Northumbria, 500-1100

"This book deals with the development of Northumbria from the beginning of its history to the end, thereby offering a unique opportunity to study the rise and fall of a kingdom rather than just focusing on its period of greatness." "It examines the mechanisms of ethnic, political, social and religious change which, beginning after the end of the Roman Empire, welded the large and disparate area between the Humber and the Firth of Forth into one of the most powerful kingdoms of early medieval England, and those which led to its disintegration and the emergence in its place of the political structures of northern England and southern Scotland."

"These mechanisms are set in a wider European context so that the history of Northumbria is seen as paradigmatic for an understanding of state formation and religious and cultural change in the early medieval world. In doing so, the book explores the consequences for our understanding of the past of the characteristics and value of available source materials. Attention is focused particularly on the interpretation of archaeological and art-historical material as it relates to written source-material, and the extent to which narrative sources were shaped by sectional interests and created imagined visions of the past."--Jacket.