Tynemouth Castle and Priory

The monastery on the promontory was probably founded by one of the Anglian kings of Northumbria; medieval tradition places it in the mid-7th century, when the Deiran king Oswine was buried here by his murderer, the Bernician king Oswiu, who established the convent in penance. Bede mentions an abbey on the site, and by 792 it was of enough standing to take the body of the Northumbrian king Osred II. Viking raiders came through the 9th century until the monastery was destroyed in 875; fragments of Anglo-Saxon crosses survive from it. A towered parish church of St Mary, recorded here in the mid-11th century by a chaplain of Tostig, Earl of Northumbria, was destroyed by William the Conqueror in the Harrying of the North.

In 1083 Turchil, a monk of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, itself a daughter cell of Durham, refounded the monastery; seven years later Robert de Mowbray, Earl of Northumbria, granted his lands in and around Tynemouth to St Albans Abbey instead, and the two houses fell into a long quarrel over jurisdiction. Work began soon after on a new church dedicated to the Virgin and to St Oswine, whose shrine drew pilgrims. Malcolm III of Scotland, killed at the Battle of Alnwick in 1093, became the third king buried here, until Alexander I had his father's body moved to Dunfermline Abbey.

Mowbray revolted against William II in 1095. When the king besieged the Earl's stronghold at Bamburgh, Mowbray and thirty followers took refuge at Tynemouth and held out six days before they were captured, which suggests the monastery was already defended, perhaps by a motte-and-bailey castle. On 20 August 1110 Oswine's shrine was carried from Jarrow into the new church, its east end complete.

The quarrel with Durham was settled in 1174, Tynemouth remaining a daughter cell of St Albans, and its rights and lands were confirmed by Richard I in 1189. The estate became known as Tynemouthshire, or the Liberty of Tynemouth, and its rents, produce and coal paid for seventy years of building from 1190, in which the choir and presbytery were rebuilt and Oswine's shrine gilded by a St Albans goldsmith named Baldwin.

In the early 13th century the prior developed North Shields as the priory's port, cutting across Newcastle's monopoly on the coal, wool and fish carried on the river; in 1270 the mayor of Newcastle led armed men down and burnt the young village to the ground. Newcastle and the abbot of St Albans together persuaded Edward I to suspend Tynemouth's trade and revoke the Liberty in 1290. The Scottish war gave it back: when Edward I invaded in 1296 the prior received a royal licence to crenellate, and curtain walls rose on the earth embankment across the neck of the promontory. The Liberty was restored in thanks for the monks' hospitality.

In 1312 Edward II sheltered at Tynemouth with his unpopular favourite Piers Gaveston, then took ship for Scarborough despite the pleas of his wife Isabella. Two years later, fresh from his victory at Bannockburn, Robert the Bruce attacked Tynemouth and was held off by a garrison of eighty men-at-arms. In February 1390 Richard II, John of Gaunt and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, all paid large sums towards Tynemouth's defences, and a gatehouse was begun on the embankment, complete by the early 15th century.

Tynemouth won independence from St Albans in the early 16th century, granted by Thomas Wolsey, and lost everything shortly after: in January 1539 Henry VIII suppressed the priory, seized the monastic lands and destroyed St Oswine's shrine. The castle stayed in royal hands for its command of the river mouth. New artillery fortifications were built from 1545 on the advice of Sir Richard Lee and the Italian engineers Gian Tommaso Scala and Antonio da Bergamo, and gunports were cut into the medieval walls. Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, was born here in 1564 while his father the 8th Earl was guardian.

The governor's duties included the coal-fired light kept burning on a turret at the east end of the priory church, for which the 8th Earl and his successors drew dues from passing ships. William Selby, keeper from December 1606, found the lodging uninhabitable and the guns unmounted. In 1665 Colonel Villiers built a lighthouse on the headland out of priory stone. The site was a barracks by the end of the 19th century, passed to the Office of Works in 1930 after a fire, and in the Second World War covered the mouth of the Tyne as a coastal battery, taking heavy air raids in 1941; the army left in 1956.