not even a respectable tradition, to guide us in the investigation of the history of the spot previously to that date.
Whatever may have been the character or extent of the religious house at Tynemouth in which Osred was interred in 792, it would appear that, owing to successive ravages of the Danish pirates, to which, from its situation, it was particularly exposed, or to some other cause, the place was ruined and deserted when the relics of St. Oswin are said to have been discovered, A.D. 1065. No great weight can be attached to the story of the refoundation of the building by Tosti, earl of Northumberland: under any circumstances that chief could have done little more than commence the good work, as he was slain in the year following the discovery of the martyr's remains. The next authentic notice, then, of Tynemouth, after the Saxon Chronicle, is in the charter whereby Waltheof, earl of Northumberland, granted "the church of St. Mary in Tinemuthe, together with the body of St. Oswin, king and martyr, which rests in the same church," to the monks of Jarrow.
By this concession, which Mr. Gibson supposes to have been made circa A.D. 1075, Tynemouth eventually became a dependency of the church of Durham: for on the removal of the brethren of Jarrow and Weremouth to that monastery, Alberic, earl of Northumberland, confirmed Waltheof's gift, to the church of St. Cuthbert and its occupants, for ever. Confirmations, however, even though well attested, were not unfrequently set aside, in the unsettled times at the close of the eleventh century. Robert de Mowbray, who succeeded Alberic in the earldom of Northumberland, restored the monastery of Tynemouth, expelled the monks of St. Cuthbert, and granted it to the abbat of St. Alban's, who with a truly mundane disregard of the solemn warnings of the monks of Durham, "to forbear from seizing the property of others," sent his people to dwell there; and Tynemouth remained a cell to St. Alban's until it fell with the maternal house at the Dissolution. In this sketch of the early history of the priory we have not followed Mr. Gibson into the pleasant but unprofitable regions of conjecture.
The annals of the priory subsequent to its union with St. Alban's offer no very remarkable incidents. Like other religious establishments it largely increased its possessions during the twelfth century, a period favourable beyond any other, before or after, to the growth of monastic institutions. The chapter of St. Alban's used it as a conveniently remote prison for its refractory or guilty members, and in early times an exile from the pleasant fields and temperate climate of Hertfordshire to a rugged rock exposed to the storms of the German ocean, and in the dangerous vicinity of the Scots, must have been a severe penalty. In one respect however the history of this priory becomes important, and that is when considered in its relations with the neighbouring town of Newcastle; to this part of the subject Mr. Gibson has given less attention than could have been desired.
