Teesdale Riverside Pilgrimage

History of the route

The Premonstratensian Monastic Order at Egglestone Abbey 1198-1540

When looking back to consider medieval monastic history Egglestone Abbey it is important to remember that the Abbot and his monks provided a vital source of knowledge and a positive force for self improvement within the wider community. When talking about many of the Orders at the time of the abbeys, monks are often mentioned as Abbey members though in the case of Premonstratensians – though premonstratensian monks were instead known as Canons Regular, who were priests and their duties involved frequent exercise of pastoral ministry in nearby parishes to the abbey or priorities to which they were based at, and we’ll use both terms to refer to members of this particular order. 

Despite being up toward the temporal apex of the complex Feudal system it was this religious brotherhood who saw it as their spiritual duty to educate the locals as well as teaching them agricultural methods of how to successfully cultivate crops, breed livestock and best go about their daily lives in a routine that suited the locality. The feudal laws, and taxes, of the day were all recorded by the Abbey as was the dispensation of day to day wisdom and justice; the latter under the dynastic control of the then Balliol and Beauchamp landowners of Teesdale.

As such their Abbey-centric community which they worked hard at expanding, over the centuries of stable continuity, was much respected and welcomed by those whose peasant lives would otherwise probably have been; “nasty, brutish and short” to quote the accepted medievalist historian opinions.

Not only were the soaring architectural facades of the well constructed Abbey a potent symbol of just what a well organised devotional localised Christian centre might achieve but by harnessing the technology of the era the order of the Abbey lifestyle methods would, in all likelihood, have seemed awesome to the lesser medieval population of the dale .

That the Church was such an influential and thriving force with a well run cohesive routine was also accepted by the local nobility who, in turn, offered protection within the walls of Barnard Castle. Should the Abbey be attacked by marauding Scots, as it was on numerous occasions throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, safety was available within the century old fortification up-river.

The Domesday Book, which recorded most landholdings of England as far back as 1086, did not cover the North East with good reason. Here there were no permanent borders within the North East as entire area, especially the dales, were deemed to be too volatile and constantly changing in ownership.

 The fact that this regional borderland was fought over so regularly and required constant military protection from the effective County Palatinate Prince Bishops shows why Durham retained its semi independence from the Crown. Spiritual and temporal matters needed to co-exist with well co-ordinated planning to ensure effective English defences against the Scots.

Armies, gangs and large bands of Scottish raiders, especially after bad harvests, often marched south for pillaging expeditions. Uppermost amongst their objectives was the capture of valuable Teesdale livestock, thriving under monastic method of animal husbandry, with which these early Reivers would then retreat back north over the Cheviot Hills beyond the range of any potential Northumbrian and Palatinate pursuers.

In 1315 such a force ravaged the whole of North Yorkshire although York held out. In 1345 a large Scots army marched south crossed the Wear at Stanhope and camped below Bollihope Moor for a fortnight before retreating back into ‘border country’. A more substantial army marched south the following year and were comprehensively defeated on the outskirts of Durham at the decisive Battle of Neville’s Cross at which their leaders were captured.

Entire homestead based agricultural communities and villages surrounding Egglestone Abbey were raided and burnt. The thirteenth century village and church at Mortham on the south bank of the Tees beside the ‘Meeting of the Waters’ was razed to the ground by the Scots and the surviving Mortham fortified Pele Tower was subsequently built for future protection and as a deterrent.

The Premonstratensian Order had been founded in France in 1121 by St Norbert in Premonte and adopted the rule of St Augustine although it borrowed elements from the, stricter, Cistercian teachings. Easby Abbey east of Catterick on the Swale was the ‘mother Abbey’ of Egglestone on the bank of the Tees the latter being completed 1198 as only the second Abbey of their order sited in the North of England. Further south on the edge of the Pennines dales the post Norman conquest Cistercian Abbeys of the Swale, Ure and Wensley dales were larger, better funded and more geared to full time agricultural activities.

Spread across the adjacent North Yorkshire moors were sited, grander still, the great monasteries of the Benedictine Cistercian and Franciscan orders. These were far larger communities with their architectural magnificence (Fountains and Rievaulx) standing almost a thousand years later as witness to the success of Abbey activities and the commercial as well as spiritual impact they had upon the region.

Premonstratensian teaching held that the daily duties of the monks ( and later the ‘brothers’ when the status of Egglestone was reduced from Abbey to that of a mere Priory ) were mainly concerned with the copying and maintaining of sacred texts, singing in regular worship and, naturally, converting the local peasantry into believing that their particular blend of Christianity offered better hope for future everlasting life than those rules promised by other orders.

To an impressionable impoverished medieval dale local such an aspirational ‘divine package’ would have, presumably, appealed far more than the drudgery of life in a basic hut ?