The King in the North

The first principle to grasp here is that water, for all the dangers of shipwreck and piracy and the vagaries of wind and wave, was a faster and more secure medium on which to travel than land. The second is to understand that Britain’s coasts and her hundreds of islands were not isolated by the sea; they were connected by it. It is wrong to think

The monk Bede, writing in the year 731, knew that the Earth was round, that seasons changed with latitude and that tides swung with the moon’s phases.

The status of potential kings, nobles of sufficiently high birth, came with the Anglo-Saxon epithet ‘atheling’. It was not an equivalent to the modern concept of the heir to the throne, because on the death of an Early Medieval king all bets were off; it rather encoded the right to be considered a possible legitimate king of the future—a future whi

Oswald’s historical significance is greater even than the sum of his parts. He forged a hybrid culture of Briton, Irish, Scot and Anglo-Saxon which gave rise to a glorious age of arts and language symbolised by his foundation of the monastery on Lindisfarne and the sumptuous manuscripts later crafted there by Northumbria’s monks. His political lega

On the other side of the North Sea/Channel famous Frisian trading centres existed at Dorestad on the Rhine and Quentovic (another wic name; probably sited at Montreuil on the River Canche). Most of the early wic sites probably owed their origins to markets held periodically on beaches, where opportunistic Frisian traders could haul their boats up b

Anglo-Saxon warlords did not name heirs; kings were chosen by the political elite from a pool of athelings, those whose blood and personal attributes entitled them to be considered;

Kent was unlike the other kingdoms of Britain. Its modern name is little changed from the tribal folk-name Cantium by which Julius Caesar knew it.19 It maintained close links with the Continent and the courts of the Frankish kings. Its land-holding structures were different from elsewhere in English-held territories—East Kent was divided into units

The seventh century is outstanding for the number of women who played active, sometimes decisive roles in the fortunes of kingdoms, both earthly and spiritual. They are not to be underestimated. They had their own queenly agendas, engineering lines of patronage for their families, acting as brakes on hot-headed husbands, as brokers of deals, as pac

Adomnán makes reference to a disgruntled farmer to whose coppice-wood the monks had helped themselves: Once St Columba sent his monks to bring bundles of withies from a plot of ground belonging to a layman so that they could be used in building a guest-house. They went and did this, filling a boat with withies. On their return they came to the sain