Northumbria E-Book

• Herausgeber: Phillimore & Co Ltd
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 870

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The North East is probably England's most distinctive region. A place of strong character with a very special sense of its past, it is, as William Hutchinson remarked in 1778, 'truly historical ground'. This is a book about both the ancient Anglian kingdom of Northumbrian, which stretched from the Humber to the Scottish border, and the ways in which the idea of being a Northumbrian, or a northerner, or someone from the 'North East', persisted in the area long after the early English kingdom had fallen. It examines not only the history of the region, but also the successive waves of identity that that history has bestowed over a very long period of time. Successful nations write about themselves in these terms; so why not regions? Northumbria existed before 'England' began but is still with us in name, and in the way we think about ourselves. A series of sections, entitled Christian Kingdom, Borderland and Coalfield, New Northumbria, Cultural Region and Northumbrian Island, explore the region on the grand scale, from the very beginning, and bring a sharp sense of history to bear on the various threads that have influenced the making of modern regional identity. The book is a work of exceptional scholarship. Never before have so many acclaimed historians addressed together the issues which have affected this special region. Clearly written, and rich in ideas, chapters explore the physical origins of Northumbria and consider just how the pressing political and military claims of adjoining states shaped and tempered it. There are further chapters on art, music, mythology, dialect, history, economy, poetry, politics, religion, antiquarianism, literature and settlement. They show how Northumbrians have lived and died, and looked forward and back, and these accounts of the North East's past will surely help in the shaping of its future.

Leseprobe

NORTHUMBRIA

HISTORY AND IDENTITY547-2000

Benedictine monastery of Lindisfarne

NORTHUMBRIA

HISTORY AND IDENTITY547-2000

Edited by

ROBERT COLLS

Dedicated to BILL GRIFFITHSScholar of Northumbria(19 August 1948-11 September 2007)

First published 2007

This paperback edition published 2019

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

© The Contributors, 2007, 2019

The right of Robert Colls to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7509-9105-6

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Acknowledgements

The Editor & List of Contributors

Introduction: When was Northumbria?

ROBERT COLLS

CHRISTIAN KINGDOM

  1   Northumbria: A Failed European Kingdom

DAVID ROLLASON

  2   ‘Between the brine and the high ground’: The Roots of Northumbria

BRIAN K. ROBERTS

  3   ‘The Start of Everything Wonderful’: The Old English Poetry of Northumbria

BILL GRIFFITHS

  4   Bede, St Cuthbert and the Northumbrian Folc

JO STORY

BORDER AND COALFIELD

  5   ‘Northumbria’ in the Later Middle Ages

A.C. KING AND A.J. POLLARD

  6   ‘Dolefull dumpes’: Northumberland and the Borders, 1580-1625

DIANA NEWTON

  7   ‘Truly historical ground’: Antiquarianism in the North

ROSEMARY SWEET

  8   Elements of Identity: The re-making of the North East, 1500-1760

KEITH WRIGHTSON

NEW NORTHUMBRIA

  9   The New Northumbrians

ROBERT COLLS

10   The Irish and Scots on Tyneside

JOHN A. BURNETT AND DONALD M. MACRAILD

11   Northumberland and Durham Settlements, 1801-1911

MIKE BARKE

12   Rebuilding the Diocese in the Industrial Age: The Church of England and the Durham Coalfield, 1810-1920

ROB LEE

CULTURAL REGION

13   Myths of Northumberland: Art, Identity and Tourism

PAUL USHERWOOD

14   Pipedreaming: Northumbrian Music from the Smallpipes to Alex Glasgow

JUDITH MURPHY

15   Northumbria in north-east England during the Twentieth Century

NATASHA VALL

16   Swords at Sunset: The Northumbrian Literary Legacy

ALAN MYERS

17   Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts

NICK EVERETT

NORTHUMBRIAN ISLAND

18   The Northumbrian Island

CHARLES PHYTHIAN-ADAMS

Acknowledgements

Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections

The Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford

British Library, St Cuthbert in bishop’s robes

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Northumberland Collections Service, Northumberland Record Office

Durham University Library

Beamish Photographic Library

Bodleian Library, Oxford

Manchester Art Gallery, J.M.W. Turner, Dunstanburgh Castle

The National Trust

Tate, London 2007, J.M.W. Turner, Norham Castle: Sunrise

Newcastle Central Library Local Studies Collection.

National Portrait Gallery

Charles Phythian-Adams would like to thank Mr Kenneth Smith for adapting the accompanying map from a national series drawn by him to the author’s specification (to accompany the general volume mentioned in fn. 3) from funding generously provided by the Leverhulme Trust. He also gratefully acknowledges the helpful advice given by Rob Colls and Roey Sweet.

The Editor

ROBERT COLLS was born in South Shields and was Professor of English History at the University of Leicester before moving to De Montfort University in 2012. His last book was George Orwell English Rebel (OUP 2013), and his next book will be This Sporting Life: England 1760-1960 (2020).

List of Contributors

(Dates and information for this edition have been updated where possible.)

Mike Barke is Reader in Human Geography at Northumbria University.

John A Burnett was a research fellow at the University of Northumbria.

Robert Colls is Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Nick Everett is Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Leicester.

Brian ‘Bill’ Griffiths was coordinator of the ‘Wor Language’ dialect project at the University of Northumbria. He was also a poet, a pianist, a publisher, a biker and a pamphleteer – but always mainly a poet. He died in 2007.

Andrew King is Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton.

Robert Lee was Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Teesside. In a short career, the Times Higher described him as ‘a historian who transformed the study of the English rural poor’ with three brilliant books that came one after the other: Unquiet Country (2005), Rural Society (2006) and The Church of England and the Durham Coalfield (2007). He died in 2010.

Donald M MacRaild is Professor of History at the University of Roehampton.

Judith Murphy is a lecturer in history, culture and music at the University of Northumbria.

Alan Myers retired in 1986 to work as a freelance translator. As well as a passionate Northumbrian scholar, according to The Guardian he ‘was one of the most acclaimed translators of Russian into English of his generation’ and his work included Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Brodsky. He died in 2010.

Diana Newton is Reader in Early Modern British History at the University of Teesside.

Charles Phythian-Adams is Professor Emeritus of English Local History at the University of Leicester.

A.J. Pollard is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Teesside.

Brian Roberts is Professor Emeritus of Geography at Durham University.

David Rollason is Professor of History at Durham University.

Joanna Story is Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leicester.

Rosemary Sweet is Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester.

Paul Usherwood was Senior Lecturer in Art History at Northumbria University.

Natasha Vall is Professor of Urban and Cultural History at the University of Teesside.

Keith Wrightson is Professor of History at Yale University.

Introduction

When was Northumbria?

ROBERT COLLS

Northumbria was one of a number of European kingdoms that came into being after the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. The name ‘Northumbrians’ first appears in 731, in Latin, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

Northumbria’s boundaries were blurred and its heartlands could be surprisingly vulnerable, but at its greatest extent the kingdom ran from the lower reaches of the Humber estuary in the south, to the three corners of Cumbria, Strathclyde, and the Firth of Forth to the north. Bede names Ida as the founder of the ‘royal lineage of the Northumbrians’ in 547. In practice, Ida probably ruled over only ‘Bernicia’, northernmost of the two provinces which were unified in the course of the seventh century to make the kingdom. The southern province of ‘Deira’, with its capital at York, took in roughly what is called Yorkshire today. Bernicia, with its capital at Bamburgh, grew out of the old fortified Romano-British zone along Hadrian’s Wall to take in roughly what are Northumberland, Tyne and Wear and County Durham. Neither of the two province names is English.

Northumbria was essentially an Anglian, or an English state, which is to say, it was made by Germanic invaders who first had to defeat, or degrade, or otherwise subjugate, the indigenous British. Very few Britons appear in Bede’s writings. As he says, ‘The British oppose the English through their inbred hatred and the … Catholic Church by their incorrect Easter and their evil customs, yet being opposed by the power of God and men alike, they cannot obtain what they want in either respect.’ Caedmon, the first English Christian poet, has a British name. He declaims the song from God because, as a servant of the lowest class, he could not have learned it from men.

The first great king of Northumbria was the Bernician, Aethelfrith (reign 594-616), with his palace at Yeavering, who waged campaigns in all directions – in Strathclyde in 603, in Deira in 604, and at Chester in 615. He was followed by Edwin (reign 616-33), who married the Christian princess Ethelberga of Kent in 625, and was converted by her emissary Paulinus. After defeating the West Saxons in 626, Edwin was baptised at York in 627. He died at the hands of Penda of Mercia and Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, at Hatfield, near Doncaster, six years later. After a period of internal strife, the Northumbrian crown was taken up by Oswald who, having set his cross and standard, defeated the Mercian army at Heavenfield, near Hexham, in 634. On this day Oswald avenged Edwin by killing Cadwallon. Yet Oswald had been no friend of Edwin. As sons of Aethelfrith, he and his brothers had had to spend time in exile from Edwin’s Northumbria when they had come under the influence of St Columba’s community on the island of Iona (f.565). Ionan monastic Christianity established itself in Northumbria during the reigns of Oswald (634-42) and Oswy (642-70).

Bede says Oswald was the maker of Northumbria as ‘one people’ and in matters of state, from the seventh century, there is evidence of itinerant courts, legal coinage, written documents, and tribute and taxation based on the household (‘hid’). Not all Northumbrians shared the same degrees of freedom. Lowest was the ‘ceorl’. The economy was mainly agricultural, and the settlements were scattered, with little surplus product. Roman roads, or at any rate Roman routes, prevailed.

Kings came and went but it is noticeable that the kingdom went on. There seems to have been some kind of aristocratic council, or formal hierarchy, which was able to command political consensus and influence kingship. If consensus was the mark of the aristocracy, continuity was the prerogative of the church – initially fragile and uncertain under Edwin, but resurgently Celtic, and embedded, under Oswald and Oswy. Even so, it was in Northumbria, at Whitby in 664, that the English church made the epic decision to be Roman rather than Celtic. The two traditions managed to make something new between them nevertheless, and a golden age of Northumbrian churchmanship was the result.

In or around 635 Aidan of Iona had founded the island monastery of Lindisfarne, just offshore from the royal capital of Bamburgh. Aidan was the first great missionary bishop of Northumbria. He died in 651, the same year that Cuthbert entered the monastery at Melrose, aged 16. Later, Cuthbert was sent to re-invigorate the Lindisfarne community in the manner of Aidan. Cuthbert accepted the decision of the Synod of Whitby but the simple asceticism of his personal ministry, and its devotion to the natural and animal world, was part of his continued devotion to a Celtic tradition. He was consecrated Archbishop, at York in 685, and died two years later on Lindisfarne, great saint of the Northumbrian folc. In honour of his ‘elevation’ (digging up) in 698, the Lindisfarne Gospels were written by Bishop Eadfrith.

The Northumbrian church grew rich, but not because its saints were pious. Aristocrats donated large sums of land and money in order to use the church as a perpetual corporation that would secure their hereditary rights. Many of the charges levelled against the church for corruption, therefore, were based on the actions of aristocrats whose clerical positions did not make them change either their secular appetites or political ambitions. Wilfrid (634-709) was the key Northumbrian churchman of these years. The man who had secured the momentous Whitby decision to turn to Rome was not going to flinch from the little local difficulty of making his church rich.

Northumbria’s ‘Golden Age’, then, was Christian and cultural rather than political or military. Some cultural works but no important buildings survive. Most important are the manuscripts: the Lindisfarne Gospels (Lindisfarne, early eighth century), the Durham Gospels (Lindisfarne, early eighth century), and the Codex Amiatinus (Jarrow/Monkwearmouth, before 716), products of the most brilliant scriptoria of the western church. Just as golden were the scholarly works of Bede and Alcuin. Alcuin (735-804) was taught at York cathedral school by Egbert, pupil of Bede. Later, he became head of Charlemagne’s palace school. Under him, the Abbey of St Martin at Tours became the main seat of European learning. Bede (672-735) was educated by Abbot Benedict Biscop at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow. His Ecclesiastical History was the first history of the English people, a people he made spiritually coherent by arguing for God’s purpose through an English church. The work, it has to be said, was also a powerful piece of propaganda for Northumbria. It is dedicated to King Ceolwuf.

Bede argued that the period of his life, and for a generation before it, had seen favourable times. After his death, following a phase of aggression in the 740s, Northumbrians worked towards an agreement with the Picts. In the south they built a system of defensive earthworks against the Mercians. But in 793 the first Viking raids were recorded. Vikings came at Northumbria from the sea. ‘Never before has such terror appeared,’ wrote Alcuin to King Ethelred: ‘It is now about 350 years that we and our fathers have dwelt in this most beautiful country and never before has such a terrible thing befallen … lo now the church of St Cuthbert is stained with the blood of the priests of God.’

In 866 the pattern of attack changed. This time Healfdene’s Great Danish Army crossed the sea, wintered in East Anglia, and then moved north, taking the York heartland in the spring of 867 and defeating the Northumbrian army the following March. This was no mere raiding party. By 875 it had moved north again and imposed itself, temporarily, in the second Northumbrian heartland of the Tyne-Wall zone. The kingdom was now beginning to heave three ways: south of the Tees to the Danes, north of the Tees to the Bernicians, and west of the Pennines to the Cumbrians, connected to the kingdom of Strathclyde. It was in this uncomfortable position of Scots to the north and Norse to the south that a truncated Northumbria looked to Alfred’s Christian English Wessex in the early years of the 10th century. Eric Bloodaxe, King of York, has sometimes been seen as the last king of Northumbria but, in truth, Northumbria had been in a condition of terminal fragmentation for nearly a century before Bloodaxe’s assassination on Stainmore moor in 954.

In 875, in the midst of the Danish invasion, Bishop Eardorf and the Cuthbertian community on Lindisfarne had packed up their relics and treasures to begin seven years of wandering on the mainland before settling their bones, and his, at Chester-le-Street in 882. In 995 the cult of St Cuthbert – or the Haliwerfolc, or ‘Saint’s People’ as they were called – was on the move again. This time they found their resting place at Durham, high above a bend in the river. In 1093 the foundation stone of the Cathedral was laid here, on the site of Cuthbert’s relics, and there they stay, last living expression of the old kingdom of Northumbria.

When was Northumbria? As far as we can tell, Northumbria was between Aethelfrith and the coming of the Danish army – let us say, between 594 and 875, by which time the kingdom had ceased to exist as a single, coherent province. The intention behind this book is to examine the history and identity of the kingdom, and then to write about the history and identity of what happened next.

As we have seen, Northumbria may have been English but it was not England. Before the rise of ‘England’, Northumbria was just itself – north-east of nowhere in particular. As England rose from the south, however, and the other kingdoms, including Northumbria, passed away, the question moves from when was Northumbria to how did the territory that it occupied come to see itself, and understand itself, in ways that matched its history, its contemporary practical purposes, and its new and growing relationship with England? In other words, what happened to the identity of Northumbria once Northumbria was no more?

In all honesty, before 1066 it is difficult to say much about identities of any sort. Northumbria was a great kingdom, and it lasted nearly three hundred years, but its borders were porous and its loyalties are difficult to ascertain. Military as well as ethnic alignments pulled to various centres of power and one should never assume that the gravitational pull was always to an English south. For Northumbrians, the pull was just as likely to be Danish, or Scottish. As for London, under the Romans it had been provincial capital of Britannia Superior, so called because it was nearer to Rome. York had been the provincial capital of Britannia Inferior. After Rome, and the breaking of the kingdoms that followed her, the centripetal tendencies of London re-emerged with the Normans. Yet, centralist though the Norman state was, we must remember that like all feudal dynasties it built its sovereignties piecemeal, through systems of lordship and kingship rather than through any sense of manifest destiny. London was base camp, therefore, for a tensile Norman power that was most stretched in the north.

Northumberland and Durham were slow and resentful members of the Norman state. They suffered 11th-century invasions both ways, from the north and the south, and neither appeared in William’s Domesday Book (1086). Northumberland remained an earldom outside the Crown until 1157, and Durham remained a palatinate, with special episcopal powers, in title at least, until 1836. New Castle – called Pons Aelii under the Romans – was begun in 1090 after yet another punitive expedition from the south, this time after the murder of Walcher, first Norman bishop, in 1081. The whole area harboured wayward loyalties to the London Crown until Henry III made absolute his claim to the earldom in 1242.

Even then, the first people to be identified as distinctive ‘northerners’ were barons with substantial connections to the Scottish aristocracy. In 1276 they did homage to Alexander II of Scotland. In 1296 a significant number sided with the Scots against Edward I. It was in such a context that the Percies, future earls of Northumberland, came to the region in the late 13th century as Lords of the Marches and Edward’s henchmen on both sides of the border. Percy power waxed and waxed on the uncertainties of a ragged frontier. The Tudors continued to war with the Scots but in northern England their writ did not always run. There were rebellions in 1536 (‘Pilgrimage of Grace’) and 1569 (‘Rebellion of the North’) that engulfed the greater region. Border security stiffened with the Union of Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603 and the pacifications that followed. In the 1680s, however, and in the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, the Northumbrian gentry were less than united in their loyalty to London. The corporation of Newcastle, whose loyalty was not in doubt and who kept their toasts Hanoverian and their gates shut, remained suspicious of the county until well into the 18th century. Victorian school textbooks talked of the events of 1688-9 – a Protestant succession and a Bill of Rights – as the key to political stability for all English counties other than Northumberland. Macaulay’s History of England stated that ‘a large part of the country north of the Trent was, down to the 18th century, in a state of barbarism’. It was only in the period beginning after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746 that historians could use the same phrases of ‘law and order’, and ‘trade and commerce’, for north-eastern England that they routinely used for the rest of the country. Given the timing of Welsh (1536) and Scottish (1707) incorporations into the central state, it is clear that north-east England was incorporated into a British polity rather than into an English one and that its historic identity and relationship with England more resembles theirs than it does England’s.

The North East region is distinctive and different because it thinks it is. The territory has changed little for over a thousand years and the region continues to take a particular view of its history. Identity in this sense is an historical event, or a series of historical events, to do with a region’s sense of relationship to its place and its past. Some peoples never experience this relationship, or live to forget it. North East England, on the other hand, as one of our authors makes clear, has long been seen as ‘truly historical ground’. It is our hope that it remains so.

I would like to thank the contributors for agreeing to join me with this book. In writing chapters of great distinction and originality, they made my job easy. All but one directly address questions of history and identity. Mike Barke’s chapter lays the foundations of identity in the modern period. I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists who helped, and those who waived or reduced fees when we explained our ideas and intentions. Thanks as well to Simon Thraves and Noel Osborne at Phillimore, who, just like last time, allowed me to get on with it. Special thanks go to my friends from the North, particularly the Laygate Lane alumni Jim Blance, John Gray and Albyn Snowden. I’ve enjoyed the craic for a very long time.

Finally and most importantly, I thank my wife Rosie for her true intellectual friendship. She has had to live with Northumbria more than anyone born in Wessex has a right to expect.

Robert CollsLeicesterOctober 2007

Christian Kingdom

1

Northumbria: A Failed European Kingdom

DAVID ROLLASON

The kingdom of Northumbria first appears in historical writing in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which has a reference to a king called Ida who, Bede states, began to rule in 547 and ‘from whom the Northumbrian royal family trace their origin’.1 More detailed information only begins to emerge in Bede’s work with a king called Æthelfrith (592/3-616), after whose time Bede gives a reasonably coherent account of the kings of Northumbria.2 Until the 630s, however, Northumbria consisted of two kingdoms, that of Deira, south of the Tees and north of the Humber, and Bernicia, north of the river Tees. According to Bede, these two kingdoms were united by King Oswald (634-42), although there was still at least a sub-king of Deira in the 650s when King Oswine of Deira was murdered by his Bernician colleague Oswiu in 651, and a king called Œthelwald who ruled Deira from then until 655.3 As if this was a relatively recent state of affairs in his time, it may be significant that Bede felt the need to give what appears a tautologous definition of ‘Northumbrians’ as ‘the nation inhabiting the district north of the Humber’.4

The period of Northumbria’s political and military apogee seems to have been in the later seventh century through the eighth century, and this was followed by a period of political turbulence in the ninth, although we have far less historical evidence for this so that the degree of turbulence is hard to decide upon. In 866-7, at any rate, a major Viking invasion led by Ivar and Halfdan (Healfdene) captured the city of York, and resulted in the deaths of the two simultaneously reigning Northumbrian kings Ælle and Osberht, and effectively brought an end to the original kingdom of Northumbria. From then until 954, York was the centre of what historians usually call the Viking kingdom of York, the last king of which, Eric Bloodaxe, was expelled and killed in 954 and his kingdom absorbed – in at least a loose way – into the nascent kingdom of England being created by the line of the former kings of Wessex. Meanwhile, the northern parts of the kingdom of Northumbria constituted the earldom of Bamburgh, centred on the fortress of that name, which was also in due course absorbed into the kingdom of England, and the region of Lothian to the north of the Tweed which ultimately became part of the kingdom of Scotland.5

Northumbria was thus a failed European kingdom, but it may nevertheless have been a serious political unit in its time so that the reasons for its failure are of considerable interest. A brief tour of its frontiers in Bede’s time emphasises its size and importance.6

On the south, the frontier was the River Humber itself, west of which historians have generally been influenced by a poem inserted into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 942 which, in describing the liberation of Mercia from Viking dominance by King Edmund of England, gives the northern frontier of Mercia (and so by inference the southern frontier of Northumbria) as ‘Dore, Whitwell Gap and Humber river’. That Dore (Derbyshire), just to the south-west of Sheffield, was indeed on the Northumbrian frontier is confirmed by another annal, that for 829, according to which King Ecgberht of Wessex led an army ‘to Dore against the Northumbrians; and they offered him submission and concord’.7 Such meetings were often held on frontiers. Westwards again, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s annal for 922 notes that Manchester was ‘in Northumbria’, and it seems possible that the river Ribble formed the south-west frontier since in the Middle Ages it was the border between the see of York (for Northumbria) and that of Lichfield (for Mercia).8

That Northumbria extended on the west right to the coast of the Irish Sea is probable in view of the foregoing, but it is in large measure confirmed by evidence relating to Dacre, a church near Ullswater (Cumberland), where there is ecclesiastical sculpture dated to the eighth or early ninth century, and archaeological excavations have recovered what may be the remains of an early ecclesiastical site, presumably a monastery. Bede was in contact with it, for he knew the names of two successive abbots and was able to relate a miracle-story from it in some detail. This involved the cure of a young man’s diseased eye by some of St Cuthbert’s hair which had been cut off when his coffin had been opened in 698 at Lindisfarne (Northumberland) and the body found un-decayed. The monks of Lindisfarne had taken the hair ‘to give as relics to their friends’, amongst whom were evidently numbered the monks of Dacre. In addition, the early eighth-century Lives of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne record him as having been in friendship with a hermit called Herbert, whose hermitage was on Derwentwater. In view of his English name, this man was probably Northumbrian and his presence on the lake in Cumberland points to Northumbrian control of that western area.9 The occurrence of ecclesiastical sculpture in Northumbrian style even further west at Irton and Heversham is further confirmation,10 as is Bede’s statement that Edwin controlled the Isle of Man, which is hard to envisage if his kingdom had not extended to the Irish Sea coast.11 Certainly Cuthbert was closely involved with Carlisle, where he was staying with the queen of the Northumbrians in 685 when news of her husband’s defeat at the hands of the Picts became known.12

1Irton Cross, Cumberland (Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, photographer T. Middlemass)

Moving further north-west, it seems certain that Northumbria embraced Galloway, the south-west part of contemporary Scotland, for Bede refers to Whithorn, an episcopal church near the western extremity of the Galloway peninsula, as ‘belonging to the kingdom (provincia) of the Bernicians’, and having a bishop with the English (probably Northumbrian) name of Pehthelm.13 Also in Galloway was the early monastery of Hoddom (Dumfriesshire), from which ecclesiastical sculpture in notably Northumbrian style is now in the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh;14 and the great sculptured cross of Ruthwell, the decoration of which resembles sculpture from Bede’s monastery at Jarrow (County Durham) in eastern Northumbria, and which has inscribed on it an early version of the English poem The Dream of the Rood.15 There seems no doubt that Northumbrian cultural influence and ecclesiastical power was paramount in Galloway, and it is therefore reasonably certain that this area was in a real sense part of the kingdom of Northumbria.

The area between Galloway and the Firth of Clyde was not part of Northumbria, but constituted the kingdom of Strathclyde, which endured as a political entity until the early 11th century when it became part of the kingdom of Scotland. Strathclyde was a kingdom of the Britons, that is, the people who had dominated Britain at an earlier period, and whose kingdoms subsisted in Wales and south-west Britain.16 Eastwards, however, the Northumbrian frontier was certainly on the Firth of Forth where, Bede tells us, the Northumbrian Trumwine was bishop of the church of Abercorn (Linlithgowshire), just to the east of Queensferry on the southern shores of the Firth. This church, Bede noted, was ‘close to the firth which divides the lands of the English from those of the Picts’.17 Moreover, there is sculpture in Northumbrian style from Abercorn itself, and also a very fine cross in a style often compared with that of the Lindisfarne Gospels from Aberlady (Haddingtonshire) to the east of Edinburgh.18 Tynninghame, a little further south-east along the coast, was the site of a Northumbrian church and the hermitage of the eighth-century Northumbrian saint Balthere.19 The circumstances in which Northumbrian power extended to the Firth of Forth are obscure, but historians have – perhaps optimistically – interpreted a laconic two words in the Annals of Ulster for 638, which read obsessio Etin (siege of Etin), as recording a Northumbrian conquest of Etin, identified with Edinburgh.20

2Ruthwell Cross, Dumfriesshire (detail)

This tour emphasises, therefore, that the kingdom of Northumbria embraced a substantial area, not far short of that of a much more enduring kingdom, that of the Franks, ruled in the late eighth and early ninth centuries by the great Frankish emperor Charlemagne.21 In view of this, the after-life of the name Northumbria emphasises the scale of the kingdom’s failure. In the late 20th century it was possible for the now defunct Northumbrian Tourist Board to use it with reference just to the counties of Northumberland and Durham; and in the Middle Ages its meaning was equally confined, if not more so. The comes Northymbrie (earl of Northumbria) in the late 11th century controlled only the land north of the Tyne and south of the Tweed, although at some periods he had at least notional control over the lands of the Bishop of Durham between the rivers Tyne and Tees.22 The name of his earldom, which was a reminiscence of the so much more extensive kingdom of Northumbria, was perpetuated in the name of a much smaller area, the pre-1974 county of Northumberland, that is the land between the rivers Tyne and Tweed. The name of that county means ‘the land north of the Humber’, as Bede had once explained in the context of the name of the kingdom. But the county, its southern boundary many miles north of the Humber, is a tiny relict of an extensive kingdom which had ceased to exist.

Partly because of its failure we suffer from a lack of evidence as to what that kingdom’s governmental capabilities were. Although we have the vivid if somewhat anecdotal accounts of Bede and the early saints’ lives, such as those of Cuthbert, as well as the annalistic record in the Northern Annals, compared with the evidence surviving from the south of England we have virtually nothing in the way of law-codes or written documents (charters).23 Nevertheless, we can perhaps glimpse a seriously powerful kingdom.

We have fragments of evidence, for example, of what appears to have been a hierarchy of government officials, beginning at the highest level with figures whom we see in the Ecclesiastical History, as well as in Stephen’s early eighth-century Life of Wilfrid, who are referred to as ‘sub-kings’ (subreguli) or ‘princes’ (principes). Thus, when the late seventh-century King Ecgfrith was attacked by the Picts, ‘he quickly mustered a troop of cavalry and putting his trust in God, like Judas Maccabeus, set off with Beornhaeth, his trusty sub-king (audaci subregulo)’.24 Below this level we catch glimpses of senior officials called patricians (patricii), four of whom are referred to in the Northern Annals, who may perhaps have corresponded to the ‘mayors of the palace’ in the Frankish kingdom before the mid-eighth century.25 Below them again we see prefects (prefecti). In Stephen’s Life of Wilfrid, a prefect appears as responsible for the urbs of Dunbar and another for that of the unidentified site of Inbroninis, both of which were evidently suitable places for the king to imprison an important man such as Wilfrid, the influential Northumbrian churchman and Bishop of York. The prefect of Dunbar clearly possessed resources sufficient to do the job properly, for the king ordered him to keep Wilfrid ‘bound hands and feet with fetters’, which the prefect duly ordered blacksmiths to make. At Inbroninis, Wilfrid was kept ‘under guard in hidden dungeons’ under the supervision of the prefect, who is also described as a count (comes).26

Like their great Frankish contemporaries on the Continent, the kings of Northumbria were itinerant, moving from place to place in their kingdom, probably as a symbolic and also a real means of exercising and demonstrating their power, as well as a means of visiting and exploiting their landed estates.27 Bede gives the following account of the itinerary of King Edwin:

So great was his majesty in his realm that not only were banners carried before him in battle, but even in time of peace, as he rode about among his cities (civitates), estates (villas) and provincias with his thegns (ministris), he always used to be preceded by a standard bearer. Further, when he walked anywhere along the roads, there used to be carried before him the type of standard which the Romans call a tufa and the English call a thuf.28

The reference to different types of royal centres, to thegns and to the ritual aspect of the carrying of standards, suggests that this itinerary was an element in the exercise of serious, kingly power.

Moreover, it seems clear that this power was underpinned by many ‘royal vills’ (villae regales), such as Yeavering (Northumberland), and the unnamed vill where King Edwin was staying when he held a council to discuss the merits of adopting Christianity, as well as the unidentified royal vills at which Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne is said to have preached. That such royal vills were surrounded by lesser settlements is suggested by Bede’s account of the people flocking to hear Paulinus’s preaching at Yeavering ‘from every village and district’ (de cunctis viculis ac locis).29 The use of the diminutive (viculi) suggests that these villages were dependent on the royal vill of Yeavering. Yeavering, constructed in the early seventh century, was an impressive palace, even if built of timber, with a complex of halls, a substantial enclosure, an amphitheatre and a ritual building, possibly a temple converted into a church. In addition, it was not the only one in possession of the Northumbrian kings for nearby Milfield (Maelmin), which Bede tells us succeeded it as the royal centre in that part of Northumbria, seems to have been built in a similar way.30 In the south of Northumbria, York was evidently a centre to rival its continental equivalents such as Charlemagne’s great palace at Aachen in modern Germany. Indeed, the following contemporary description of the late eighth-century church, the Alma Sophia in York, has led one scholar to suggest that it may have been the model for the palace church at Aachen:31

This lofty building, supported by strong columns, themselves bolstering curving arches, gleams inside with fine inlaid ceilings and windows. It shines in its beauty, surrounded by many a chapel with its many galleries in its various quarters, and thirty altars decorated with different finery.32

That there may have been royal rituals there like those at Aachen is suggested by the 796 entry in the Northern Annals which describes King Eardwulf of Northumbria as having been ‘raised to the insignia of the kingdom (regni infulis est sublimatus), and consecrated (consecratus) in York in the church of St Peter at the altar of the blessed Apostle Paul’.33

Despite their failure to survive, it seems probable that the kingdom did use written documents – as in other kingdoms, the contribution of the Christian church. In his Life of Wilfrid, Stephen describes the dedication of the church at Ripon as follows:

Then the holy bishop Wilfrid stood in front of the altar, and, turning to the people, in the presence of the kings, read out in a clear voice the names of the lands which the kings had previously given him for the good of their souls, with the consent and signature of the bishops and all the princes (principes).34

This unquestionably refers to the existence of a charter with a witness-list, and there is a similar reference to charters in a letter which Bede wrote to Bishop Ecgberht of York.35 The fact that Bede gives precise figures for the assessment in hides of the islands of Anglesey and Man, which King Edwin conquered, suggests that the kings maintained written records of land assessments.36

As for the kingdom’s capability to mint coins, the evidence is much slighter. No Northumbrian king is known to have minted coins before Aldfrith (686-705), who issued silver pennies of quite high value, but these may have been more for prestige than for practical use. After his death, no further coins are known to have been minted until the silver pennies of Eadberht (737/8-58), from whose reign onwards there was a more or less continuous Northumbrian coinage. This declined steeply in precious metal content in the ninth century, however, resulting in the so-called stycas, which were effectively bronze coins but nevertheless produced in considerable quantities and possibly indicating substantial trading activity.37

On the face of it, it seems easy to attribute the failure of this apparently great kingdom to Viking raids and invasions. A series of sporadic raids afflicted the monasteries of Lindisfarne in 793 and Jarrow in 794, although it is not clear how destructive these were.38 In 865, however, the so-called Great Army under Halfdan and Ivar landed in East Anglia, then moved north in 866 and in a complicated series of attacks seized York, killing the native Northumbrian kings and establishing a sort of Viking kingship, at least from the later years of the ninth century (Halfdan is stated to have ruled as king from 875 to 877), which lasted until the death of the last king, Eric Bloodaxe, in 954.39 It is doubtful, however, whether the creation of this kingdom constituted the destruction of Northumbria in a real sense or whether it simply marked the emergence of a smaller successor state very similar in character. Viking kings ruled from York, which had been an important centre for the kings of Northumbria, and, like them, they were closely associated with the archbishops, their coins even having on them the name of St Peter, to whom York Minster was dedicated. Moreover, the development of York under the Vikings was not especially Scandinavian in character, as can be seen in the styles of ecclesiastical sculpture as well as in remains of buildings, including the church of St Mary Bishophill Junior, and in what we can deduce of the governmental organisation.40

3Anglo-Saxon Northumbria

To the north of the Viking kingdom of York, there seems to have been another successor state in the shape of the earldom of Bamburgh. That this was very Northumbrian in character is suggested by the paucity of Viking place-names north of the river Tees, as well as by the fact that the earls ruled from Bamburgh, an ancient Northumbrian royal seat.41 They might even have been scions of the Northumbrian royal family and the first of them, Eardwulf (c.890-912), was indeed called ‘king of the north Saxons’ by the contemporary Annals of Ulster.42 At the end of the tenth century, Earl Uhtred (d.1016) patronised the religious Community of St Cuthbert, which had moved in the late ninth century from Lindisfarne and was established by 883 at Chester-le-Street on the river Wear between the rivers Tyne and Tees, and at Durham, also on the Wear, from 995. According to the Durham monk Symeon, writing in the early 12th century, he helped with the establishment of the Community at Durham.43 There it developed as a community which, both before and after the Norman Conquest, had interests focused on the past of the kingdom of Northumbria, as is evident in its historical writings, in its claim to be successor of the church of Lindisfarne, and in the backward-looking style of ecclesiastical sculpture which it patronised, notably the decoration on the grave-cover now in the Monks’ Dormitory at Durham Cathedral.44

In the western part of the former kingdom, the kings who emerged in the tenth century are described by our sources as ‘kings of the Cumbrians’. These kings first appear with Owain, who was probably the ruler defeated along with others by King Æthelstan at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937; they continue with Dunmail (Donald), expelled in 945 by King Edmund of England who blinded his sons, and with Malcolm (d.997), who was also known as ‘king of the Britons of the North’. It appears then that these kings began to rule the North West at least as early as the early tenth century and, to judge from sources for the somewhat later history of the region, their southern frontier was as far south as the monument known as the Rey Cross (or Rere Cross) on Stainmore (County Durham) on the line of the modern A66 road from Scotch Corner to Brough. They may have been, as some scholars believe, kings of Strathclyde who had conquered western Northumbria, or they may have been indigenous kings ruling what was another successor state of the kingdom of Northumbria in Cumbria.45

From a cultural and religious point of view, Cumbria as well as the area of the Viking kingdom of York continued in much the same way as the old kingdom of Northumbria had done. The dense distribution of ecclesiastical sculpture points to rapid assimilation of the incoming Vikings to the Christian culture of Northumbria.46 Moreover, there are striking examples of the juxtaposition of pagan Viking and Christian images as if to emphasise the process of assimilation. There are possible examples of this at Lowther and Kirkby Stephen (Westmorland), although we cannot always be sure that we are seeing actual pagan images as opposed to images common to a Christian artistic tradition. In the famous and elaborate cross at Gosforth in Cumberland, however, there is no doubt. The sculptured scenes combine a representation of the Crucifixion of Christ with scenes from the end of the gods – the Ragnarok – in Scandinavian mythology. The church of Gosforth also preserves a sculptured stone, the so-called Thor’s Fishing Stone, which in representing the god Thor fishing for the World Serpent is a definite allusion to Scandinavian paganism and was also, like the cross, presumably an attempt at assimilation and acculturation. Other representations of pagan mythology on ecclesiastical sculpture are less detailed than those at Gosforth, but it seems likely that they are to do with similar themes of conversion and integration.47

If the Viking raids resulted in a continuation of the kingdom of Northumbria in a similar but fragmented form, the destruction of these as political entities was the next stage. It can best be understood in terms of the ‘heartlands’ of the former kingdom of Northumbria, that is those areas where the kings were most powerful and most active and which were the centres of gravity of the kingdom. The distribution of churches, royal sites and other evidence suggests that they were located, for the former kingdom of Deira, in the Vale of York, Ryedale, the Yorkshire Wolds and surrounding areas; and for the former kingdom of Bernicia, in the hinterland of Lindisfarne and Bamburgh, and in the coastal area north to the Firth of Forth, and in part of pre-1974 County Durham from the river Wear north to the river Tyne. For what became the area of Cumbria, the former kingdom of Northumbria’s heartland may have lain around the city of Carlisle.48

The Deiran heartland came under repeated military pressure from the kings of Wessex, who later became kings of England. They defeated the rulers of the Viking kingdom of York at the Battle of Tettenhall in 910, and in 927 King Æthelstan expelled the Viking king of York, Guthfrith, and ruled there until his death in 939, when Viking kings were re-established. Subsequent years saw a series of military attacks from the southern kings, including a campaign led by Eadred in 948 when he ‘ravaged all Northumbria because they had accepted Eric Bloodaxe as their king’. His ravaging included the church of Ripon (Yorkshire), from which he seems to have removed the relics of the great Northumbrian bishop St Wilfrid, sending them to Canterbury, perhaps as a symbol of southern political dominance over Northumbria.49

A little later, probably in the late tenth or early 11th century, the Bernician heartland in the hinterland of Lindisfarne and Bamburgh was split by what historians know as the ‘cession of Lothian’. The accounts of the written sources are various, but this area between the river Tweed and the Firth of Forth is stated to have been ceded to the Scots by King Edgar of England (957-75), on the initiative of Earl Oslac of York and Earl Eadwulf Evil Child of Bamburgh; or by Earl Eadwulf Cudel of Bamburgh, after the siege of Durham by the Scots in 1006; or as a result of the Scottish victory at Carham on the river Tweed in 1018. Whatever the truth of this, the beginnings of the creation of the Scottish border on the River Tweed in this period bisected the ancient Bernician heartland. In the west, the creation of Carlisle as a Norman fortress by King William Rufus in 1092 and the absorption of the kingdom of Strathclyde into the kingdom of Scotland earlier in the 11th century began the process of the creation of the south-western length of the Scottish border. This, too, effectively bisected the ancient heartland of north-west Northumbria around Carlisle.50

In these ways, the destruction of the kingdom of Northumbria went beyond its division into successor states. In shattering the heartlands of the ancient kingdom and in absorbing its remains into two separate kingdoms with a boundary which arguably had little respect for previous historical realities, little was left beyond reminiscence in the name of the earldom of Northumbria and then the county of Northumberland with which we began.

The medieval historians of the north, however, were intent on revivifying the Northumbrian past, at least in writing. The Community of St Cuthbert was a particular focus for such revivification, with the composition in the earlier 11th century of the text known as the History of St Cuthbert, which took the Community’s traditions back to the ancient kingdom and the church of Lindisfarne. After the Norman Conquest and the reform of the Community as the Benedictine Durham Cathedral Priory in 1083, Symeon of Durham and others systematically collected materials, and Symeon produced both his Tract on the Origins and Progress of this the Church of Durham, and his History of the Kings, tracing Northumbrian history through the inclusion of sets of annals, including the so-called Northern Annals from eighth-century York.51

This interest was driven partly by practical considerations. Durham Cathedral Priory, of which Symeon was a precentor, claimed wide estates in Durham and Northumberland (especially the territories known as Norhamshire and Islandshire, that is ‘North Durham’) on the basis that it was the successor to the church of Lindisfarne and therefore entitled to the former lands of that church.52 The history of the early kingdom of Northumbria in which Lindisfarne had been founded and its lands acquired was therefore of crucial importance, and Symeon’s task was no less than to create a ‘memory’ of those times in a monastic community which was, in fact, a new foundation. But there were other motives too, including a desire on the part of the monks and their bishops, who were continental churchmen as a result of the Norman Conquest, to associate themselves and their church with the saints and sanctity of the age of Bede; for example, at the completion of the east end of the great new cathedral of Durham in 1104, the relics of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne were translated into it and his shrine from then on became the focal point of the Cathedral. The past of the kingdom of Northumbria, its churches and its saints, was thus a matter of current importance, and Durham took a particular lead in promoting and developing it at least in the 11th and 12th centuries.53 Then as now, the past was too important not to be manipulated. Then as now, a retrospection, almost a nostalgia, was created around the past for purposes of the present which bore little relation to what the kingdom of Northumbria had really been.

1 Colgrave, B. and Mynors, R.A.B. (eds), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (revised ed. Oxford Medieval Texts; Oxford, 1991), bk 5, ch. 23. What follows is a summary of Rollason, D., Northumbria 500-1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge, 2003). References to sources and other works have nevertheless been given where appropriate.

2 Colgrave and Mynors (eds), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, bk 1 ch. 34, bk 2 ch. 2.

3Ibid., bk 3 chs 6, 23.

4 For example, Ibid., bk. 2 ch. 5.

5 For detail and full references, see Rollason, Northumbria.

6 For a fuller summary, see Ibid., ch. 2. For more detail, see Blair, P.H., ‘The Northumbrians and their Southern Frontier’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 36 (1948), pp.98-126; Blair, P.H., ‘The Bernicians and their Northern Frontier’, in Studies in Early British History (ed. N.K. Chadwick, Cambridge, 1954), pp.137-72. See also Higham, N.J., ‘Northumbria’s Southern Frontier: A Review’, Early Medieval Europe, 14, no. 4 (2006), pp.391-417.

7 Plummer, C. (ed.), Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel with Supplementary Extracts from the Others (2 vols; Oxford, 1892-9), s.a. 827 (recte 829).

8Ibid., s.a.

9 Rollason, Northumbria, pp.28-9; Colgrave, B. (ed), Two Lives of St Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life (Cambridge, 1940), pp.248-51 (ch. 28).

10 Bailey, R.N. and Cramp, R.J., Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture II: Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire North-of-the-Sands (Oxford and New York, 1988), s.n.

11 Colgrave and Mynors (eds), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, bk 2 ch. 9.

12 Colgrave (ed), Two Lives of St Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life, Bede’s vita, ch. 27.

13 Colgrave and Mynors (eds), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, bk 3 ch. 4, bk 5 ch. 23; Hill, P., Whithorn and St Ninian: The Excavation of a Monastic Town 1984-91 (Stroud, 1997).

14 Romilly Allen, J. and Anderson, J., The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland (2 vols; Balgavies, 1993), II, 439; Lowe, C.E., ‘Hoddom’, Current Archaeology, 135 (1995), pp.88-92.

15 See, for example, Cassidy, B., The Ruthwell Cross: Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art Princeton University 8 December 1989 (Princeton, 1992).

16 Kirby, D.P., ‘Strathclyde and Cumbria: A Survey of Historical Development to 1092’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian Society, n.s. 62 (1962), pp.77-94; Duncan, A.A.M., Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom (Edinburgh, 1975).

17 Colgrave and Mynors (eds), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, bk 4 ch. 26.

18 Romilly Allen and Anderson, The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland, II, pp.418-20, 428.

19 Rollason, Northumbria, pp.28 n.34.

20 MacAirt, S. and MacNiocaill, G. (eds), The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131): Part I: Text and Translation (Dublin, 1983), 121. See, for example, Kirby, D.P., ‘The Kingdom of the Northumbrians and the Destruction of the Votadini’, Transactions of the East Lothian Ant. and Field Naturalists’ Society, 14 (1974), pp.1-13.

21 See, for example, Bullough, D.A., The Age of Charlemagne (London, 1973).

22 See, for example, Lomas, R.A., North-East England in the Middle Ages (1992).

23 Rollason, Northumbria, pp.11-16.

24 Colgrave, B. (ed.), The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge, 1927), ch. 19.

25 Thacker, A.T., ‘Some Terms for Noblemen in Anglo-Saxon England c.600-900’, in Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History (ed. D. Brown, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 92; Oxford, 1981), pp.201-36.

26 Colgrave (ed.), Life of Wilfrid, chs. 36-8.

27 Brühl, C.-R., Fodrum, Gistum, Servitium Regis: Studien zu den Wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen des Königtums im Frankenreich und in den Fränkischen Nachfolgestaaten Deutschland, Frankreich und Italien vom 6. bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts (2 vols; Cologne, 1968).

28 Colgrave and Mynors (eds), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, bk 2 ch. 16.

29Ibid., bk 2 ch. 14, 13, bk 3 ch. 17.

30 Hope-Taylor, B., Yeavering: An Anglo-British Centre of Early Northumbria (London, 1977); Alcock, L., Bede, Eddius and the Forts of the North Britons (Jarrow Lecture, Jarrow, 1989).

31 Norton, C., ‘The Anglo-Saxon Cathedral at York and the Topography of the Anglian City’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 151 (1998), pp.1-42.

32 Godman, P. (ed.), Alcuin: the Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York (Oxford, 1982), lines 1509-14.

33 Arnold, T. (ed.), Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia (2 vols; Rolls Series 75; London, 1882-5), II, pp.57-8.

34 Colgrave (ed.), Life of Wilfrid, ch. 17.

35 Plummer, C. (ed.), Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica (2 vols; Oxford, 1896), I, p.415.

36 Colgrave and Mynors (eds), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, bk 2 ch. 9.

37 North, J.J., English Hammered Coinage, Volume I, Early Anglo-Saxon to Henry III, c.600-1272 (3rd edn; London, 1994).

38 Plummer (ed.), Two Chronicles Parallel, s.a.

39 Rollason, D. and Gore, D., Sources for York History before 1100 (Archaeology of York, York, 1998), pp.63-9.

40 Rollason, D., ‘Anglo-Scandinavian York: The Evidence of Historical Sources’, in Anglo-Scandinavian York, ed. R.A. Hall (York, 2004), pp.305-24, and this volume passim.

41 Rollason, Northumbria, pp.244-9.

42 MacAirt and MacNiocaill (eds), Annals of Ulster, 361. Note that the editors render the name Etulbb in the original as Ethelwald.

43 Rollason, D. (ed.), Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio atque Procursu istius hoc est Dunelmensis Ecclesie (Oxford Medieval Texts; Oxford, 2000), pp.148-9.

44Ibid., pp.lxxvii-xci; Rollason, D., ‘Symeon of Durham and the Community of Durham in the Eleventh Century’, in England in the Eleventh Century: Proceedings of the 1990 Harlaxton Symposium (ed. C. Hicks Stamford, 1992), pp.183-98; Cramp, R.J., ‘The Artistic Influence of Lindisfarne within Northumbria’, in St Cuthbert, his Cult and his Community to AD 1200 (ed. G. Bonner, D. Rollason, and C. Stancliffe, Woodbridge, 1989), pp.213-228.

45 Kirby, ‘Strathclyde and Cumbria’; Phythian-Adams, C., The Land of the Cumbrians: A Study in British Provincial Origins, AD 400-1120 (London, 1996), pp.110-22.

46 Bailey, R.N., Viking Age Sculpture in Northern England (London, 1980), passim.

47Ibid., pp.101-43.

48 Rollason, Northumbria, pp.45-52.

49 Rollason, Northumbria, pp.265-7; Plummer (ed.), Two Chronicles Parallel (D) s.a. 948.

50 Meehan, B., ‘The Siege of Durham, the Battle of Carham and the Cession of Lothian’, Scottish Historical Review, 55 (1976), pp.1-19; G.W.S. Barrow, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Border’, Northern History, 1 (1966), pp.21-42; Summerson, H., Medieval Carlisle: the City and the Borders from the Late Eleventh to the Mid-Sixteenth Century (2 vols; Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, Extra Series, Kendal, 1993); Duncan, Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom.

51 Johnson South, T. (ed.), Historia de Sancto Cuthberto: A History of Saint Cuthbert and a Record of his Patrimony (Anglo-Saxon Texts; Woodbridge, 2002); Rollason (ed.), Symeon, Libellus de Exordio.

52 Craster, E., ‘The Patrimony of St Cuthbert’, English Historical Review, 69 (1954), pp.177-199.

53 Rollason, ‘Symeon and the Community of Durham; Rollason, D., Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989), pp.225-6, 235-6.

2

‘Between the brine and the high ground’: The Roots of Northumbria

BRIAN K. ROBERTS

Introduction

Between the brine and the high ground and the fresh stream water,

Men will quake before Cunedda, the violent one.

In Caer Weir and Caer Lywelyth fighting will shake the civitates –

An encompassing tide of fire from across the sea …

His honour was maintained a hundred times before death came to our [stout] door post.

The men of Bernicia were led in battle.

These words provide a dramatic image of the troubled times between the collapse of Roman control and the appearance of stable Anglo-Saxon kingdoms under strong rulers. They are taken from verse once chanted in a British royal hall in praise of Cunedda, described as the ‘[stout] door post’ of his kingdom, Bernicia.1 Northumbria grew from intricate political alliances created by charismatic leaders, both British and Anglo-Saxon, who were able to define primitive states from the remains of the civitates or Roman local administrations. They had war bands to assist them, for they offered booty as reward. What follows develops four threads of argument that interlace like the patterns on a great Northumbrian stone cross. A first thread comprises a brief review of nature’s contribution to the regional personality, while a second considers some archaeological evidences, assessing the contexts in which these survive and what they may mean. This leads to ruminations upon the interaction between natural contrasts in landscape and culturally assessed features such as the roads and route ways. A third thread takes the discussion to the region’s post-glacial woodlands and the region-wide patterns of clearances that provided focal zones for the development of early states. The distribution of burials falling between the fifth and the eighth centuries and place-name survivals derived from Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, provide a means of exploring these ideas. A final thread focuses upon the distribution of Anglo-Saxon stone sculptures throughout the north and all four threads are drawn together in a brief conclusion looking at the roots of Northumbria. Above all, time and space, questions of chronology and distribution, provide a matrix in which to explore the past.

From Nature’s Hand