2.1.1 Years 867 and 954
In modern historiography, Northumbria’s demise is most likely to be assigned to either 867 or 954. King Ælla had led the Northumbrian defenders to defeat at the battle of York, on 21 March 867, while 954 marked the death of Erik, last independent Scandinavian ruler in eastern Northumbria. Both points are fittingly dramatic, well suited for inclusion in the kind of exciting historical reconstructions that attract the most attention from the wider public. The fall of Ælla was a tale that would be told and retold in the literature of both England and Scandinavia later in the Middle Ages, and today it remains one of the most famous early medieval events in popular imagination, a version having been recounted in the 1958 Kirk Douglas film The Vikings. The excitement of the event has been difficult to escape from. Indeed David Rollason agreed with the Chronicon ex Chronicis annal and declared it to mark ‘theend of Northumbria’.76 By contrast, television historian Michael Wood, quoting the strong words of Wallingford, presented Erik in his In Search of the Dark Ages as the last ‘free ruler’ of both the Northumbrians and the Scandinavians of England.
2.1.2 York and Bamburgh
The two dates also represent two perspectives about the nature of Northumbria. Ælla and Erik can be made to fit two different views: the former, the ethnically-English polity that continued to be ruled by Northumbrian earls, the family of Eadwulf of Bamburgh; the latter, a reduced kingdom, ruled by Scandinavians.77 The rise of the term ‘kingdom of York’,
originating in the works of Collingwood and Stenton, has strengthened such a perspective in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.78 The York polity had been Whitelock’s ‘Danish kingdom of Northumbria’,79 but for Rollason in 2003 the York kingdom was just one of
present (which is, after all, considerably more hierarchial and where, for all but a few, there is little or no personal involvement in collective decision-making).
76
Rollason, Northumbria, 215.
77
A point of note is that the account of Northumbrian history in De Northymbrorum Comitibus had been ignorant of the early ‘Bamburgh family’, and saw late–tenth-century Bamburgh family as the successors of Erik, not Ælla; yet De Northumbria post Britannos, which did know about Eadwulf, very much presented Eadwulf’s family and not the Scandinavians as the successors to Ælla.
78 For instance, W. G. Collingwood, Scandinavian Britain (London, 1908), chapter 4; F. M. Stenton, William the
Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans (New York, 1908), 7, and id., Types of Manorial Structure in the Northern Danelaw (Oxford, 1910), 3, 85. Collingwood uses the term ‘sub-kingdom of York’ in reference to a passage in Heimskringla, though otherwise calls the kingdom ‘Northumbria’, for which see Collingwood ‘The Battle of Stainmore in Legend and History’, TCWAAS 2 (1902), 231-41, at 236.
79
several successor states, including not only the ‘earldom of Bamburgh’ but also the
‘Community of St Cuthbert’ and ‘Cumbria’. So rather than being any kind of continuity, the ‘kingdom of York’ can also be construed as a separate, break-away polity. In this
perspective, the honour of being true successor could plausibly be given to the family of Bamburgh earls. For some modern historians, being ethnically English gave them legitimacy for this role.80 It has also encouraged historians to see a revival of the Bernicia–Deira fault line in Northumbrian history, and or at least to describe matters in such terms.81 Today, it is not unusual to see references to the tenth- and eleventh-century ‘earldom of Bernicia’ or the ‘earldom of Deira’, despite there being little justification for such terminology in this era.82 Likewise, ‘the kingdom of York’ can be used interchangeably with that of ‘Deira’.83 Notwithstanding these developments, the most common approach remains to treat the rulers of the settled Scandinavians as the successors of Ælla.84
The differing emphases expose the indecisiveness in the historical evidence used by modern historians. Study of the Norse kings in Northumbria and elsewhere in the British Isles has been relatively intensive in recent years and much of it has even prioritised early sources to reach more reliable conclusions. Treatment of the wider political context in the immediate post-Viking era of Northumbrian history has however tended to be very limited, and the biggest discussions of the Northumbrian kingship have relied on superficial readings of texts produced in the Anglo-Norman era. The wider political outline is necessary however to understand anything else about tenth- or eleventh-century English history, at least north of the Trent.
80 For instance, Duncan, Scotland, 87–88, Kapelle, NCN, 9–10; L. R. Laing and J. Laing, Anglo-Saxon England
(London, 1979), 137.
81
R. Fletcher, Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England (London, 2002), 40–41.
82 E. A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England (Oxford, 1867–1879),
I, 327, 374, 478;
Barrow, SNMA, 61; Barrow, Kingdom, 135; Fletcher, Bloodfeud, 205–07; these days the distinct identities of Yorkshire and the ‘North-East’ may also be influential; similarly D. M. Hadley, ‘“Hamlet and the Princes of Denmark”‘, in D. M. Hadley and J. D. Richards (eds), Cultures in Contact (Turnhout, 2000), 107–32, at 114.
83
P. H. Sawyer, ‘The Last Scandinavian Kings of York’, NH 31 (1995), 39–44, at 39; Anglo-Norman writers would use the terminology, but could get their meaning confused (Munimenta Gildhallae, II, 625) or mixed up (Wallingford, 54).
84
For instance, D. M. Hadley, The Vikings in England (Manchester, 2006), 37–54; Downham, Viking Kings, 71– 82.