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The kingdom of Northumbria |
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Northumberland
for centuries was bandit country having been rejected by the Romans due to local
hostilities, when they abandoned their first attempt to build a wall between the
Firth and Clyde Estuaries.
They
withdrew back to the Tyne where Hadrian built his fortified wall from Wallsend
upon Tyne on the East coast to Carlisle on the Solway Firth.
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Northumberland
was later to become part of Northumbria, one of the seven English Kingdoms which
were established following centuries of fighting after the Romans departed.
Northumbria
stretched from Berwick on Tweed in the North down to York in the South and the
Pennine Hills acting as a natural boundary from Cumbria, later being divided up
into three areas of Northumberland, Durham and Cleveland, the capital being
Bamburgh under King Ethelfrith.
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The
Northumbrian coast has miles of sandy beaches divided by the Tweed, Aln, Coquet,
Wansbeck, Blyth and Tyne Rivers each with its own castle and fortified towns as
they wander down from the hills and peat moors in the Border Country to the Sea.
The
North Country of Britain has numerous ruins of castles and monasteries which are
a standing testament to the regions turbulent past.
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Few
are more majestic than those on the Northumberland Coast at Holy Island,
Bamburgh, Dunstanburgh and Warkworth and many fortified Peel Towers, which were
used as refuge from the Vikings across the sea and raiders over the Border.
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The
roots of British Christianity are here in Northumberland with Paulinus from Rome
and St Cuthbert being the first in the seventh century followed by St. Aiden who
founded a monastery on Lindisfarne in the thirteenth century not forgetting the
work of the Venerable Bede on Tyneside at Jarrow.
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Marauding
Invaders
The Romans invaded
Britain in 43 AD bringing with them the corner stones of civilisation turning
villages into towns many of which remain today as our rural and industrial
centres connected by a road network across Britain originating in Rome to
support the Garrisons on Emperor Hadrian’s Wall.
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They left nearly four
hundred years leaving behind them an organized prosperous country with law and
order established, following over 300 years of peace. This left Britain
unprotected from the Scots to the North beyond the Wall and the Angles and
Saxons across the channel to the South.
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The Anglo Saxons came
as the Romans were leaving followed by many migrant farming settlers during the
following two centuries, while the Scot’s plundered Northern England across
the Wall, as the farming communities slowly demolished it for the pre cut stone
to build homes and dry stone walls.
Then the Danes
plundered the East Coast for a while in the Ninth Century eventually settling in
the coastal regions around York and the southern dales.
While the Vikings
after years of raiding the Northumbrian Coast eventually stayed and settled in
the Northern Dales and the Cumbrian Lake District.
The influence of
these Scandinavian Invaders heard in the local derelicts spoken on Tyneside and
in the Northumbrian Border Hills and visibly noticed in the place names such as
dale, thwaite, fell, beck and force being Norse for valley, clearing, hill,
steam and waterfall.
Then
last but not least the Normans invaded in 1066 and stayed after William the
Conquer won at the Battle of Hastings. William ordering the compilation of the
Doomsday Book in 1086, which formed the first census of the counties, shires,
towns and family names throughout southern England.
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