The King in the North

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

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

Thanks to the sensational discovery of a hoard of battle-booty in a field near Lichfield in Staffordshire in 2009, we now have an idea of just what the spoils of Dark Age warfare looked like. Here are more than seventeen hundred objects of gold and silver, precious stones, millefiori and cloisonné, the peak of Early Medieval craftsmanship, equal in

The suffix wic—Sandwich on the East Kent coast is a prime example—seems to reflect the sites of beach or estuarine markets.*4 When kings began to see opportunities for controlling and taxing them in the seventh century they were given royal protection and patronage and developed into what have become known as emporia. Hamwic, near Southampton, is t

Oswald Iding ruled Northumbria for eight years, from ad 634 to 642. In that time he was recognised as overlord of almost all the other kingdoms of Britain: of Wessex, Mercia, Lindsey and East Anglia, of the Britons of Rheged, Strathclyde, Powys and Gwynedd, the Scots of Dál Riata and the Picts of the far North. A famed warrior, the ‘Whiteblade’ or

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

Between the ages of twelve, when he fled Bernicia, and thirty, when he returned, Oswald was transformed from an English heathen refugee into a crusading Irish Christian prince.

In the days of Kings Æthelfrith, Edwin and Oswald the greatest architectural feats since the end of the Roman Empire stood here as symbols of royal power: a palace complex, noble halls of great technical complexity and grandeur and, wonder of wonders, a grandstand unique in its period. In a pagan temple offerings were made to the gods and tribal to

The idea that Kentish kings regarded themselves as direct inheritors of the late Roman state is reinforced by the minting of coins in the late seventh century at Canterbury. One, found in a hoard at Crondall, Hampshire, bears the inscription DOROVERNIS CIVITAS.*7 That a Canterbury mint of that late date should call Canterbury a civitas—an explicitl