saints, and its rose window survive, and it is the only roofed part of the priory church.

The priors, as a surviving list records them, begin with Remigius in 1129 and Germanus in 1148, who was elected abbot of Selby in 1153. Ruelendus, Geoffrey, Henry, Robert, and Gilbert appear without firm dates. Henry and Robert are named in the Belvoir obituary as priors of Tynemouth, and the lack of surnames makes an early date likely. Akarius was prior before 1189, later prior of Saint Albans, and abbot of Peterborough in 1200.

He died in 1210. Hugh Gubiun is recorded about 1200. Ralph Gubiun, previously prior of Binham, served from 1208 to about 1217, resigned, retired to Saint Albans, and died on 4 May 1223. William de Bedford’s priorship ended in 1224, when he was elected prior of Worcester and admitted on 21 November.

He died on 29 October 1242. A second Germanus is recorded from 1227, and Walter de Bolum from 1233. Walter died on 2 January 1244. Richard de Parco, also called Rufus of Winchelcombe, previously prior of Binham from 1226, served from 1244 until his death on 25 April 1252.

Then come Ralph de Dunham from 1252, William de Horton about 1265, Adam de Maperteshall from 1273, William Bernard from 1279, and Simon de Walden from 1280. Adam de Tewing is recorded from 1295, Simon de Walden again from 1305, Simon de Taunton from 1311, and Richard de Tewing from 1315. Thomas de la Mare was prior from 1340, and Clement de Whethamstede from 1349. John Macrell of Whethamstede, from 1393, was buried at Tynemouth.

Thomas Barton is recorded from 1419, John Langton from 1450, Nicholas Boston from 1478, William Dixwell from 1480, and Nicholas Boston again about 1481. John Bensted served from 1503, John Stonewell from 1512, Thomas Gardiner from 1528, and Robert Blakeney from 1537.

In February 1390, during a renewed war with Scotland, Richard II, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, all paid large sums toward Tynemouth’s defences. Construction of a great gatehouse began in the middle of the embankment and was complete by the early fifteenth century. The gatehouse is also described as a fourteenth-century building. It was as strong as the gate of any castle, and it is the only part of the medieval defences to survive intact.

The visit to the headland still passes through it. Much of the wall circuit is given as 3,200 feet, about 975 metres. The promontory was once entirely enclosed, but the north and east walls fell into the sea, and most of the south wall was demolished. The west wall, and a section of the south wall with its original wall walk, remain in good condition.

Tynemouth was not an alien priory. Its mother house was the English abbey of Saint Albans. Alien cells were a different kind of Benedictine dependence, and their fate shows what Tynemouth escaped. Edith Weston Priory was a small alien house of Benedictine monks at Edith Weston in Rutland.

Its French parent, the abbey of Saint-Georges at Boscherville, was founded about 1050 by Ralf de Tanquerville, chamberlain to William the Conqueror. By 1114 his son William gave the church and manor of Edith Weston, and a small cell was set up to collect the rents and to pray for the founder’s soul. William founded Avebury Priory in Wiltshire at about the same time, and that was the other English cell of the same house. Like other alien priories, Edith Weston Priory passed under the Crown, with its revenues, whenever England was at war with France, and it was during one of those periods that the cell closed.

The last known prior is recorded in 1361, and by 1394 the church and manor had been sold to Saint Anne’s Priory at Coventry. Nikolaus Pevsner was dismissive, and said that Brooke Priory was the only monastery in Rutland because Edith Weston hardly counted as one. The earthworks probably now lie under Rutland Water. Only a few priors are known: John from 1295 to 1298, Hugh de Altifago from 1324 to 1326, Robert de Cunebaud from 1339 to 1355, William de Beauvey in 1355, Robert in 1361, and John in 1375 and 1379.

Robert de Cunebaud was remembered as a delinquent, and his abuses were used to justify a wide suspicion of alien cells. Tynemouth’s Liberty could be revoked by the king, and it was, but war with France did not by itself hand the house to the Crown.

In the early sixteenth century Tynemouth at last gained independence from Saint Albans. Prior John Stonewell obtained it through Thomas Wolsey, the most powerful minister of Henry VIII. The privilege did not last. The dissolution of the monasteries, between 1536 and 1541, was the set of legal and administrative acts by which Henry VIII disbanded the Catholic monasteries, priories, convents, and friaries of England, Wales, and Ireland, seized their wealth, disposed of their assets, destroyed buildings and relics, dispersed or destroyed libraries, and provided for their former people.

The policy was first imagined as a way to raise the regular income of the Crown. Much of the property was later sold to pay for Henry’s wars in the 1540s. He acted under the Act of Supremacy of 1534, which made him Supreme Head of the Church in England, after the break with papal authority in the previous year. Two acts of parliament carried the suppressions, the first in 1535 and the second in 1539.

Nearly nine hundred religious houses stood in England, about two hundred and sixty of them for monks, three hundred for regular canons, one hundred and forty-two nunneries, and one hundred and eighty-three friaries. About twelve thousand people lived in them: four thousand monks, three thousand canons, three thousand friars, and two thousand nuns. If the adult male population was about five hundred thousand, one adult man in fifty was in religious orders. Most of those houses were not survivors of the Anglo-Saxon church.

They belonged to the wave of monastic foundation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. By the sixteenth century religious houses controlled appointment to about two fifths of the parish benefices in England, took about half of all ecclesiastical income, and owned about a quarter of the landed wealth of the kingdom.

Battle Abbey shows that same end, one year before Tynemouth. It is a Benedictine abbey at Battle in East Sussex, built on the site of the Battle of Hastings and dedicated to Saint Martin of Tours. William the Conqueror had vowed to build a monastery if he won. In 1070 Pope Alexander II ordered the Normans to do penance for the killing done in the conquest, and William’s vow placed the high altar where King Harold was said to have fallen on Saturday 14 October 1066.

William began the work and died before it was finished. The church was completed about 1094 and consecrated under his son William II, who presented his father’s sword and coronation robes there. The first monks came from the Benedictine abbey of Marmoutier. The house was dedicated to the Holy Trinity, Saint Mary, and Saint Martin.

It was planned for one hundred and forty monks, though no more than sixty lived there at one time. William I had exempted the church of Saint Martin of Battle from all episcopal jurisdiction, putting it on a level with Canterbury. The abbey held sanctuary, treasure trove, free warren, and the right of inquest, and its inmates and tenants were exempt from episcopal and secular jurisdiction. Its mitred abbot later sat in parliament and had the privilege of pardoning any criminal he met on the way to execution.

Walter de Luci became abbot in 1139. The Roll of Battle Abbey, a list of those said to have come with William from Normandy, was kept there, and later ages added names that were not authentic. The church was remodelled in the late thirteenth century. In May 1538, at the suppression, seventeen monks were in residence.

They received pensions, among them Abbot John Hamond, Prior Richard Salesherst, and the monks John Henfelde, William Ambrose, Henry Sinden, Thomas Bede, and Thomas Levett. Henry VIII gave the abbey and much of its land to his friend Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the Horse, who demolished the church and parts of the cloister and turned the abbot’s lodging into a country house.

In January 1539 Tynemouth fell in the same suppression. All the priory’s lands and possessions were surrendered to the king. The shrine of Saint Oswine was destroyed. Monastic life on the headland ended.

The castle stayed in royal hands because of its position. Only a few years later Henry VIII planned to improve the fortifications and to use the former priory as a supply base for war in Scotland. That war grew out of his attempt to force a marriage between his son Edward, then six, and the infant Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. In 1544 the Earl of Hertford assembled a fleet at Tynemouth and carried English soldiers to Scotland.

The aim was destruction enough to force the marriage, and also, before Henry’s planned expedition to France, to leave England safer from Scottish attack. Edinburgh was sacked and burned, and so were many Scottish towns and villages, as the army returned overland.

Guns already on the headland did not command the river mouth, because a low hill stood between them and the water. In 1545 Sir Richard Lee and the Italian engineer Gian Tommaso Scala prepared a plan for a new line of defence. Antonio da Bergamo also advised on the works. The line was to begin west of the gatehouse and run south to include the low hill, so that guns could fire directly on the mouth of the Tyne.

The hill became Spanish Battery, a name said to recall Henry’s Spanish mercenaries. By July 1545 a thousand workmen had almost finished the new fortifications, and there were plans for four hundred of them to serve as a temporary garrison, because regular soldiers were scarce while Henry campaigned in France. The finished defences departed from the plan but did the work intended, and a drawing of 1582 shows them. A governor with a small garrison commanded the fortress and was charged with the security of the Tyne and of Newcastle.

The medieval walls were given new gunports. The economic value of Newcastle kept the place important.

In 1564 Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland, was born at the castle, while his father, the eighth earl, was guardian of it. For some time a navigation light, a coal brazier, was kept on a turret at the east end of the priory church. A record of 1582 speaks of keeping a continual light in the night season at the east end of the church of Tynemouth Castle, for the safeguard of ships passing that coast. As governor, the eighth earl was responsible for the light, and he and his successors in the office were entitled to dues from passing ships.

The stairs to the turret collapsed in 1559, and the fire could not be lit. In May 1594 George Selby and Thomas Power, lieutenant of Tynemouth Castle, captured two fugitives from the court of Anne of Denmark who had stolen some of her jewels. Power held Jacob Kroger, a German goldsmith, and Guillaume Martyn, a French stableman, at Tynemouth for five weeks, then returned them to Edinburgh for summary trial and execution.

William Selby became keeper of the castle in December 1606, succeeding Sir Henry Widdrington. An inventory was made of the artillery. Some muskets and halberds in the great chamber and the armoury were claimed for the earl of Northumberland. Selby wrote that the house or lodging was uninhabitable and that the guns were not mounted.

His duties included keeping a light for shipping.

During the English Civil War, the series of wars and political struggles between Royalists and Parliamentarians in England from 1642 to 1651, Newcastle and Tynemouth were among the few important ports held for the king. They mattered because they could deny coal to Parliament. The English Civil War was part of the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms, from 1639 to 1653. The first war was fought mainly over the balance of power between Parliament and Charles I, and it ended in June 1646 with the king in custody and the Royalists defeated.

Most of those who had gone to war in 1642 had wanted Parliament to share in government, not to abolish the monarchy. Charles’s refusal to concede produced a deadlock. Fear of radicals in the New Model Army, among them Oliver Cromwell, helped bring moderate Parliamentarians and Royalists together, with support from the Covenanter Scots. Royalist defeat in the second war, in 1648, led to the execution of Charles I in January 1649 and to the Commonwealth.

In 1650 Charles II was crowned king of Scots in return for agreeing to a Presbyterian church in both kingdoms. The war that followed ended with a Parliamentarian victory at Worcester on 3 September 1651. The arrangement was dissolved at the Restoration in 1660. The words Cavalier and Roundhead, for the two sides, began as insults.

The wars also multiplied pamphlets and newsbooks.

At Tynemouth the castle and Spanish Battery were heavily fortified, and their guns controlled the river until July 1644. Newcastle and Tynemouth were then surrendered to Parliament after the Battle of Marston Moor, when the Royalist cause in the north collapsed. After the Restoration of Charles II, who reigned from 1660 to 1685, Tynemouth continued as a garrison. Its buildings were concentrated in the outer court, north of the church, and included new barracks and a house built by the governor, Colonel Edward Villiers, with stone and lead taken from demolished priory buildings.

The church was used to store gunpowder. Villiers’s house had servants’ quarters, stables, a brewhouse, barns, and stores. There was a house for the master gunner. The gatehouse lodged the soldiers.

A lighthouse stood near the cliff by 1677. In 1665 Villiers had already set a lighthouse on the headland, built with stone from the priory. It was rebuilt in 1775. Like the old turret fire, it was at first coal-fired.

An Act of 1802, given royal assent on 4 May, provided for an oil-fired Argand light. In 1841 the governor, William Fowke, sold the lighthouse to Trinity House in London. When a lighthouse was established at Souter Point in 1871, the Tynemouth light was changed from a revolving white beam to a revolving red one. It worked until 1898, when Saint Mary’s lighthouse at Whitley Bay replaced it, and the castle lighthouse was demolished.

Tynemouth’s military role declined from 1672, when Clifford’s Fort was built on the riverside, but a master gunner remained on the headland through the eighteenth century, and guns were mounted there during successive invasion scares. From 1793, in the French Revolutionary War and then the Napoleonic War, an ordnance depot inside the castle walls supplied the troops of Durham and Northumberland. New barracks were built for one hundred and forty-six part-time artillerymen, and gun platforms were remade on each side of the gatehouse against an attack from the land. The depot closed at the end of the war in 1815, but a master gunner still looked after the guns and a limited store of equipment.

New threats in the 1840s and 1850s, the growth of shipbuilding, the export of coal, and the opening of Armstrong’s armament factory at Elswick in 1859, brought a fresh programme of defence. From 1859 the headland had twenty guns, a new gunpowder magazine, barracks, and stores. By the 1880s new piers at the mouth of the Tyne had blocked the field of fire from Clifford’s Fort at river level, so the castle and Spanish Battery again became responsible for the defence of the river. Buildings for modern breech-loading guns were begun in 1893.

By 1905 the castle had two 6-inch guns, one 9.2-inch gun, and two 12-pounder guns, with more at Spanish Battery. They were meant to protect the river mouth and its industries from long-range fire by large warships and from fast raids by small torpedo boats. Concrete emplacements and underground magazines stood along the eastern edge of the headland, with command buildings behind them. Barracks grew again inside the old priory walls, and the medieval gatehouse was still in use.

The defences included the headquarters of an army Fire Command that controlled the guns and searchlights covering the Tyne and the coast to the north and south in the First and Second World Wars.

At the end of the nineteenth century the castle was also used as a barracks, and several new buildings were added. In 1930, after a fire, the Office of Works took the castle over and removed many of the modern additions. The headland was an important coastal-defence post in the Second World War, covering the mouth of the Tyne, and it suffered heavy air raids in 1941. By 1945 it was filled with military buildings, many of them used until 1956, when the army left.

Afterwards many of those structures were cleared so that the priory and the castle could be shown as a historic monument. The Warrant Officer’s house and the gun emplacements along the cliff were left as the visible trace of the twentieth-century fortress. A 6-inch Mark XXIII naval gun now on the site is a modern installation standing in for an earlier Mark VII. Restored parts of the coastal batteries, including a guardroom and the main armoury, show how munitions were handled and protected.

A coastguard station built in 1980 and opened by Prince Charles was closed in 2001.

An excavation in 1980, in the outer court, uncovered a large aisled barn known from documents to have been the monastic wheat barn. In the same area were the remains of the large house Colonel Edward Villiers built about 1672 and which was demolished in 1902. By 1916 that ground had been reused as the control centre for the coastal batteries of the First World War. The burial ground among the ruins holds tombstones of Tynemouth mariners.

The cult of Saint Oswine did not end with the shrine. He is co-patron, with Our Lady, of the Catholic parish of Tynemouth, whose church stands at the end of Front Street, not far from the ruins, and a church at Wylam, built in 1886, is dedicated to him. The choir, the chapel, and the presbytery of the priory church are at present closed for essential maintenance. What remains in use as a monument is the gatehouse, the ruined east end with its lancets, the Percy Chantry when the works allow it, the prior’s lodging, the stretches of curtain wall, and the gun positions above the cliff.

The headland’s long use was always the same fact of geography. Whoever held the rock held the mouth of the Tyne.