The youngest among English cities may also claim to rank as one of the oldest among English towns. Whether a Celtic stockaded stronghold ever occupied the site of the Norman keep at Newcastle is still a moot point; but at least from Roman days downward the deep gorge at the tidal head of the Tyne has almost uninterruptedly afforded the site for a military station or a trading burgh of considerable importance. It was not coals that first made Newcastle. When the Romans spread their conquests in Britain as far north as the narrow neck of land between the Forth and the Clyde, they ran a great causeway northward between York and the Caledonian wall; and at the point where Hadrian’s road crossed the Tyne, the tête-du-pont of the Pons Ælii (so-called from the Emperor’s gentile name) must naturally have formed the nucleus for a town, which rapidly rose to be the earliest capital of all Tynedale. Its alternative title of Ad Murum was due to its position at the point where the north road intersected the lower wall between Carlisle and Wall’s End. Relics of the Roman town are now scanty; and the silence of later Northumbrian historians as to its occupation by the English would lead to the belief that it scarcely reached anything more than local and military importance. When the first English pirates bore down upon the exposed provincial coast before a favouring north-east wind from Sleswick, and founded their colony of Bryneich or Bernicia, the Land of the Braes, between Tyne and Forth, the new chieftains did not fix their principal capital at Newcastle, but on Ida’s craggy promontory of Bamborough, about the centre of the little principality. As the Tyne now formed their boundary against the Deirans of Yorkshire and Durham to the south, the lords of Bamborough could hardly be anxious for the maintenance of the Roman road; and though we cannot know with certainty whether they actually broke down the bridge, in pursuance of that policy of isolation which made every early English principality surround itself with a mark of waste borderland, or whether they merely allowed it to fall out of repair, it is at least undeniable that the communication was long interrupted, and that the road or “gate,” as our ancestors called it, came to a dead halt by the banks of Tyne, at the spot which still bears the significant name of Gateshead — that is to say, the road’s end. During this intermediate period of heathen anarchy, it is very probable that the station of Ad Murum became quite depopulated, or that it was reduced to a few huts of fishermen and crofters, who must often have been exposed to border raids from the men of the debateable district south of the river.
With the introduction of Christianity into the country of the braes, the deserted site by the Tyne began once more a fresh career as a habitation of civilised men. It was at first a royal vill of the Northumbrian princes; but the Church in the north laid special claim to all the remains of Roman buildings; and a body of monks was granted the old station of Ad Murum, which now took from them the newer title of Muneca-ceaster or Monkchester — a form that would, doubtless, have been modernised, on the usual local analogies, as Muncaster. The older name survived as an alternative in that of At Wall, once given to the existing suburb of Pandon. Still, the monastery seems to have been a small one, for it is seldom mentioned in the northern annals, and its border position must have made it very insecure, except during the times when Bernicia and Deira were temporarily united under a single ruler. When the heathen Danes once more descended upon Christian Northumbria, in the eighth century, Tynemouth was one of the first spots to bear the brunt of their attack; while Jarrow and Lindisfarne, the great ecclesiastical centres of early Bernicia, were both sacked and demolished after the merciless Scandinavian fashion. Monkchester could hardly fail in those evil days to meet with the same fate as its sister-monasteries. For the most part, however, the Danes spread but little in the harbourless country between Tyne and Forth, which continued to acknowledge the sway of Christian English masters in Bamborough, even while heathen Scandinavians bore rule in the archiepiscopal city of York itself. The Dane, in fact, cared little for a country with no fiords or tidal inlets. Yet even so, Monkchester must have stood so close to the Scandinavian border that it could hardly have been a safe dwelling-place for Englishmen, exposed as it was to constant eruptions by the open navigable waters of the Tyne.
By the days of the Norman conquest, Monkchester still remained apparently a mere village of monks and fishermen. When William returned from his terrible harrying of Northumbria — a harrying so complete that manor after manor is entered in Domesday with the laconic description, “waste,” “waste,” “waste” — he was stopped for a while by a flood on the Tyne, at the place where Hadrian’s bridge had once made the transit so easy, and where Stephenson’s vast structure now carries the railway trains hung high in air above the grimy and smoky abyss below. But after the harrying there was little material for the natural growth of a town left in Northumbria, and Monkchester might have shared the fate of Porchester or of Uriconium had not Robert Curthose, on his way back from an expedition against the Scotch, decided to guard the passage of the river by a castle, and, if one may judge from the cursory expression of a later chronicler, to secure communications by a bridge as well. The castle was hastily reared above the steep side of the gorge, and from it the trading town, which soon grew up clinging to the slope under its walls, received its modern-sounding name of Newcastle; for the older station rather occupied the site of Pandon. No part of this earliest building is now discoverable; the existing remains belong to the later Norman castle erected under Henry II. It was always the fate of Newcastle to be a border town, and this fact alone checked the development of its natural resources and the utilisation of its splendid position throughout the Middle Ages. The castle became the principal border fortress against the Scotch during those troublous times when every farmhouse in Northumberland was a fortified peel-tower and every farmer a raiding moss-trooper. After the revolt of Mowbray under William Rufus, the earldom of Northumberland merged in the Crown; but it was again granted out by Henry I. to David of Scotland, and for a whole century the county passed in a perpetual see-saw from the real or nominal sway of one king to that of the other. Throughout the Scotch wars of the Edwards, Newcastle was a constant rendezvous and base of operations for the English army; and, on the other hand, the neighbouring population were often compelled to take refuge within the walls of the castle from the forays of the Scotch freebooters. Even as late as the great Civil War, the Scotch army became masters of Newcastle, where they kept King Charles a prisoner until they sold him to the English Parliament. The curiously one-sided position of the county town, [barely] paralleled in any other shire, is doubtless due to the natural choice of the safest and most strongly fortified post in the whole county as the local metropolis.
Nevertheless, in spite of border warfare and constant insecurity for life and property, the value of the Tyne with its navigable water-way made the town struggle on as a commercial centre all through the long centuries of raids and moss-trooping. The company of merchant adventurers of Newcastle early began to trade on their own account with the great staple at Antwerp, chiefly in fells and country produce. Their houses were for the most part built in the old Cloth Market; but at a later date they began to straggle down the slope towards the water’s edge in the steep street still known as the Side; and the narrow chares, or alleys of steps which climb the dirty but picturesque flank of the hill, prove how anxious were the burgesses and goodmen to keep their wares well within the protection of the castle garrison. The grand tower of St. Nicholas’s church shows the increasing wealth of the town in the fourteenth century. Under the Lancastrian kings trade began to take a wider sweep, and Sir Robert Umfreville did so much for the commerce of Newcastle that he gained the name of Robin Mendmarket; while Roger Thornton, the local Whittington of the same period, is still gratefully remembered in many a pithy Tyneside proverb. How early coal began to be mined in the neighbourhood it is impossible to say exactly, but the industry was already well established in the fifteenth century. From that time Newcastle has continuously grown in wealth and population with the general growth of English manufactures. The lead mines, the great coal-field, the iron-works, the ship-building trade, and the navigable river now form, of course, its true raisons d’être. The coal extends over eight hundred square miles, and a large part of the output finds an exit by the railways and collier ships of Newcastle. Before the days of steam this port was almost its sole means of egress, and the old name of sea-coal bears witness to the only way in which it long arrived at the London market. Until the present century, however, the town still continued to consist mainly of the narrow chares along the gorge of the Tyne, and little was done in the way of improving its comfort or sightliness. The introduction of railways gave it its most striking feature at the present day, the immense high-level bridge which hangs so lightly across the gorge; while about the same time Grainger’s cold but handsome buildings in the new town metamorphosed the appearance of Newcastle as it is now to be seen; though even to this day the visitor can still find himself suddenly transported to the Middle Ages if he chooses to explore the close wynds and narrow staircases about the Side and Sandhill. It brings the two extremes of English history into yet more incongruous juxtaposition when we remember that our modern best Wallsend derives its name from the terminal station on the great Roman wall at Segedunum, and that the large sister-town of Gateshead is still called after the gap in the north road at the broken bridge of Hadrian.