page_title: Sunderland
section_title: 17th and 18th centuries
hierarchical_section_title: Sunderland / History / 17th and 18th centuries
context_page_description: Sunderland is in North East England. It was a county borough, and is now part of the City of Sunderland in Tyne and Wear. It sits at the mouth of the River Wear.
  Sunderland started as three small villages:
  Monkwearmouth was created in 674 when Saint Benedict Biscop started a monastery. Monkwearmouth is on the north side of the river.
  Bishopwearmouth was founded in 930. It is on the south side of the river.
  Sunderland, at the mouth of the river was a small fishing village. It was given a charter in 1179. The charter gave the people of the small town some rights which people outside the town did not have.
  Sunderland grew as a port, mostly selling coal and salt. In the 1300s people began to build ships along the river bank. By 1835, the port of Sunderland was so important that its name was used when the three old villages became the a borough. Sunderland became a city in 1992.
  A person born in Sunderland is sometimes called a Mackem.
context_section_description: Before the English Civil War in 1642, King Charles I said Newcastle could be the only town in the east of England which could send coal by ship. This had a big impact on Sunderland, which was selling more and more coal. This created resentment towards Newcastle and towards the idea of having a king. When the civil war began, the mainly Protestant Sunderland sided with Parliament against the mostly Catholic Newcastle. This was good for Sunderland's business, because Parliament blockaded (blocked) the Tyne. This stopped the Newcastle coal trade and allowed the Sunderland coal trade to grow. When an army from Scotland came to fight the King, its base was set up in Sunderland.
  The River Wear was not very deep, so the coal had to be loaded onto big boats called keels and taken downriver to the coal ships which were called colliers.
  In 1719, Sunderland and Bishopwearmouth were too big for the only parish church, which was in Bishopwearmouth. A new parish of Sunderland was created and Holy Trinity, Sunderland parish church was built. The three original settlements of Wearmouth (Bishopwearmouth, Monkwearmouth and Sunderland) had started to join up. This was because of the success of the port of Sunderland as well as the salt panning and the shipbuilding along the banks of the Wear. Around this time, Sunderland was also known as 'Sunderland-near-the-Sea'.
caption: Holy Trinity church, built in 1719.
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