Early Anglo-Saxon History Of Sunderland - Tyne And Wear

Sunderland, Tyne and Wear is a large, industrial city on the NE coast of England. It is situated at the mouth of the River Wear, and is very well known as a ship building and coal mining center. This article describes two settlements which predate the city of Sunderland itself by many centuries, but are now absorbed into the modern city.

Human settlement within the Sunderland city limits was recorded a long time before the name Sunderland itself. Sunderland was at first a small village near the mouth of the Wear. This little fishing village was granted a charter in 1179, several hundred years after Monkwearmouth and Bishopwearmouth had first appeared in history.

The oldest recorded habitation in the area is Monkwearmouth. A monastery was founded here in 674. The founder was an Anglo-Saxon, a nobleman by the name of Benedict Biscop. Biscop has received the lands to the north of the River Wear in a grant from the local ruler, King Ecgfrith, King of Northumbria. The monastery was called the Wearmouth-Jarrow monastery or St. Peter’s. The location gained the name Monkwearmouth.

St. Peter’s was one of the major monasteries of its day, and at that time monasteries were the most important source of learning in England. The library at St. Peter’s held more than 300 volumes. Monks at the monastery made copies of St. Jerome’s Bible (the Vulgate Bible), and one of those copies still exists. It is called the Codex Amiatinus, and it is the oldest copy of the Vulgate (Latin) Bible still existing. The Codex was one of three copies. It was sent to Rome, to Pope Gregory II. It is now in Florence in the Laurentian Library.

Saint Bede, or the Venerable Bede, was a monk at St.Peter’s. It was here that he wrote “The Ecclesiastical History of The English People”, for which master work he is now known as “The Father of English History”.

Monkwearmouth suffered from the Viking raids along the English coast, and it had to be abandoned some time in the ninth century. However in 930 the opposite bank of the river Wear saw new developments. The king, Athelstan, had granted these territories to the local bishop, the Bishop of Durham. The town or village which grew up here was accordingly called Bishopwearmouth.

In 1179 Hugh Pudsey was Bishop of Durham. He awarded a charter to a small fishing village named Sunderland, which was inside the boundaries of the parish of Bishopwearmouth. Over the centuries Sunderland became an important port and city, with ship building, coal mining and salt panning industries. It swallowed up its older neighbors Bishopwearmouth and Monkwearmouth.

Today St. Michael’s Church now known as Sunderland Minster is the old Bishopwearmouth Parish Church, and St. Peter’s Church, Monkwearmouth contains parts dating from the original monastery of 674.