6 - Going North: Revisiting the End of Northern Independence

Summary

The reign of Eadred has long been presented as the conclusion of the West Saxon struggle for England. His contemporary Eric, son of Harald, is usually called the last of the old rulers of Northumbria. According to a passage incorporated into the Anglo-Latin annals of thirteenth-century St Albans, Eric, along with his son and brother, died on Stainmore, ‘slain by a nobleman named Macon’ through ‘the treachery of Earl Oswulf [of Bamburgh]’. The event's significance for northern England could hardly have been stated more grandly, the chronicler adding that ‘after this Eadred reigned in those parts’. There is an extended version of this passage in the thirteenth-century compilation associated with the name of ‘John of Wallingford’, and here the author doubled down, telling his readers that ‘from that time to the present, Northumbria has been subject to the Southenglish (Suthangli), and has been grieving through want of a king of their own and the liberty they once enjoyed’. Readers may recall how, over film of rolling moorland dramatically intensified by synthesizer music, the historian and documentary-maker Michael Wood repeated these accounts in In Search of the Dark Ages: Erik Bloodaxe, assigning them to ‘the lost York chronicle’. Despite the obscurity of Eadred's reign, it is this presentation of the end of both Northumbria and Scandinavian England that underlies his claim to be the son of Edward the Elder who really unified England.

There are some significant interpretational issues with the presentation outlined above that will be explored below. Firstly, one of the oddities about the historical memory of future centuries is Eric's relative insignificance, at least when compared to another contemporary, Óláfr Sigtryggsson. In Ireland, Óláfr appears with the nickname cuarán, referring to a type of manufactured footwear produced in Dublin (and perhaps other Insular Norse cities) in the 940s. The appellation is reminiscent of caligula, ‘little boots’, once applied to the (at the time future) Roman emperor Gaius (r. 37–41) by Roman soldiers, by which he became best known.