This book deals with the rise and fall of the kingdom of Northumbria. It examines the mechanisms of ethnic, political, social and religious change which, beginning after the end of the Roman Empire, welded the large and disparate area between the Humber and the Firth of Forth into one of the most powerful kingdoms of early medieval England, and those which led to its disintegration and its replacement by political structures of northern England and southern Scotland. The story is set in a wider European context so that the history of Northumbria is seen as paradigmatic for an understanding of state formation and religious and cultural change in the early medieval world. Full attention is given to archaeological and art-historical material, and the extent to which narrative sources were shaped by sectional interests and created imagined visions of the past.
List of illustrations; List of figures; List of maps; Preface; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Northumbria: map for general reference; Part I. The Kingdom of Northumbria: 1. Kingdoms, peoples and nations: Northumbria in context; 2. The kingdom of Northumbria: frontiers and heartlands; Part II. The Creation of Northumbria: 3. The Northumbrians: origins of a people; 4. Culture and identity in pre-Viking Northumbria; 5. The framework of power: government, aristocracy and the church; Part III. The Destruction of Northumbria: 6. The Northumbrian 'successor states' - (a) The fragmentation of Northumbria, 866/7-c. 1100; (b) The Viking kingdom of York: political transformation?; (c) The Viking kingdom of York: ethnic transformation?; (d) The Viking kingdom of York: cultural transformation?; (e) North of the river Tees: the 'liberty' of the community of St Cuthbert and the earls of Bamburgh; (f) Cumbria; 7. The English and Scottish impact: partition and absorption of the Northumbrian 'sucessor states' - (a) The west Saxon kings and the kings of England; (b) The kings of Scots and the origins of the Scottish border; (c) The Norman kings of England; (d) The shadow of the past; References; Index.
