Everything about Hartlepool Abbey totally explained
Hartlepool Abbey was a
Northumbrian
monastery founded in
640 CE by
Hieu, the first of the saintly recluses of Northumbria, and
Aidan of Lindisfarne, on the headland of
Hartlepool now called the Heugh or Old Hartlepool, in
County Durham,
England.
Construction and early days
Built in the early
Saxon style, it was likely a walled enclosure of simple wooden huts surrounding a church. It was a joint-house of both monks and nuns, presided over from
640-
649 by Hieu, the first female abbess to ever be put in charge of such an institution. In
649 after Hieu left for
Tadcaster, Hilda (later
Hilda of Whitby) was appointed second abbess of the abbey by Bishop Aidan. In
655, King
Oswiu of Northumbria sent his one-year-old daughter
Ælfflæd to stay with Hilda, "to be consecrated to God in perpetual virginity", an important gesture. Hilda stayed at Hartlepool Abbey until
657 or
658 when she became founding abbess of
Whitby Abbey, then called Streoneshalh.
Impact
A village was founded around the monastery in the
7th century, marking the earliest beginnings of the modern town of Hartlepool. However, after Hilda left Hartlepool Abbey it, and the village surrounding it, isn't mentioned again in any known sources until the 12th century, and appears to have declined in importance until it was finally either sacked and destroyed by
Danish Vikings around
800, or possibly simply abandoned.
Excavations
No trace of the monastery remains today, though the monastic cemetery has been found near the present-day St Hilda’s Church. It is the most extensively explored of all the
Northumbrian monasteries of the 7th and 8th centuries, beginning in
1833 when workmen building houses on the headland found human burials and Anglo-Saxon artefacts. A namestone found during this excavation can be found on display in St Hilda's Church. Significant finds are still being unearthed to this day. Hartlepool Abbey was featured in a March,
2000 episode of
Time Team, called "Nuns in Northumbria", where bones and a book clasp were found.
Further Information
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