Sunderland
Sunderland is a port city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England. It is a port at the mouth of the River Wear on the North Sea, approximately south-east of Newcastle upon Tyne. It is the most populous settlement in the Wearside conurbation and the second-most populous settlement in North East England, after Newcastle.
The centre of the modern city is an amalgamation of three settlements founded in the Anglo-Saxon era: Monkwearmouth, on the north bank of the Wear, and Sunderland and Bishopwearmouth on the south bank. Monkwearmouth contains St Peter's Church, which was founded in 674 and formed part of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow Abbey, a significant centre of learning in the seventh and eighth centuries. Sunderland was a fishing settlement and later a port, being granted a town charter in 1179. The city traded in coal and salt, also developing shipbuilding industry in the fourteenth century and glassmaking industry in the seventeenth century.
Sunderland was once known as 'the largest shipbuilding town in the world' and once made a quarter of all of the world's ships from its yards. Following the decline of its traditional industries in the late 20th century, the area became an automotive building centre. In 1992, the borough of Sunderland was granted city status. Sunderland is historically part of County Durham, being incorporated to the ceremonial county of Tyne and Wear in 1974.
Locals are sometimes known as Mackems, a term which came into common use in the 1970s. Its use and acceptance by residents, particularly among the older generations, is not universal. The term is also applied to the Sunderland dialect, which shares similarities with the other North-East England dialects.
Toponymy
In, King Ecgfrith granted Benedict Biscop a "sunder-land". In 685 The Venerable Bede moved to the newly founded Jarrow monastery. He had started his monastic career at Monkwearmouth monastery and later wrote that he was "ácenned on sundorlande þæs ylcan mynstres". This can be taken as "sundorlande" or the settlement of Sunderland. The name may also be descriptive of the original settlement's location, being almost cut off from the rest of the mainland by creeks and gullies from both the sea and the River Wear.History
Early, ancient and Medieval
The earliest inhabitants of the Sunderland area were Stone Age hunter-gatherers. Artefacts from this era have been discovered, including microliths found during excavations at St Peter's Church, Monkwearmouth. During the final phase of the Stone Age, the Neolithic period, Hastings Hill, on the western outskirts of Sunderland, was a focal point of activity and a place of burial and ritual significance. Evidence includes the former presence of a cursus monument.It is believed the Brythonic-speaking Brigantes inhabited the area around the River Wear in pre-Roman Britain. There is a long-standing local legend that there was a Roman settlement on the south bank of the River Wear on what is the site of the former Vaux Brewery, although no archaeological investigation has taken place.
Roman artefacts have been recovered in the River Wear at North Hylton, including four stone anchors, which may support the theory there was a Roman dam or port on the River Wear.
File:Northumbria.rise.600.700.jpg|thumb|right|The areas that are now Sunderland were once part of the Brythonic Hen Ogledd lands in the Dark Ages; the land was Anglicised over time and merged into Northumbria.
Recorded settlements at the mouth of the Wear date to, when an Anglo-Saxon nobleman, Benedict Biscop, was granted land by King Ecgfrith and founded the Wearmouth–Jarrow monastery on the north bank of the river—an area that became known as Monkwearmouth. Biscop's monastery was the first built of stone in Northumbria. He employed glaziers from France and in doing so he re-established glass making in Britain. In 686, the community was taken over by Ceolfrid, and Wearmouth–Jarrow became a major centre of learning and knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England with a library of around 300 volumes.
The Codex Amiatinus, described by biblical scholar Henry Julian White as the 'finest book in the world', was created at the monastery and was likely worked on by Bede, who was born at Wearmouth in 673. This is one of the oldest monasteries still standing in England. While at the monastery, Bede completed the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum '''' in 731, a feat which earned him the title The father of English history.
In the late 8th century the Vikings raided the coast, and by the middle of the 9th century the monastery had been abandoned. Lands on the south side of the river were granted to the Bishop of Durham by Athelstan of England in 930; these became known as Bishopwearmouth and included settlements such as Ryhope which fall within the modern boundary of Sunderland.
In 1100, Bishopwearmouth parish included a fishing village at the southern mouth of the river known as 'Soender-land'. This settlement was granted a charter in 1179 under the name of the borough of Wearmouth by Hugh Pudsey, then the Bishop of Durham. The charter gave its merchants the same rights as those of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but it nevertheless took time for Sunderland to develop as a port. Fishing was the main commercial activity at the time: mainly herring in the 13th century, then salmon in the 14th and 15th centuries. From 1346 ships were built at Wearmouth, by a merchant named Thomas Menville, and by 1396 a small amount of coal was being exported.
Jamies and Black Cats
Rapid growth of the port was prompted by the salt trade. Salt exports from Sunderland are recorded from as early as the 13th century, by 1589 salt pans were laid at Bishopwearmouth Panns. Large vats of seawater were heated using coal; as the water evaporated, the salt remained. As coal was required to heat the salt pans, a coal mining community began to emerge. Only poor-quality coal was used in salt panning; better-quality coal was traded via the port, which subsequently began to grow.Both salt and coal continued to be exported through the 17th century, with the coal trade growing significantly. Difficulty for colliers trying to navigate the Wear's shallow waters meant coal mined further inland was loaded onto keels and taken downriver to the waiting colliers. A close-knit group of workers manned the Keels as 'keelmen'. In 1634 a market and yearly fair charter was granted by Bishop Thomas Morton. Morton's charter acknowledged that the borough had been called Wearmouth until then, but it incorporated the place under the name of Sunderland, by which it had become more generally known.
Before the outbreak of the English civil war, the North, with the exception of Kingston upon Hull, declared for the King. In 1644 the North was captured by the Roundheads, the area around Sunderland itself being taken in March of that year. One artefact of the civil war in the area was the long trench; a tactic of later warfare. In the village of Offerton roughly three miles inland from the present city centre, skirmishes occurred. The Roundheads blockaded the River Tyne, crippling the Newcastle coal trade, which allowed a short period of flourishing coal trade on the Wear.
In 1669, after the Restoration, King Charles II granted letters patent to one Edward Andrew, Esq. to 'build a pier and erect a lighthouse or lighthouses and cleanse the harbour of Sunderland'. A tonnage duty was levied on shipping in order to raise the necessary funds. There were a growing number of shipbuilders or boatbuilders active on the River Wear in the late 17th century.
By the start of the 18th century the banks of the Wear were described as being studded with small shipyards, as far as the tide flowed. After measures were taken in 1717 to increase the depth of the river, Sunderland's shipbuilding trade grew substantially, in parallel with its coal exports. A number of warships were built, along with many commercial sailing ships. By the middle of the century the town was probably the premier shipbuilding centre in Britain. Ships built in Sunderland were known as 'Jamies'. By 1788 Sunderland was Britain's fourth largest port by measure of tonnage, after London, Newcastle and Liverpool; among these it was the leading coal exporter. Still further growth was driven across the region, towards the end of the century, by London's insatiable demand for coal during the French Revolutionary Wars.
Until 1719 the borough of Sunderland formed part of the wider parish of Bishopwearmouth. Following the completion of Holy Trinity Church, Sunderland in 1719, the borough was made a separate parish called Sunderland. Later, in 1769, St John's Church was built as a chapel of ease within Holy Trinity parish; built by a local coal fitter, John Thornhill, it stood in Prospect Row to the north-east of the parish church. St John's was demolished in 1972. By 1720 the port area was completely built up, with large houses and gardens facing the Town Moor and the sea, and labourers' dwellings vying with manufactories alongside the river. The three original settlements - Bishopwearmouth, Monkwearmouth and Sunderland - had started to combine, driven by the success of the port of Sunderland, salt panning and shipbuilding along the banks of the river. Around this time, Sunderland was known as 'Sunderland-near-the-Sea'.
Sunderland's third-biggest export, after coal and salt, was glass. The town's first modern glassworks were established in the 1690s and the industry grew through the 17th century. Its flourishing was aided by trading ships bringing good-quality sand from the Baltic and elsewhere which, together with locally available limestone was a key ingredient in the glassmaking process. Other industries that developed alongside the river included lime burning and pottery making.
By 1770 Sunderland had spread westwards along its High Street to join up with Bishopwearmouth. In 1796 Bishopwearmouth in turn gained a physical link with Monkwearmouth following the construction of a bridge, the Wearmouth Bridge, which was the world's second iron bridge. It was built at the instigation of Rowland Burdon, the Member of Parliament for County Durham, and described by Nikolaus Pevsner as being 'a triumph of the new metallurgy and engineering ingenuity of superb elegance'. Spanning the river in a single sweep of, it was over twice the length of the earlier bridge at Ironbridge but only three-quarters the weight. At the time of building, it was the biggest single-span bridge in the world; and because Sunderland had developed on a plateau above the river, it never suffered from the problem of interrupting the passage of high-masted vessels.
During the War of Jenkins' Ear a pair of gun batteries were built on the shoreline to the south of the South Pier, to defend the river from attack. One of the pair was washed away by the sea in 1780, but the other was expanded during the French Revolutionary Wars and became known as the Black Cat Battery. In 1794 Sunderland Barracks were built, behind the battery, close to what was then the tip of the headland.
The world's first steam dredger was built in Sunderland in 1796-7 and put to work on the river the following year. Designed by Stout's successor as Engineer, Jonathan Pickernell jr, it consisted of a set of 'bag and spoon' dredgers driven by a tailor-made 4-horsepower Boulton & Watt beam engine. It was designed to dredge to a maximum depth of below the waterline and remained in operation until 1804, when its constituent parts were sold as separate lots. Onshore, numerous small industries supported the business of the burgeoning port. In 1797 the world's first patent ropery was built in Sunderland, using a steam-powered hemp-spinning machine which had been devised by a local schoolmaster, Richard Fothergill, in 1793; the ropery building still stands, in the Deptford area of the city.