The Northumbrians: North-East England and Its People: A New History

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The dates for the Kingdom of Northumbria are often given as 654-954 CE; 654 CE as the date Oswiu (r. Both were made subjects of the Kingdom of Wessex between 825-829 CE in the reign of Egbert of Wessex (r. Especially after 793, raids, gifts, and trade with Scandinavians resulted in substantial economic ties across the North Sea.

There were raids that extended into that area, but no sources mention lasting Norse occupation and there are very few Scandinavian place names to indicate significant Norse settlement in northern regions of Northumbria. During the ninth and tenth centuries, there was an increase in the number of parish churches, often including stone sculptures incorporating Scandinavian designs.The names Deira and Bernicia are likely British in origin, for example, indicating that some British place names retained currency after the Anglo-Saxon migrations to Northumbria. Northumbrian hegemony over northern Britain is dealt a painful blow when King Ecgfrith is killed by Pictish forces at the battle of Nechtansmere. In the time of Bede, there were five languages in Britain: English, British, Irish, Pictish, and Latin. Aethelfrith, grandson of Ida, expanded his kingdom through military conquest and repopulating formerly British regions with citizens from Bernicia.

Northumbria ceased to be an independent kingdom in the mid-tenth century when Deira was conquered by the Danes and formed into the Kingdom of York.In the early twentieth century, historians identified Eric of York with the Norwegian king Eric Bloodaxe, although more recent scholarship has challenged this association. The party applied to stand in the 2021 Hartlepool by-election, but because its Electoral Commission registration was pending, its candidate, former Labour MP Thelma Walker, stood as an independent. A king of Bernicia, Ida's grandson Æthelfrith, was the first ruler to unite the two polities under his rule. Cuthbert and the castles, hills and crumbling Roman ruins that remain far from the smog and soot of industrial Tyneside and Wearside.

CE), considered the first serious work on the history of Britain and earning Bede the epithet `Father of English History'. The devastating Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793 marked the beginning of a century of Viking invasions that severely limited the production and survival of Anglo-Saxon material culture. In 866 Ivar the Boneless captured the lands between the Humber and Tees (former Deira) and founded Scandinavian Kingdom of York. The notion that North-East England has been overlooked, patronised, forgotten and misunderstood runs through Dan Jackson’s The Northumbrians, a welcome examination of the last 2000 years of history in this seemingly peripheral corner of England.In what would have been southern Bernicia, in the Cheviot Hills, a hill fort at Yeavering Bell contains evidence that it was an important centre for first the British and later the Anglo-Saxons. At least four of the greatest Illuminated Manuscripts – The Book of Durrow, The Codex Amiatinus, The Lindisfarne Gospels, and The Westminster Abbey Bestiary – all come from Northumbria as did two of the greatest scholars of the medieval world.

Oswiu then claimed Deira and unified the two kingdoms as the single entity of Northumbria in 654 CE. Parts of Northumberland were divided into liberties and shires, which, like Durham, were often exempt from the writ of the King. Although the monasteries flourished during this time, the government was almost continuously unstable. A Scottish army defeats the forces of Uhtred, Earl of Bamburgh, at Carham on the Tweed, sounding the death knell for the Northumbrian kingdom. The Northumbrian hegemony over northern Britain, won by Ecgfrith's predecessors, had begun to disintegrate.These differences in the practice of Christianity may have played a part in the unification of Bernicia and Deira under Oswald's successor, Oswiu. A chronicler recorded: "On the 8th June, the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God's church by rapine and slaughter. Oswald had beaten back an offensive by Penda during his reign but, during Oswine's, Penda took parts of the southern kingdom without any opposition. Oswine refused to fight, disbanded his army, and sought refuge with one of his earls who betrayed him to Oswiu and he was executed. Nineteenth-century Tyneside was a ‘sort of Dallas or Dubai’ or even Florence of the Industrial Revolution, ‘both entrepreneurial and highly literate’ (78); a centre of innovation, printing and study which welcomed many great figures including Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Jean Paul Marat, Eça de Queirós, Oscar Wilde, Yevgeni Zamyatin, George Bernard Shaw and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others.