If Northumbria is a lost kingdom, where would you find it? It’s not on the map. Sure, there’s Northumberland, but while that is certainly composed of land north of the Humber, it’s separated from the river by the whole of Yorkshire. It’s a curious name for a county; transplanting the nomenclature to countries, it’s like calling Canada North Mexico. But the distance of the modern county from its name source gives us a clue: once upon a time, Northumbria was bigger. Much bigger. For a couple of hundred years, between the withdrawal of the Roman legions and the arrival of the Vikings, the kingdom of Northumbria was the pre-eminent realm in the land, its dominion stretching from the Humber in the south to Edinburgh in the north. Before Northumbria’s kings, the rulers of the other kingdoms of Britain bent their knee and offered their homage. To put it bluntly: Geordies ruled us all.1
Not only did they rule us, they renewed us. The kingdom of Northumbria was the fount and inspiration for a cultural and political renaissance that first transformed Britain and then the rest of northern Europe. It produced the brightest scholars, the holiest saints, the greatest kings, the fiercest warriors, the most beautiful art and the most innovative technology of its time.
But then it was forgotten. Most people today will have heard of Bede, but apart from labelling him ‘venerable’ – which relegates the monk to a dim past rather than suggesting him worthy of regard – that will be about the limit of their knowledge. Oswald, Wilfrid, Alcuin, Edwin? Names that have fallen out of fashion, rather than four of the key figures in British and (in Alcuin’s case) European history. There are many reasons for the forgetting, but they can be summed up as fate and fortune, or geography and war. Northumbria’s position at the edge of the world, which once served it well, isolated it in the end. But unfortunately its isolation was not sufficient to protect it from the whirlwind that came out of the north: the Vikings. In the desperate struggle against the northmen, the kingdom of Wessex, insulated by geography from raiders who regarded the North Sea as their private pond, took first place, and history accorded its king, Alfred, the deserved title of ‘the Great’. But two centuries before Alfred, Northumbria’s King Oswald was Britain’s first royal saint – and martyr.