Jarrow

Jarrow town (1991 pop. 31,345), South Tyneside metropolitan district, NE England, on the Tyne estuary. Industries include the manufacture of iron and steel products, oil installations, and shipbuilding and repairing. St. Paul's Church and an adjacent Benedictine monastery (now in ruins) were both founded in the 7th cent. The Venerable Bede lived, worked, and died in the monastery. Jarrow lent its name to the hunger marches that were made across England to London during the 1930s. In 1967 the Tyne Tunnel (beneath the Tyne River) was opened, connecting Jarrow with Willington.

Jarrow a town in NE England, on the Tyne estuary. From the 7th century until the Viking invasions its monastery was a centre of Northumbrian Christian culture; the Venerable Bede lived and worked there. Its name is associated with a series of hunger marches to London by the unemployed during the Depression of the 1930s.

Jarrow, on the south bank of the Tyne, was founded in 682 by Benedict Biscop and thereafter formed a single monastery with Monkwearmouth. Largely through the work of Bede this foundation had an enormous impact on medieval European learning. One of Biscop's churches still survives as the present chancel; the larger basilica, dedicated in 685, lay to its west and was destroyed in the 18th cent. As at Wearmouth, these churches and the surrounding excavated monastic structures reflect Gaulish tastes. The present standing buildings lying to the south of the church are of post-Conquest date, some associated with Aldwine's attempt to revive monasticism on the site in the 1070s.

Richard N. Bailey