The King in the North

although warlords might claim possession of territory by conquest, they were unlikely to enjoy, in their new-won lands, the networks of élite client relations on whom secure rule depended. As late as the tenth century very powerful kings of Wessex struggled to engender loyalty among peoples recently ‘liberated’ from Viking control. There is a fine

The fort at Banna (Birdoswald) on Hadrian’s Wall is, perhaps, the best place to catch sight of localized lordship in its early development.b The last army pay wagons cannot have arrived here much later than the 390s; the last visit by a Dux Britanniarum probably occurred in the same decade. Banna’s fifth-century commanders responded by expediently

Some fifth-century lords may have ruled quite large territories, and the organizational effort required to construct some of the great dyke systems may be their enduring witness. Gildas’s five tyrants look as though they inherited or won rights over the lands of former civitates. But so little is known about them that it is impossible to say if the

The seven kingdoms that made up the Heptarchy were Northumbria, Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Essex and Sussex, a tradition popularized by Henry of Huntingdon in the twelfth century.