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History of Newcastle Upon Tyne


With evidence of early settlement dating to 5000 BC, the Newcastle region has thousands of years of particularly colourful history and stories to tell.

When the Romans arrived, in 43AD, they found that Britain was a land of tribes and hill forts and that the Newcastle region was part of the territory of the Brigantes, a tribe led by a woman called Cartimandua.

The Romans held onto Britain until 410AD when the Goths of the east sacked Rome. At that point its troops were permanently withdrawn from Britain to defend the collapsing empire.

Britons were left at the mercy of the invading Anglo-Saxons. From 430AD to 600AD Saxons from Germany colonised the south of England while Angles or Anglians from southern Denmark colonised the north and east.

Northumbria, ‘North of the Humber’ was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom formed by merging Bernicia, north of the Tees, with Deira to the south. Northumbria's first two kings were a Bernician called Aethelfrith and a Deiran called Edwin. Aethelfrith was a pagan, but Edwin became the North's first Christian king after baptism at York in 627AD.

In the late 8th Century, Northumbria, plagued by weak leadership, collapsed into a state of anarchy caused in part by rivalry between the royal houses of Deira and Bernicia. From 737AD to 806AD, Northumbria had ten kings: three were murdered, five were expelled and two retired to become monks. This instability may well have encouraged the first Viking raiders to attack the Northumbrian coast from 793AD.

Most people have heard of the Norman Conquest of 1066, but the Danish conquest of 866 made just as great an impact on the North. The Danes brought cultural, linguistic and political changes to the North and made southern Northumbria the Danish Kingdom of York which they divided into three 'ridings'. In Northern England, the Danes settled mainly in Yorkshire while the land north of the Tees remained largely Anglo-Saxon.

The New Castle, which gave the city its name, was constructed by the Normans in1080. Its keep and one of its gates still exist, though they are oddly separated from each other by nineteenth-century railway tracks. The rest of the castle was also demolished to make way for the line. Prior to the Norman Conquest the town was known as Monkchester. Pilgrims came to the Holy Well of Jesus' Mount, now part of Jesmond. One of the biggest shopping streets, Pilgrim Street, is so-called because of the popularity of the well.

Newcastle's development as a major city owed much to its central role in the export of coal from the Northumberland coalfield - the phrase ‘carrying coals to Newcastle’ proverbially denotes the act of bringing a particular commodity to a locality that has more than enough of it already. In the nineteenth century, shipbuilding and heavy engineering were central to the city's prosperity; it was the powerhouse of the nation's prosperity.

Heavy industries declined in the second half of the twentieth century with office, retail, tourism and art now the city's staples.