The King in the North

The Northumbrian army was resoundingly defeated; Æðelfrið was slain and his imperium died with him on the battlefield. By such strokes of fate Edwin succeeded to the Northumbrian kingdom. In victory, he was obliged to recognize Rædwald’s superiority, offering noble hostages to his court, sending gifts reflective of the honour in which he was held a

Within a year of the battle at Chester, whether or not Æðelfrið’s campaign had been directed at Edwin or at those who would shelter him, the exiled prince left, or was encouraged to leave, the protection of his British sponsors and seek sanctuary with a king whom he must have believed lay beyond Æðelfrið’s reach. Rædwald, he of the Sutton Hoo ship

No surviving English, Welsh or Scottish document describes such arrangements: the earliest Anglo-Saxon law codes speak of obligations between lords and their followers and dependants, not between kings. Even so, a set of rules can be reconstructed with some confidence through the careers of those who were able to wield imperium over others and by l

The first kings of Early Medieval Britain were not off-the-shelf products of a homogeneous history, geography or philosophy; they were experimenting with new forms of power born out of the necessity to rule self-identifying peoples and regions that generated a directly consumable surplus; by the needs of mobile lords and their warbands.