Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Conflicts with the Danes in 876 left the settlements along the river Tyne in ruins. After battles with the Danes and following the 1088 rebellion against the Normans, Monkchester was all but destroyed by Odo of Bayeux.

Due to its strategic position, Robert Curthose, son of William the Conqueror, erected a wooden castle there in the year 1080. The town was henceforth known as Novum Castellum or New Castle. The wooden structure was replaced by a stone castle in 1087. The castle was rebuilt again in 1172, during the reign of Henry II; much of the keep which can be seen in the city today dates from this period.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Newcastle was England's northern fortress. In 1400, Newcastle was separated from Northumberland for administrative purposes and was made a county of itself by Henry IV. Newcastle was given the title of the county of the town of Newcastle upon Tyne. The town had a new charter granted by Elizabeth I in 1589. A 25-foot-high (7.6 m) stone wall was built around the town in the 13th century, to defend it from invaders during the Border war against Scotland. The Scots king William the Lion was imprisoned in Newcastle in 1174, and Edward I brought the Stone of Scone and William Wallace south through the town. Newcastle was successfully defended against the Scots three times during the 14th century.

From 1530, a royal act restricted all shipments of coal from Tyneside to Newcastle Quayside, giving a monopoly in the coal trade to a cartel of Newcastle burgesses known as the Hostmen. This monopoly, which lasted for a considerable time, helped Newcastle prosper and develop into a major town. The phrase taking coals to Newcastle was first recorded contextually in 1538. The phrase itself means a pointless pursuit. In the 18th century, the American entrepreneur Timothy Dexter, regarded as an eccentric, defied this idiom. He was persuaded to sail a shipment of coal to Newcastle by merchants plotting to ruin him; however, his shipment arrived on the Tyne during a strike that had crippled local production, allowing him to turn a considerable profit.

In the Sandgate area, to the east of the city and beside the river, resided the close-knit community of keelmen and their families. They were so called because they worked on the keels, boats that were used to transfer coal from the river banks to the waiting colliers, for export to London and elsewhere. In the 1630s, about 7,000 out of 20,000 inhabitants of Newcastle died of plague, more than one-third of the population. Specifically within the year 1636, it is roughly estimated with evidence held by the Society of Antiquaries that 47% of the then population of Newcastle died from the epidemic; this may also have been the most devastating loss in any British city in this period.

During the English Civil War, the North declared for the King. In a bid to gain Newcastle and the Tyne, Cromwell's allies, the Scots, captured the town of Newburn. In 1644, the Scots then captured the reinforced fortification on the Lawe in South Shields following a siege and the city was besieged for many months. It was eventually stormed ("with roaring drummes") and sacked by Cromwell's allies. The grateful King bestowed the motto Fortiter Defendit Triumphans (Latin for 'Triumphing by a brave defence') upon the town. Charles I was imprisoned in Newcastle by the Scots in 1646–47.

After the Union in 1707, the City walls became obsolete and gave way to an expansion of the city. Despite the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, fortifications gave way to industrial development.

The extraction and processing of coal and iron created a series of specialised industries, such as steel manufacture and eventually steam power.

Newcastle also became a glass producer with a reputation for brilliant flint glass. Glass was key in the industrial development of the Tyne and Wear region.

Newcastle opened its first lunatic asylum in 1767. The asylum catered for people from the counties of Newcastle, Durham and Northumberland.

The Newcastle Eccentrics of the 19th century were a group of unrelated people who lived in and around the centre of Newcastle and its Quayside between the end of the 18th and early/mid 19th century. They are depicted in a painting by Henry Perlee Parker.

Newcastle was the country's fourth largest print centre after London, Oxford and Cambridge, and the Literary and Philosophical Society of 1793, with its erudite debates and large stock of books in several languages, predated the London Library by half a century. Some founder members of the Literary and Philosophical Society were abolitionists.