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Middlesbrough North Yorkshire

Approximate Population: 142,691

In Middlesbrough in 686 a monastic cell was consecrated by St. Cuthbert at the request of St. Hilda Abbess of Whitby and in 1119 Robert Bruce granted and confirmed the church of St. Hilda of Middleburg to Whitby.   Up until its closure on the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in 1537, the church was maintained by 12 Benedictine monks, many of whom became vicars or rectors of various places in Cleveland.   The importance of the early church at “Middleburg”, later known as Middlesbrough Priory, is indicated by the fact that in 1452 it possessed four altars.

After the Angles the area became home to Viking settlers and it is argued by some that ‘old’ Cleveland has the highest density of Scandinavian parish names in Britain. Names of Viking origin (with the suffix by) are abundant in the area – for example, Thornaby, Ormesby, Stainsby, Lackenby, Maltby and Tollesby were once separate villages that belonged to Vikings called Thormad, Orm, Steinn, Hlakkande, Malti and Toll, but now form suburbs of Middlesbrough.   Lazenby was the village belonging to a Leysingr – a freeman; Normanby, a Norseman’s village and Danby (in neighbouring North Yorkshire), a Dane’s village.   The name Mydilsburgh is the earliest recorded form of Middlesbrough’s name and dates to Anglian times (400 to 1000 AD), while many of the aforementioned villages appear in the Domesday Book of 1086.

Other links persist in the area, often through school and/or road names, to now-outgrown or abandoned local settlements, such as the medieval settlement of Stainsby, deserted by 1757, which amounts to little more today than a series of grassy mounds near the A19 road.  In 1952 Stainsby Secondary Modern School, now renamed Acklam Grange Secondary School, was named for this village.

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Middlesbrough North Yorkshire

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