Here is a bit of info on Monkton pasted from some records of the Village I have.
The origins of Monkton and the name dates back to at least 1074 when the Bishop of Durham is recorded granting land here to monks involved with the reconstruction of St Paul’s at Jarrow. Monkton grew to become a mainly agricultural village made up of a number of farmsteads, outbuildings and labourers cottages and buildings lining the main street, Monkton Lane, and facing each other across it. The settlement was based on four farms – West Farm, Monkton Farm, East Farm and Grange Farm. Tenant farmers leased the land and buildings from the Dean & Chapter of Durham. There were also several large houses including Monkton Hall.
Research findings published in Archaeologia Aeliana, the journal of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne (5th series, vol 12, pp181-208), illustrate the changing character of occupation at Monkton Farm and the adjoining Bede Cottage, one of the main building groups in the village. Occupiers researched from 1495 to the early seventeenth century were successive generations of tenant farmers from the Brompton family. In 1628, the tenancy passed to Thomas Cocke, a merchant from Newcastle whose inventory showed a greater emphasis on domestic comforts than agricultural equipment. Another merchant, Robert Crisson, took over the tenement in 1646, his widowed wife later marrying Jacob Blenkinsoppe who in 1651 assigned half his holding to a Thomas Davison. Davison would become an Alderman of Newcastle upon Tyne and later its Mayor, and the Davison family retained the tenancy until 1703 when it was taken over by the Forsters. By 1740, the date on the stone above the front door of the current Monkton Farmhouse, four generations of Forsters had lived there. Much of the area’s early agricultural character has managed to survive and the settlement retains its strong linear, introspective development pattern based on farmhouses and land behind. This is despite – and, in places, because of – Monkton’s two subsequent industrialisation around the edges, and twentieth century development infilling the medieval layout. significant stages of development history, nineteenth century
In 1826, the first section of one of the world’s first modern railways opened from Springwell Colliery to Jarrow Staithes on the Tyne. This colliery wagonway, engineered in part by George Stephenson and later known as the Bowes Railway, skirted the southern edge of Monkton, crossing Monkton Lane by level-crossings twice, one at either end of the village. When complete in 1855, the wagonway was 15 miles long, handling over 1 million tons of coal a year. The last section between Monkton and Jarrow Staithes only closed in late 1980s.
The route of the wagonway across open fields to the south of thevillage effectively limited its southern growth, but it did define a neat quadrant of land which would later be developed as the first large area of infill housing in Monkton – Cheviot Road – in the early 1970s. South of the wagonway, land remained open apart from Monkton Stadium which grew from a late nineteenth century cycle track to become a major modern sporting facility.
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