Anyone who knows anything about the ancient history of
Northumbria will be aware of the region’s strong links with early Christianity.
Aidan, Cuthbert and Bede dominate the annals of our history from the former’s
arrival here as a missionary in 635AD to the latter’s death exactly a century
later. And the village we now know as Norham on the very edge of England
overlooking the River Tweed played an important role in those formative years.
These days, of course, the castle is the great symbol of
Norham’s place in history, but this fine structure didn’t appear in its earliest
form until the 1120s. Unlike most other settlements in the North-East, the
village had already enjoyed an eventful and quite well documented history up
until this point, mainly due to its situate.
Skipping conveniently over its very earliest days, it came
to prominence most notably at the dawn of Northumbria ’s period of Dark Age
dominance in the 630sAD. When King Oswald won the crown of the northern kingdom
in 634 he invited the Celtic monks of Iona to
establish Christianity in the region – and it was, of course, Aidan who made
this happen. He was sent over from the little Scottish island in 635
and, by passing over the Tweed and through Norham en route, he first brought the village into the sightlines of the
religious community.
Norham was then called Ubbanford (‘upper ford’), and though Lindisfarne soon became religious HQ, it has been
suggested that Norham enjoyed a brief period of superiority beforehand. Even in
later years it remained a regular monkish stopping-off point on their journeys
to and from Iona. A grant of land was, in fact, made to create a monastery at
Norham as early as 655.
The village’s religious links were reinforced during the
ninth century when on at least one (and probably two) occasions, the remains of
St.Cuthbert were moved there to keep them safe from Viking raids. By the mid
eleventh century Ubbanford had become Norham, and was essentially the capital
of the County Palatine of Durham’s lands in North
Northumberland – or North Durham ,
as it was for centuries known. So, yes, Norham (or Norhamshire) and a good deal
more of the northern reaches of Northumberland weren’t in Northumberland at
all, really, from the medieval period to the Victorian era, but rather they were
part of County Durham – a curious state of affairs brought on by the enduring
religious heritage of these stretches of land. Amazingly, it wasn’t until 1844
that the common sense switch was made by handing North
Durham to Northumberland.
When the castle came along in the 1120s, it was a Bishop of
Durham who commissioned it. Built to keep the incursions of the increasingly
boisterous Scots at bay, it encouraged the development, in time, of the the
village proper. Then another very different phase in Norham’s history began… as
a military outpost.
But that’s another story.
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