Monastic site
The Anglo-Saxon monastery of St Paul's, Jarrow, was founded in 681/2 AD and St Paul's Church dedicated in 685 AD. The monastery was founded by a Northumbrian nobleman, Benedict Biscop, who had less than a decade earlier, in 674 AD, founded St Peter's in Wearmouth (now Monkwearmouth, a district of Sunderland). Both houses were founded on large land grants from King Ecgfrith of Northumbria. Bede tells us that St Paul's was "built on the understanding that the two houses should be bound together by the one spirit of peace and harmony" (Lives of the Abbots) and that they functioned as a single monastery: "the monastery of the apostles St Peter and St Paul, one part of which stands at the mouth of the river Wear and the other part near the river Tyne in a place called Jarrow" (Ecclesiastical History, V.21). The seven-year-old Bede entered St Peter's in 680 AD and remained in the twin monastery until his death in 735 AD. His writings, particularly The Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow and The Ecclesiastical History of the English People give a unique insight into life in the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in the late 7th and early 8th centuries.
The founder of the monastery, Benedict Biscop, was well travelled. He journeyed three times to Rome before beginning to build St Peter's, and undertook a further three journeys bringing back books and equipment for his monasteries. He visited monasteries and experienced monastic life across Anglo-Saxon England and in France and Italy, including two years spent living the monastic life at the monastery of St Honorat, Lérins. He drew on these experiences for his own foundation, putting together a rule based on the best rules he had seen at 17 different monasteries, and bringing the Arch-Cantor of St Peter's in Rome to teach his monks to sing the Roman chant as it was sung in Rome. He built his monasteries "in the Roman style he had always loved so much" (Bede, Lives of the Abbots), bringing stonemasons and glaziers from Gaul so that he could have stone buildings with plain and coloured window-glass. At this time the Anglo-Saxon building tradition was to build in timber; the monasteries of St Peter's and St Paul's were amongst the first stone buildings in Northumbria since the days of the Roman empire, and would have created an impressive statement in the landscape.
Excavations at both sites were undertaken in the 1960s and 70s under the direction of Professor Rosemary Cramp of Durham University. These revealed the central buildings of each site. The layout of the Anglo-Saxon buildings at St Paul's have been marked out and can be seen on site. The site is owned by the Church of England, is in the guardianship of English Heritage, and is managed by Bede's World and can be visited free of charge during museum opening hours.
Amongst the finds were finely carved stone and large quantities of coloured window glass. These survivals testify to the richness of the art and architecture employed by Benedict Biscop to glorify God, and represent a fraction of what could have been seen at the monastery in the early 8th century. We know from Bede that fine textiles, religious pictures, and vast quantities of books were also obtained for the monastery by Benedict Biscop and his successor Ceolfrith, but these would not survive in the ground. Finds from the site of St Paul's monastery - including styli, carved stone, coloured window-glass, imported pottery and Anglo-Saxon coins - and a reconstruction model of the monastery in the early 8th century based on the evidence from the excavations are displayed in the Age of Bede exhibition at Bede's World.
No detailed accounts of Wearmouth-Jarrow dating from after Bede's death in 735 survive. A few letters, and an account of Bede's death written by his pupil Cuthbert, show that life carried on through the 8th century. Archaeological evidence suggests that in the later 9th century, organised monastic life was disrupted or discontinued and at some time between the later 9th and the later 11th centuries the buildings were badly burnt. At about this time, Viking raiders were establishing a kingdom based around York, and the Community of St Cuthbert abandoned their monastery at Lindisfarne because of the Viking threat, so this perhaps explains the archaeological evidence. Alternatively, Scottish raiders could have attacked the monastery.
Eventually pagan Scandinavian settlers in Northumbria accepted Christianity, allowing the Community of St Cuthbert to establish a monastery at Chester-le-Street in 883 and giving them substantial lands between the rivers Tyne and Wear - this presumably included the estate of St Paul's, Jarrow. In 995 the Community moved to Durham. According to the chronicler Symeon of Durham, a member of the Durham community, Alfred Westou, was in the habit of visiting Jarrow in the 1020s on the anniversary of Bede's death and on one of these occasions removed Bede's bones from Jarrow to put in St Cuthbert's coffin at Durham.
In the 1070s, Aldwin, prior of Winchcombe, travelled north with two monks from Evesham to visit the sites of the Northumbrian saints described by Bede. Walcher, Bishop of Durham, gave them the site of St Paul's monastery, "the unroofed walls of which were alone standing, and they exhibited scarce any vestige of their ancient dignity" (Symeon of Durham, History of the Church of Durham. They set about rebuilding the monastery to a Benedictine layout. The ruins of the medieval monastery can be visited free of charge during normal museum opening hours. The monastery continued to function as a small cell dependant on Durham Cathedral, until it was dissolved by Henry VIII. The monastic estates were then sold, although St Paul's Church continued in use as the parish church of Jarrow. Although significant architecturally as one of the first Anglo-Norman monasteries in Northumbria, the medieval monastery of St Paul's never achieved the European-wide significance of the Anglo-Saxon monastery evident from the works of Bede.
