Looking upon the Priory of St. Mary and St. Oswin we are carried back to the days when Edwin, the first king of Northumbria to embrace Christianity, built a little church here, in which his daughter took the veil. King Oswald had the first wooden structure replaced by a stone one; and here, in 651, the body of another good king--Oswyn--was brought for burial from Gilling, near Richmond in Yorkshire, where, disbanding his army, he sacrificed his cause and his life to Oswy of Bernicia, with whom he had been about to fight.
When the pirate ships of the Danes swept down upon our coasts, the Priory of St. Oswin, conspicuous on its bold headland, could not hope to escape their ravages. It was destroyed by the fierce invaders; but King Ecgfrith[1] of Northumbria restored the shattered shrine. Again, in the year 865, it was sacked and burnt, and the poor nuns of St. Hilda, who had already fled from Hartlepool to Tynemouth hoping to find safety, were ruthlessly slain and earned the crown of martyrdom. It was again restored; but, five years later, the destroying hands of the invaders fell on the place once more, and for two hundred years the Priory stood roofless and tenantless. After the Norman Conquest, Waltheof, Earl of Northumberland bestowed it upon the monks of Jarrow. The rediscovery of the tomb of St. Oswyn in 1065, had gladdened the hearts of the monks, and forthwith the monastery was reared anew over the ashes of its former self.
Mowbray, the next Earl of Northumberland, re-endowed the building. He had quarrelled with the Bishop of Durham, so in order to do him a displeasure, he made Tynemouth Priory subordinate to St. Albans instead of to Durham and brought monks from St. Albans to dwell there. The new buildings were finished in 1110, and the bones of St. Oswyn enshrined within them, the right of sanctuary being extended for a mile around his resting-place. This right, however, was already in existence, and had been appealed to in 1095 by Mowbray himself, who fled here pursued by the followers of William Rufus, against whom he had rebelled. The King's men disregarded the sanctuary right, captured Mowbray, and sent him prisoner to Durham[2]. [Footnote 2: See account of Bamburgh Castle.]