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Max Adams and Colm O’Brien, "Northumbria AD 367-867: Earth Hall, Ring Gift and Heaven’s Field" (Birlinn, 2025)
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Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very excited today because we get to go very far back in time to a fascinating world. Specifically, we're going back to the book titled Northumbria AD 367 to 867, Earth, Hall, Ring, Gift and Heaven's Field, published by Berlin in 2025. Exploring this world of early medieval Northumbri through a lot of different perspectives. We're going to be talking about archaeology, about religion, about specific people, politics. There's really all sorts here that helps us get a sense of this world that is really quite far away from us in many senses. And yet through this kind of investigation, we can actually sort of step into this world a little bit and understand what it would have been like. So I'm very pleased to have both of the authors of the book with me today on the podcast. We've got Max, Adam and Colm o' Brien here to tell us all about Northumbria. Thank you both Colm and Max, for being here.
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D
Well, thank you. It's a pleasure.
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C
Could you please each start us off by introducing yourselves a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book and do it together. Max, maybe you can start.
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A
Yeah. I was approached by the publisher about three years ago who said it's been a very long time since somebody wrote about the early medieval period in Northumbria. There are obvious precedents. Nick Hyams book in the, well, the 1980s really, and then David Rollison's 20 odd years ago. And such is the pace of change in thinking about historical geography, about place names, about, well, and new archaeology, new discoveries happening all the time, that it was clearly a good time to think about a new book about early medieval Northumbria. And I was quite busy with other projects and I thought it would be much more interesting to approach this with my friend and colleague Colm. We've worked together for many, many years and although we both have backgrounds in field archaeology, which is to say we're both excavators, we both have a love of this period, we both teach it in a lifelong learning context. But Colm is a classicist as well as an archaeologist, and I'm not a classicist by any means, but I suppose I've specialized in storytelling over the last 20 years, so it seemed to me a pretty natural partnership. And I just thought it would be more fun if we swapped ideas and bounced thoughts off each other and it would just produce a much better book.
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D
Well, yes, I came to it because as Max has just said that Max approached me there and it's not something I'd been looking for or expecting. And indeed I'm retired now, enjoying a retired life. But it seemed an interesting challenge there when I thought about it. And as Max says, he and I have worked together a lot over 10 years and more on project work and keeping it. We run a study group and we still run this study group up in Northumbria that we call the Benician Studies Group. So we've done a lot of work together, we've written papers together, journal papers together, so we knew that we could Collaborate. We knew that we had that ability to do, to work together. And, yes, it seemed like a challenge worth taking up. Max is over generous to me when he refers to me as a classicist. What he means by that is many, many years ago, I took a first degree in classics. But that does mean I can read some Latin and have a bit of a sense about approaching ancient authors there, which is a great help when studying this period of time. But like Max, I started off and had the first half of my career in field archaeology. I came into it as a digger, right at the bottom as a digger, which is a good way to come into archaeology, because you then know what it's all about. You know, archaeology is a physical discipline. It's about an engagement between somebody and the earth that's under their feet or between their fingers. So it's a good way to come into it, coming as a digger. And then when you try to understand what this can, you understand something about the limitations and the possibilities because you've experienced it physically. So I'd like to think we can. And we did bring an element of that into the book and into the working of the book there. So, yeah, we went for it.
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C
Thank you both for that lovely introduction. It's always nice to hear about sort of teamwork coming together in projects like this. And having read the book, I'm not surprised that the two of you have worked together before. It definitely shows through very clearly. There's not sort of the Max chapter, the column chapter. It's very much integrated throughout. So I'd love to start getting into the details of what you both have put together. And I think the obvious starting point goes back to the title. We are talking about Northumbria and we're talking about a very particular time period starting in 367. So why do we start at that point? What's going on with Northumbria in this moment?
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A
Well, I suppose I can answer that. There's a sort of. Well, there's a rather happy convenience here in that we both felt incompetent to take the history of Northumbria past the fall of York in 867, which heralds the beginning of the Viking age in York particularly, and the Viking or the Norse takeover of Northumbria. That's really highly specialized subject, and we didn't really want to get into that. And in any case, the book would have been enormous if we had. And then as a starting point, well, there's a rather convenient starting point. 500 years before the fall of York in 867 and that is an event called, popularly called the Barbarian Conspiracy, which occurred in 367 A.D. during the sort of last decades of Roman imperial rule in Britain, when there is clearly a crisis. Hadrian's Wall is overrun by tribes in cahoots on either side of the northern frontier. And the frontier seems to have been overrun. And the Roman emperors send a very senior general to come and sort things out. And after a while things are sorted out. But in retrospect, it signals the end really of centralized imperial control over Northumbria and indeed the whole province of Britain. And one way of looking at it is that increasingly this sort of centralized command based in Rome, with a town oriented market economy around the Mediterranean, increasingly provinces like Britannia are remote from the cause of power. Taxation is beginning to be exerted and imposed at a much more local level. There's a lot of, there's a lot of local recruitment into the imperial armies in Britain. And so in retrospect, we see this as a turning point really, after which imperial control lessens, particularly in Northumbria. And so it seemed a perfectly natural place for us to start. I don't know if, Colm, you want to add anything to that.
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D
Yeah, starting points obviously are a bit arbitrary, aren't they? And it's as good a starting point as any, because I think it's a good enough point from which to look at the way that the military infrastructure of Britannia started falling apart around the frontier regions there. What was going on much further south might be a little bit different, but certainly around the frontier regions where we are in what is now the north of England. Yes, that makes a deal of sense, doesn't it?
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C
I want to pick up though, there on Colin, what you just said. What is now the north of England. We're talking about Northumbria, as if kind of. We all know what that is. And of course today we can point to a particular place on a map and go, yeah, no, that's a thing. That's a place that has sort of an identity. Was that the case at this point? Was there an idea of Northumbria being some sort of coherent category? And if not, when do we get that?
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D
Well, in a word, no. And to give a headline, I think one might say it's an invention of Bede. But even so, I think one would have to qualify that a little bit. And this is sort of interesting really, because we talk about, I mean, our vocabulary in our language, and the thinking behind our language is about a region, a geographical region, part of this island of Britain now divided between the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland. But Bede actually did not write about Northumbria, the geographical entity. Bede wrote about the gens Nordan Himbrorum, the people of the Northumbrians. So Bede anchored it in people. Bede wrote about people, and he had to explain that the people were the people who lived north of the Humber, the River Humber that present day divides Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. The Bede starts with people there, but even so, in his own writings before the ecclesiastical history of 731. So, for instance, when he wrote his great book on natural history, De Temporum Ratione, he wrote about the Transumbrians. So the terminology, even in Bede's own day, was not entirely stable table there. Transhumbrian, of course, implies a perspective from south of the River Humber, does it not? Which makes one wonder about where that term came from and how bead writing from well north of the Humber should have used that term. But in the Ecclesiastical History, it's Nordaun, Humbren says. But underneath that, of course, we have two other identities that these days we think of as kingdoms, the two small kingdoms which, according to the standard historical model, became merged into the greater kingdom of Northumbria at the reign of King Ethelfred. So we're at the beginning of the seventh century. These are the kingdoms of Deira, centered in eastern Yorkshire and Bernicia up where we are. I'm speaking from Tyneside there. And again, so Bede wrote about the Bernician people and the Da Iran people, people. But in spite of the fact that, as I say, the standard historical idea was that these kingdoms were merged then into a greater Northumbria, it's quite clear that these identities of Bernisian peoples and De Iran peoples and the polities that underlay them had not disappeared, we might say. Well, to give three examples, if we take Stephen of Ripon there, Wilfred's biographer, writing in 712. So a little bit before the Ecclesiastical History, he wrote about King Ecgfrid as being rex deorum et Bernisiorum, king of the Dearans and the Venetians. So he clearly had the idea that there were these two entities which were still relevant there. Bede himself there, when he referred to the founding of the establishment at Whithorn in southwest Scotland of a Northumbrian bishopric, explained that Whithorn was in the province of the Benicians there. So that's Bede in that. And in fact, three times in the Ecclesiastical History, when Bede was writing about the Northumbrians, the Nordan Himbrorum. He put a little gloss. He felt he had to put a little gloss to explain to people where that was, that is to say, the land north of the Humber. So it was fluid even in Bede's day evening. And beyond Bede's Day as well, we find in the middle of the. In the 740s, Boniface, the English missionary bishop there, out in Mainz in Germany, writing letters back, still has the idea of these entities of Benicia and Deira. So the two points. First of all, we start with the people, not a territory. The territory derives from the people. So our usage in the present day has changed in that respect. And then the second point, that these identities of the Benicians and the Da Irons were still in people's minds as late as the middle of the 8th century there. So it's sort of quite interesting, and I think it's an exaggeration to say that Bede invented the Northumbrians, but, you know, let's say that Bede invented the Northumbrians.
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C
That is really interesting indeed and very helpful to understand so that we don't just kind of assume that what we mean by it now is sort of always the way that it's been. Max, is there anything you wanted to add on this point?
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A
Well, I suppose where we're coming to is an idea of how and where power is invested, isn't it? And it's a theme that runs through the book. It's a theme that runs through the book because when you look at the Roman Empire, the imperial rule in province of Britannia, and then you look at the other end, as it were, of. Of the historical time period in the 8th and 9th centuries, there aren't that many threads that seem to carry through. We. In Bede's day, we don't have any towns, for example, we don't have standing armies. We don't have sophisticated trading networks, although there are trading networks. And so it's as if, if you tug on some of the threads that you see in the Roman period, they. They run out. They don't come through. So one of the. The challenges in this book was to find threads that do carry through all the way from the Roman period, indeed the prehistoric period, the Iron Age period, right through into the Viking world. And the core theme that we've chosen is what we call territorial lordship. That is to say that power is expressed geographically and centripetally. So it was the aim of a warlord, and by Bede's day, he's calling them kings, but we'll call them warlords, tribal warlords, to exert influence over a geographical area. And in doing so, they were able to draw renders of services, military service, personal service, and food from across this geographical area. And the larger the area they controlled, the wealthier they became. This would include being able to exact tribute in the form of cattle on the hoof and sheep and honey and ale and all sorts of things. And we know that these tribal warlords travel between what we might call estate centers throughout the lands that they control, and when they arrive at a certain place, and we've been able to identify some of these places in Northumbria, we know that essentially, like medieval itinerant kings, they. They eat the local area out of house and home like a plague of locusts, and then they move on. And this territorial lordship expresses itself in all sorts of interesting ways. We don't really find kings attempting to conquer territory in the sense of creating a united kingdom. Really what they're doing is operating a sort of turf war where they want bragging rights over their neighbors. And that means that if they conquer their neighbors in war, and very often that's how it happens, they get to exact tribute from them, which is basically hard cash, bullion, scrap metal, gold, silver, all sorts of interesting things that they can recycle and give to their followers. And the larger a territory over which a warlord can exert control, the more warriors he can attract to his banner, and therefore the more areas he can raid and superimpose his will over. And so we get this idea developing of comparatively small areas of territorial control. And one can think of, oh, really very, very locally, slowly joining together, sometimes fragmenting, so that by the time Bede starts to be able to tell us about these people, real historical figures, like a great Benitian warlord, he's already able to exert control over a really very substantial area. In fact, the area that we call Benicia, which is Northumberland, north of the River Tyne, and there are kings in Deira as well. And similarly, they can exert power and tributary status over very large areas. And during the 7th century, we see kings attempting to extend their influence, their power, their control over neighboring kingdoms. And eventually these neighboring kingdoms, their ruling dynasties, are absorbed into a sort of class of earldom or dukedom, in which they can claim royal lineage. But they now belong under the umbrella of the Bernician or Da Iran, or indeed Northumbrian kings. And so you see, and occasionally these things fragment. And I suppose one of the most significant aspects of this warlord concept is that it's not the same as a state that we would understand. A state will survive the death of a king in all essence. When Northumbrian kings in the seventh century die, effectively, their power dies with them. And whoever takes over has to re establish their power from a base of practically zero, depending on the strength of the war band that they can muster on the death of the old king. And of course, it may be that they've killed the old king, it may be that they're the son of the old king. And indeed, you know, one of the key aspects of Northumbrian history as told to us by Bede, is these dynastic battles between people who come from a Deiran line and people who come from a Benistian line, and their various attempts to weaken the other dynasty and control larger areas for themselves. And I suppose the crucial thing about this is that we really only know the detail of this because of Bede. Without Bede, we really cannot construct anything like a narrative history of this early period.
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C
It is very dramatic, though, from Bede. Colm, what do you want to add?
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D
Yeah, just add that I know, Max. Absolutely right. This term warlord is really the term we should be using, because in our day and age now, the word king and kingdom have all sorts of connotations and overtones that have developed over long periods of time. And we have words like majesty and splendor, things like that. There's nothing majestic and nothing very splendid at this period of time. It's all pretty brutal. And one of the reasons, I think, that we're inclined to perhaps overstate the solidity of this kingship again, but it goes back to the way that Beadwright wrote about it. And if we take a contrast, let's say that if we look at the way that people we could call kings were described in Ireland, very, very sort of similar part of the world, barbarian world on the edge of Europe. Like we are there, we know we have a whole sort of hierarchy of kings in Ireland, sub kings under kings, kings, you know, and high king. There's all that about them. And I think. I think to a great extent, Bede might have had Northumbrian history been presented in the way that Irish history might have been. We might be seeing sub kings and under kings and all sorts of things. We get a little bit of a hint of them from Bede, but I think Bede has rather telescoped the whole thing down to elaborate or to emphasize the role of the king himself. And I think Bede has particular reasons for wanting to do this there. And as Max has just talked about, these other people in there, at an earlier stage, they may have been called kings, but I think Bede wants to do this. Bede wants to talk up kings and kingship because Bede had very clear ideas about what kingship was about. And these ideas were developed not from the Roman world or the barbarian world, but these ideas were developed from his studies on the Old Testament. And we must remember that had we been approaching, had we known about Bede anywhere, really anywhere in western Christendom, had we known about BEDE in the 8th or 9th or up to the 12th century, we would probably have known Bede not as a writer of history, but as a commentator on scriptures. And one of the parts of the scripture that Bede worked on very hard in the year 716, he wrote four books on the book of the Scriptures that he calls that in his day was known as the First Book of Samuel. This is now known as the First Book of Kings there. And that talks about King Saul. And in what is, on the face of it, an absolutely bizarre thing to say, he likened the Bernician warlord Aethelfridd to King Saul of the Israelites. Now, that's absolutely bizarre at one level of thinking, but Bede saw kingship through the lens of the kingship of God's people in Israel. And he saw Ethelfreth, which in his narrative is the first of the Bernicean kings that he writes about. I mean, there is a genealogy which will take us back to Ida in Bambara in 547, but he doesn't bring those people onto the stage. Ethelpith at the end of the sixth century, beginning of the seventh, is the first. So he conceives of Northumbrian kingship in the light of the kingship of the people of Israel that he has studied and understood through his readings and writings on the Scriptures. And I think that's why he bigs up the kingship.
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C
That's very helpful to understand because it does sometimes seem a bit odd. I mean, yes, it's very dramatic, but as you mentioned, like, it's pretty brutal, not a lot of sort of shininess going on. And parallels to the Old Testament seem a bit odd without that kind of context. And I do want to make sure that we talk about the adoption of Christianity in all of this. So what does that mean for these ideas of kind of political power? What does that mean for not just what Bede thinks leadership should look like, but more broadly, how does the adoption of Christianity fit in do you want.
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D
To start on that, Max, with Iona? Yeah. That is a huge question.
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A
That's a hospital pass, thank you.
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D
We can both have a go on this one. Bats can start it in Iona. How about that?
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A
Well, let's start. In Iona, the great warlord a of Benicia is killed by a military alliance between a rival Edwin and a king of East Anglia called Radwald. He may be the king represented by the Sutton who ship burial. The reason that this conflict comes about is that Edwin is the son of Da Iran kings and has a right to succeed to the Dearan kingship. But Abelfrith has been overlord of both Bernicia and Deira for, well, many years. In fact, Bede says both kingdoms he ruled over for 24 years. We might, in fact, in the book, we do nuance that statement, but we know that Edwin spends his exile, his youth in exile in various kingdoms. And we know that Athelfrith spends a great deal of energy trying to have him killed. Indeed, he bribes attempts to bribe Radwald to get rid of Edwin. Anyway, Radwald, thanks to his queen persuading him this isn't a good idea, decides to make war on Aethelfrith and Juliafrith is killed. Edwin becomes King of Deira and de facto overlord of all Northumbria. Now, what happens to Abelfrith's children is very interesting because as it happens, Abilfrith's wife is Edwin's sister. And one can imagine certain conversations happening. We can ask ourselves, does Edwin drop a line via a messenger to his sister saying, it would be lovely to see you again, hope the boys are fine and they're very, very welcome to stay on. Or does Ethelfreth's widow say, pack your bags, pack a treasures chest and let's do a runner? And the answer, of course, is that she does a runner because her brother is going to kill her children. There is no question of leaving them alive to create further competition between the two kingdoms. So they go into exile and we know from work done by a friend and colleague of ours called Herman Moisel, that the reason they go into exile in a kingdom called Dalrieta, which is, if one thinks of Argyleshire, the west coast of Scotland, and also the sort of northeastern part of what we now call the north of Ireland, that is the sort of zone of influence of Dalrit and kings, with their. Their great fortress and seat at a place called, well, probably Dunad in Algarshire, in Kilmartin Glen. And the Dalrytons are, are Gaelic speaking. They're thoroughly Irish in. In cultural influence and milieu. And they have a great holy man. Their great holy man is Saint Columba, who has founded a monastery on Iona sometime in the 560s and become, I suppose, one of the most charismatic and influential figures in early Christianity. And we know that the oldest of King Aethelfrith's sons, Oswald, who goes into exile with his mother and brothers and sisters aged 12, comes into the. The orbit of the then abbots of Iona sometime after Columbus death. And it's very evident both from what Bede says and from what Saint Columba's biographer, Adavnan says, that Oswald is very heavily influenced by the spiritual teaching of the abbots of Iona. But not just the spiritual teaching, the teaching about what kingship is. Because the Irish view of kingship is very particular. It's intellectual, it's rational. It involves a very strong relationship between a warlord and his holy man or his holy people. And the idea is that good kings are good to the Church. They can look forward to an everlasting place at God's side in heaven, which rather contradicts the pagan idea. And they can also look forward to their children being legitimized as successors by the Church. Now, this is very powerful. It's powerful intellectually, it's powerful imaginatively, and it's backed up by the power of the written word, which Irish Christianity is very sophisticated in.
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D
So.
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A
When, when Oswald returns and takes part in the overthrow of his uncle Edwin, he promises to bring a bishop from Iona so that Northumbria will, as it were, found a daughter house of the Ionian mission. And we know famously, of course, that this first foundation is made on Lindisfarne holy island, which sits off the coast of Northumbria on a tidal island which is cut off twice a day, but within sight of the ancestral seat of the Northumbrian kings at Bamborough. And from then on, with a short break, Northumbrian kings, and indeed English kings, are Christian kings in a hybrid relationship with both Ireland and with Rome. And perhaps Colin wants to take up the point at which that hybrid Christian kingship develops.
- [32:59]
D
Yeah, and actually Bee has several sort of little vignettes and little stories which put across the lesson and be this explicit about this. History is about writing good stories to give good lessons to good people there about the working relationship between Oswald and his bishop Aidan and others which are really putting across the idea that a good king, good king is one who does what his bishop tells him there. So that working relationship there between the warlord and the holy Men which Max has just referred to. Yeah, you can see that at work. Indeed. And then the. The Irish derived the. The Iona Irish. Iona was a foundation at one removed from Ireland, then that centered on Lindisfarne, was the dominant strand of kingship, the dominant strand of Christianity in Northumbria until the 660s. Now, I had to qualify that in a minute by referring back to Edwin. But within this island then there was another strand of Christianity which had already appeared in southeast England in Kent in 596when the Pope, Gregory I, Gregory the Great, sent the missionary Bishop Augustine and people on a mission to Kent. So a Christianity sent direct from Rome was already there in southern England. And then when the pagan Edwin of Deira married there, Ethelware, the daughter of the Kentish king and queen, who were Christian, a Roman strand of Christianity appeared in Northumbria with Paulinus as its leader, as its bishop, as an offshoot from Canterbury, as an offshoot from the Kentish mission, the Roman Church there. And at the death of Edwin and the overrunning of the kingdom by Penguin and Cadwallen, then Edwin's widow and the children and Paul Linus retreated back down to Kent. And whatever Christian infrastructure had been built up at that stage was lost. Except Bede tells us that James the Deacon hung on somewhere around Catterick there. So when Oswald brought Aidan across from Iona, there, this is introducing the Irish strand of Christendom. But the Roman strand of Christendom really didn't make a lot of headway in England for a couple of generations, really. It never really broke out of the south of England. But from the 650s we find people in Northumbria getting themselves interested in the continent of Europe. And the two names we have in particular that we can talk about are Wilfrid the Great, Bishop, Abbot and great everything, really. And Benedict Bishop, who was the founder of Bede's own monastery, who in 653 traveled onto the continent of Europe. Wilfred was just a youth at the time, 18 years old, Bishop was a little bit older and they traveled through France. Wilfred stayed on, for they were headed for Rome, but Wilfred stayed on in Lyon at the court of the archbishop for a while. He then went on to Rome. He studied in Rome. There he got the patronage of Archdeacon Boniface, who introduced him to all sorts of things, taught him in particular the Roman rules about how you calculate the date of Easter. He taught him canon law there. And then Wilfred started coming back, spent three years in the household of Animundus the archbishop in Lyon again before he Came back to England. We don't know the data exactly, but it'll be getting on from 660 in a long trip. Which put in modern terms, Bede spent his gap year, his higher education and his internship there in Gaul and Rome, learning all about these things. Then came back to Northumbria, well educated in the Roman stand of Christianity, got the patronage, secured the patronage of all of Osweu's son, Oswiu, by then the king in Northumbria, Osaw's son Alfred there, who was sub king in Deira, and started building up a power base from there. And then Benedict Bishop had been doing a lot of traveling, but then in the 670s he appeared again on the scene in the reign of King Edgewood, the beginning of the reign of King Edgewood, and got the patronage and got landing downwards from King Edgwyd to set up the religious house, first at Wearmouth and then at Jarrow. And so the monastery, we refer to it now as the monastery of Wearmouth, Jarrow, Bede refers to it as one monastery on two houses. And so Wilfred's establishments, particularly at Ripon and Hexham there and Bishop's establishment at Weymouth and Jarrow, really spearheaded a strand of Christendom there that did come direct from the Roman period there and by the, well, Weymouth and Jarrow founded a little bit later on. So the Roman stand of Christianity was there in Northumbria from about 660. And it was becoming problematic. And the king Oswe decided to sort this out. And this, of course, is the context for the famous Synod of Whippy, when this was all argued about. And the focus that Bede gives to the argument is about how you calculate the date of Easter. But it was more widely about what tradition of Christianity the kingdom of Northumbria should follow. Should it continue to follow that Irish strand of Christianity there, or should it turn around and look to the mainstream of Western Europe there? And against the odds and I guess against everybody's expectations there, Oswe, who turned his back on 30 years of tradition in his own kingdom. And Oswald himself had of course, been brought up in Iona, younger brother of Oswald that Max has already mentioned, and then said, okay, we're going to follow the Roman traditions. So that's how all that washes out. And you've got those two religious traditions working in Northumbria. The Irish tradition was never entirely lost there, but the Roman tradition became sort of dominant.
- [40:09]
C
Okay, this is really helpful to understand both in terms of obviously answering my question about Christianity, but you've also both laid out a whole bunch of other things there that really help us understand Northumbria in this context as not. I mean, obviously, to some extent being a backwater in the kind of larger European picture. But there's a lot going on in Northumbria. Right. As you said, Bede is on a whole gap year in education to Europe. There's these discussions happening about what the future should be of religion, like Holy island today might be sort of hard to get to, but clearly is sort of more in the center of things than we might expect. So that's very helpful to understand the sort of context that Northumbria is operating in at this point and kind of why it's an important place and why these discussions are being held. I mean, if it's not important, why bother talking about which version of Christianity to adopt? Right. So then if we move forward in time, we get to a point, though, of some of that power sort of seeming to go away, because as we move forward, we get to hearing more about names like Mercia or London becoming bigger deals in the history, and we stop hearing as much about the centre of things being Northumbria. So how do we get to that point of Northumbrian power waning?
- [41:21]
A
I suppose Bede tells us that after a famous battle in 679 and then the death of King Ecgfrith in ignominious circumstances in pictland in 685, that the Northumbrian kings remained powerful, but the extent of their power drew its horns in, as it were, to sort of narrower boundaries. And it's obvious that from the late 7th century, powerful kings are emerging in Mercia. And certainly after the 680s, Northumbria is never really able to exert control anywhere south of the River Humber. And of course, historians reading Bede are have to struggle with the problem that after about 700, Bede stops being so interested in the development of Northumbrian kingship. He's sort of more interested in church affairs at that time. And he doesn't really tell us very much about the fortunes of Northumbrian kings. Partly, of course, because some of those are contemporaries of his, he knows them and he has to be a little bit discreet. He hints at troubled times and things like that. And then, of course, in 735, a year or a few years after he's completed his masterwork, the Ecclesiastical History, which is, you know, the first great English history, he dies. And for the Northumbrian historian, it's really the end of history, because the Anglo Saxon chronicles interests are much more focused on southern Britain. The Mercian kings, powerful though they are throughout the 8th century, immeasurably more powerful than they had been before. They don't seem to write their own history down. So we sort of drop out of the historical narrative, really. And it's always been tempting to look at the list of Northumbrian kings after Bede and look at the sheer numbers of them and how many of them seem to die in unpleasant circumstances and see the sort of dynastic failure of Northumbrian kingship. But various new strands of evidence are beginning to suggest that there's another narrative going on, or at least that we've over egged this idea of the end of Northumbrian power. First of all, King egfrith's successor in 685 is a man called Alfrith, who is a sapiens, a highly literate intellectual man brought over from Iona where he's been in exile, is installed as the Northumbrian king. And although he comes from the Bernician line, he seems to have an orbit that's really concentrated in East Yorkshire. And East Yorkshire seems to be a place particularly centered on York, where trade is reviving, trade with continental Europe is reviving under the auspices of what seemed to be a group of Frisian merchants. Now, althret is that Alfred is interesting a because in a sense, Bede isn't interested in him. But we have hints at Alfred's power and his interest in continental Europe and his interest in maintaining links with colleagues further south and in Ireland. And one of the clues that's emerged in the last, well, few decades really, is the coinage, the silver coinage that Alfred has produced. These are tiny, tiny coins weighing about one and a quarter grams each. They're made of silver, pretty good quality silver. They carry a portrait, a stylized portrait of King Aldrith. And over the years, 34 of these have been found. Well, 34 tiny silver coins maketh not a global economy. However, numismatics has developed over the last, well, few generations really, to become a very sophisticated, highly effective means of providing an alternative narrative to the histories. And the numismatists have crunched the numbers, they've crunched the sort of Bayesian probabilities on these coins. And because coins have two sides and each side is created by a die, effectively a stamp between which the blank coin is pressed, those designs vary through time because the stamp wears out. And we know that the sorts of stamps being used by early medieval coin moneyers wear out after a few thousand coins and so if it was the case that all Frith's coins had matching sides and there was only one design in 34 coins, we would suspect that these are a very small issue, possibly even ceremonial or as gifts, but not evidence of the economy. However, these 34 coins give us numbers which suggest that Alfrith did in fact produce something like 2 million silver penny coins during his reign. Well, that is an economy, that's currency. That means he's trading. And so if it's the case that a Northumbrian king who otherwise doesn't look very powerful, is capable of producing a very serious minted coinage, in fact the best coinage in Britain at the time, then it leads us to believe that the narrative of decline is really not quite as convincing as we thought it was. And indeed, numismatics pick up that same story throughout the 8th century, when Mercia is very powerful kingdom under two extremely long lived kings. Avalbard, who reigns for 41 years, and his almost immediate successor, King Offa, the famous King Offa, who built the dyke, who reigns 39 years. They are an extremely dominant dynasty and yet Northumbrian kings are, some of them are surviving for 20 years on the throne. They're producing sophisticated coinage in large numbers. And so we have to start changing that narrative and allowing for the fact that history is being silent on a Northumbria, which, north of the Humber, and certainly in what we would now think of as southern Scotland, below the River Forth, is still a very, very powerful kingdom. It's intellectual, its ecclesiastical and its military reach are still substantially intact, even if we don't have a historian of the rank of Bede to tell us as much about them as we would like.
- [48:27]
D
Can I add to that?
- [48:27]
C
Yeah, of course, please.
- [48:30]
D
I mean, what Max says about the coinage is absolutely fundamental. I mean, this is the. If we ask what's new around in our understanding of this period of time since the books that we referred to earlier on were written, the coinage is a large part of it. The work of the numismatist has got to such a stage that we can now, we've had the good fortune to be able to try and build in the work that they've been doing into creating some, some narrative of a Northumbrian history beyond the time of Bede. And so we think now we're not falling off the end of a cliff. The other aspect to that, if we're thinking about what was going on in Northumbria, or against the idea that it become politically weak or militarily weak, is if we think about the extent to which people from Northumbria were engaged with the continent of Europe and the mainstream of intellectual, religious and intellectual and political traditions in the. On the continent of Europe. And we can see sort of continuing engagement. We can take that back to the time of Wilfred. I mean, Wilfred interfered. I'm going to say interfered. Wilfred interfered in the dynastic politics of Merovingen Gaul, and nearly came to a sticky end because of that there. And towards the end of the 6th century, we find the missionary priest and Bishop Willibrod then going across into Frisia there, the northern part of the Netherlands, as it would be now going into Frisia, taking mission out into Frisia. We know that Bede's abbotts kept in touch with the continent of Europe, kept traveling there. 716. His abbot Chailfrith, his abbot and his great teacher Chailfrith then left carrying with him a great Bible book that he had written and done all the textual scholarship on in 716 to take to the Pope as a gift. He died en route in Langres in northeastern France. But other people from his entourage continued the journey and presented the gift to the Pope. And we have the Pope's letter of thanks still survives back to the abbot in Wearmouth Jarrow. On that we know that in the middle of the seventh, the eighth century, Boniface we've referred to as not Northumbrian, but Boniface in Mainz and his successor Lool. We have letters surviving from them writing back to the abbot at Weymouth Jarrow, saying, send us the works of Bede and shopping list. So we know that by the middle of the seventh century, the works of Bede were being exported onto the continent of Europe and read on the continent of Europe and being used by these missionary priests and bishops in their works to extend Christianity and to develop Christianity within what is now Germany there. So that speaks rather highly of a sort of an intellectual tradition that is still continuing on that's going on. It's not quite under the radar, but sort of under the radar. And then of course, if we go a bit later on, pardon me, we come to the great figure of Alcoin there, Alcohen, the churchman born in York there, who was educated in York when edgewith former pupil of Bede was the archbishop in York. And Alcuin, as we know, then met Charlemagne himself and was taken up by Charlemagne and appointed by Charlemagne as head of the. The schools headed the sort of intellectual and tradition of learning at the center of Charlemagne's kingdom. Well, there we have about there, we have a Northumbrian at the head of the center of Charlemagne's kingdom towards the end of the 8th century. Well, that's pretty good, isn't it?
- [52:58]
C
Yeah, those are definitely some useful correctives to the myth there. We love some myth busting here. So thank you both for that. And it's actually on that theme. I'd love to ask what might end up being our penultimate question for the discussion, which is going up to, as you said, the end date of the book, 867, kind of a very clear one. We've got Vikings in York, so very, very clear on the historical record what's going on at this point. But the myth that often comes, I think, before that is almost the idea that this invasion was in some way inevitable. That kind of Northumbria was waning in power, which you both have just explained why we should not trust that as much. But even if we put that aside, that kind of the 800s leading up to 867 was just sort of disaster after disaster for Northumbria. And so the kind of Vikings were the very last straw that broke the camel's back type thing. How much does that myth hold up?
- [53:54]
A
Well, the picture that we've been able to draw, I think is much more nuanced than that now for various reasons. First of all, we know from place name studies and from some slightly more subtle textual references that survive from later but can be retrospectively fitted onto this period, that what we call a sort of Northumbrian ecclesiastical empire has developed across southern Scotland, northern England, north of the Humber. And the place names tell us that Anglian, that is to say, English speaking influence has spread throughout that area. We have substantial church foundations, we have hints of travel and trade, particularly coastal travel and trade. And in really what becomes the core area of Northumbrian kingship, which is to say the old kingdom of Deira, East Yorkshire, York, down to the Humber. We know that some of the new developments in statehood, this radical new idea of medieval statehood that develops in Mercia, western Mercia particularly, is also spreading north of the Humber. Now, what's going on in Mercia is that Mercian kings are trying to control a very, very large disparate area. Essentially the whole of central England, bordered on the west by Wales, on the south by Wessex, on the east by East Anglia, and on the north by Northumbria. That's a huge area of the Midlands in between. And they do so by, as it were, re engaging with the Roman road network and placing people in key Positions in key places as really local territorial lords who are also state functionaries. And it's the place names that are giving this away. The work of John Blair, Ann Cole and many others has shown how some of the place names that, that are being applied in the 8th century are administrative place names. They're functional place names, places where things are happening because of a relationship between local people and the kings. Well, this system of naming places as part of the development of a state administrative apparatus is spreading north of the Humber, particularly in East Yorkshire, in the old kingdom of Deira. And it's in Deira also that by far the largest numbers of 8th century Northumbrian coins are being found. So really between the Tyne and the Humber, the rivers Tyne and Humber is where it's at for a sort of modern state based Northumbrian kingdom. North of that there seems to be a much more traditional, very ecclesiastically based imperial colonial rule going on. We don't quite understand it, we don't, we haven't got there yet, but we, we suspect this is happening and then this is happening against the background, which of course is one of the famous, the most famous entries in English history. The, the entry in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle for 793 in which, in which fiery dragons are seen in the sky and portents tell of dire events and the heathen attack Lindisfarne, the first great raid on a Northumbrian monastery. Alcuin tears his hair out over the disaster. It's seen as a divine retribution for a fall in moral and spiritual standards in Northumbria. It's immensely dramatic and heralds the beginning of the Viking age. Well, from 793 to get to 867, when Diera falls to a Viking army, ought to be a period of decline and weakness. And to some extent it is evidenced by the fact that increasingly Norse raiders are able to pick off Northumbrian monasteries. Very, very wealthy Northumbrian monasteries, monasteries full of bling, full of things that can be sold, full of enslavable men. And it seems that Northumbrian kings are not able to protect the church from the predations of Norse raiders. Well, that's dire, no question of that. Even so, I think we can say that the most dire reading of that, which is that Northumbrian royal power collapses in the 9th century, is an exaggeration because we see these other things going on, we see a coin economy, we see successful monasteries inland thriving. So it's a nuanced picture and I suppose the point one has to recognize, and it has parallels with the Norman conquest in 1066, is that when in 865, the so called Micklehaven Hera, the great heathen army, arrives in East Anglia from the continent, it used to be thought that this was probably, well, a few thousand at most, soldiers, and that they're able to conquer some of the English kingdoms because the English kingdoms are so weak. Well, we now know through archaeology that this great heathen army was indeed a great army, numbering in the more than 10,000, vastly bigger than any army that any English king could muster. They are armed to the teeth, they're battle hardened veterans, they know exactly what they're doing, they understand, they understand how to get anywhere in England because they're also traders, they know the navigable rivers, they know the Roman road network. And so when they turn up in York, despite resistance from Northumbrian kings, such is the technological and military sophistication and the sheer numbers of this Norse army, that it's really inevitable that no English army can stand against them. Until, of course, famously, and this is the point at which the Anglo Saxon Chronicle takes over, Alfred makes his great comeback 10 years or so after this. And then from then on, of course, history is written by Wessex kings and the Northumbrians and the merchants are absolutely written out of English history.
- [60:53]
C
And that's why we need this kind of history to make sure we don't fall into those traps. Now, Colin, was there anything you wanted to add?
- [61:01]
D
I suppose in the. Yeah. When we come to the later period up towards the end there, again, it's easier for us to see what's. And to understand what's going on within Deira, the southern part of the kingdom, because of the sort of coinage that Max is talking about, which doesn't get a strong distribution up further north, beyond the Tyne, into the Courland of Panicia. So it's easier for us to understand that than it is for us to understand what is continuing to go on in Northumbria. But I suppose one of the cautionary things one would have to say, although people often sort of assume that all the monasteries were trashed there in Northumbria, that's not necessarily quite the case. I mean, the evidence for Viking trashing of Northumbrian monasteries is actually a bit limited. And I think we shouldn't necessarily assume that that sort of religious, intellectual life and whatever economic life that is going on there had been completely trapped. And of course, the great survivor is the monastery of Lindisfarne. And that takes us, that takes us through into the era that, that we've not dealt with. But insofar as we can see something that's still robust and still working and still continuing on even beyond the period at which we finished there, we look to what became called the community of St. Cuthbert there as a core power player, really in this period of time.
- [62:56]
C
Yes, definitely. Lots of Northumbria history that continues though, as I think it was. Max, you mentioned earlier, no one book could do all of them. So that does take us to the end of the fascinating period that this book covers. Leaving me with just a final question for each of you of what you might be working on next. A column, I assume, fun retirement projects. I don't know, catching up on sleep after all this research. I don't know what you're up to next.
- [63:20]
D
I'm certainly not, certainly not intending onto working on another book. I mean, there's life to get on with. Well, Max and I still run our study group, which keeps us engaged mentally and keeps us engaged in this period of time. And we have some outstanding commitments in the sense that we have a certain amount of project work that we've already done that then needs bringing to completion. And we're talking journal articles here, we're not talking whole books. And the one I'm focusing on at the moment is that we did a piece of work, we did some geophysics, some very spectacular geophysics, as it turns out, at one of the Lindisfarne derived monasteries along the River Tweed of Carham. So we have a study of Caram to work on and then we have carried out a project over some years in Northwestern Ireland, County Donegal, on early monasteries. And some of that is published, we have a few papers from that, but some of it remains to be remains yet for us to get to grips with and publish. So there's stuff to, you know, for me to tick over.
- [64:37]
C
Yes, certainly plenty to keep you busy with. Max, anything you want to add?
- [64:41]
A
Well, my next project, I don't have the luxury of retirement yet, but my next project was a book called Doomsday Walking. So over the last three years, in between writing chapters for the Northumbria Book, I've been walking a thousand miles through 10 or more of the English counties that are described in the Doomsday Book of 1086, reflecting on the England of a thousand years ago, the effect that the Norman Conquest had on the English and on England, and also, inevitably, like J.B. priestley in the 1930s, reflecting on the England of today and where we are at in our historical trajectory. So that's kept me very busy. And that will be coming out next September 2026.
- [65:37]
C
Well, certainly quite a lot that you both are working on. So a best of luck with all of those projects. And of course, while you are working on them, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Northumbria AD 3672867, Earth Hall, Ring Gift and Heaven's Field, published by Berlin in 2025 column. And Max, thank you both for joining me on the podcast.
- [66:00]
A
It's a pleasure.
- [66:01]
D
Well, thank you.