Lords and Kings in International Power Struggles, 975-1100

The air and the light are so still, and so soupy this morning she cannot see her breath let alone the trees. But Inga knows her way through the village like she knows the smell of her own hands. Her grandmother knew it too, this same earth, this same sky, forty years before Inga was born. The night the sky caught fire, her grandmother was walking this path.

Inga herself is about fourteen in the year 1016.

I wonder what this place we call Gilcrux was called in 1016? As for Cumbria. There was this word – Cymry – fellow countrymen. And that word sat inside a large Britonnic world the Welsh called Yr Hen Ogled – the Old North – a world that had been absorbing generations of the descendants of Roman soldiers, among them North African soldiers who had garrisoned Aballava at Burgh by Sands and Luguvalium in Carlisle; Gaelic speakers from across the Solway, Norse farmers and their thralls, Saxons and Irish-Scandinavian coastal arrivals. At some point the language came to be called Cumbria. And it was close enough to Old Welsh, and Old Cornish, that folk up and down the west coast would have understood each other. England was down south, back then, and Scotland (Alba) did not yet reach as far. It was still coalescing, if you like. What existed above Gilcrux and all around it was an often contested, plural kingdom, squeezed between Alba pressing down from the north and the Anglo-Danish world pressing in from the east.  

Above this kingdom in 975 a comet crossed the sky. Inga’s grandmother had watched it from this village. Whatever it had meant to her, and she’d had the stories to know what it could mean, she’d gone back inside and got on with the business of giving birth to Inga’s father. 

“But the world was shifting,” she’d said. “The world was shifting.”

In the one-hundred and twenty-five years between 975 and 1100, twelve different men sat on the English throne. Edward the Martyr, murdered in Corfe at sixteen, died after being dragged by his stirrups. Æthelred. His reign spanned almost four decades, but history tells us he wasted twenty-two years of it bribing the Danes, buying them off only to watch them come back anyway. Historical revisionism paints a more nuanced picture. [1] The Danish king, Sweyn, “was said to have cut his moustache so that it hung down on either side of his mouth, like the pointed tines of a two-pronged pitchfork, and therefore became known as Sweyn Tjugeskjegg or Toskjegg – Sweyn Forkbeard.” [2] Sweyn spent months conquering England, but held the throne for just five weeks then died. Edmund Ironside, believed to be in his mid twenties, lasted for seven months – his murder may have been instigated by the Ealdorman Eadric Streona.

Cnut, Sweyn’s son, who had married Æthelred’s second wife Emma of Normandy, ruled an empire stretching from England to Scandinavia. Then there was Harold Harefoot, who stole the throne from his half brother, Harthacnut (who took it back and had Harold’s body dug up and thrown in a fen.) Edward the Confessor left no heir but a disputed succession (four men claimed his throne within the year). Harold Godwinson won a battle at Stamford Bridge in September 1066, marched his army south and lost his life at Hastings three weeks later. Edgar the Atheling was declared king, but never crowned. William of Normandy was. William the conqueror’s son, William Rufus, ruled England for thirteen years until killed by an arrow while hunting in the New Forest. 

None of this was distant from the Solway plain. The world was, indeed, shifting fast.  

Gilcrux, 1016. The not-so-distant ruler was Uhtred the Bold, Earl of Northumbria. When Malcolm II of Scotland besieged Durham in 1006, Uhtred raised a relief force who drove them off and had their heads fixed to stakes on the city walls. Uhtred controlled his territory, pressing hard against the Kingdom of the Cumbrians. And while he was the man at the top, Inga’s family didn’t deal with him. Rather, there was a local lord loyal to Uhtred. Inga’s family are drengs or free tenants, owing regular payments to their lord. Grain. Cattle. There was a payment, cornage, based on the number of horned animals you kept. The payments flowed upward, Uhtred at the top. Until, in spring 1016, Cnut’s allies summoned Uhtred to a meeting, a negotiation. The Old Norse word for what happens next is morð. Treacherous killing. 

That Autumn, the local lord’s servant who comes for the cornage arrives using a name Inga hasn’t heard before but the payment is the same and the sheep are counted in the same old Cumbria numbers she was taught, one of the last traces of Cumbria still legible to us today. Yan, tan, tethera… Inga grows up, has children and grandchildren, was widowed twice. Cnut proves more capable than perhaps folk expected, goes on pilgrimage to Rome, writes letters home about the dignity of the occasion, builds churches, administers competently. For a time, the north gets a period of relative quiet. But for Inga’s family nothing has changed much anyway. 

The north country shifts in Inga’s middle age, Alba pressing south and the Northumbrian earldoms shifting hands. Siward the Earl of Northumbria brings the Allerdale area under his lordship around 1050. We know this because Gospatric’s Writ, the sole surviving document of pre (or immediately post) Norman governance in Cumbria – its precise dating remains contested, orders that Thorfinn Mac Thor be free in all things in Allerdale and that no one should break the peace given by Gospatric and Earl Siward. Inga’s Brittonic world that her grandmother would have taken for permanent is contracting, into something that will become a Norman barony. 

While Hastings burns, Gilcrux farms (the luck of farming in a landscape that large powers found difficult to hold and expensive to garrison). In 1092, though, King William Rufus seizes Carlisle from Dolfin (Lord Waltheof’s brother) and builds a castle there. And when Henry I becomes king he gives a knight, Ranulf le Meschin [4] the overlordship of Cumbria. Sometime between 1098 and 1106, Ranulf enfeoffs [3] Waltheof – Gospatric’s son – with the barony of Allerdale; and Ranulf’s brother, William, enfeoffs Waltheof with the Honour of Cockermouth. Waltheof sets up house at Papcastle before moving to what will become Cockermouth Castle. Uhtred the Bold’s great grandson – not five miles from Gilcrux.  And Waltheof’s wife is Sigrid, a Norse name like Inga’s. 

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[1] The standard revisionist account is Levi Roach, Æthelred: The Unready (Yale University Press, 2016). Winner of the Longman–History Today Prize 2017, it argues that Æthelred has been wrongly maligned and situates his decisions within the religious anxieties and political pressures of the age. Earlier revisionist works include Ann Williams, Æthelred the Unready: The Ill-Counselled King (Hambledon and London, 2003) and Ryan Lavelle, Æthelred II: King of the English, 2nd ed. (The History Press, 2008). For the military dimension specifically, see also Brandon Michael Bender, England’s Unlikely Commander: The Military Career of Æthelred the Unready (Rounded Globe, 2019).
[2] The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire.  Tore Skeie Translated by Alison McCullough (Pushkin Press, 2022).

[3] To enfeoff someone meant to grant them land in exchange for loyalty and service. It comes from the feudal system, a lord would hand over a manor to a tenant, who in return owed military service, taxes, or other obligations.

[4] Later, Ranulf became the Earl of Chester. See Ranulf le Meschin, earl of Chester (d.1129) Online at People of Medieval Scotland Database https://poms.ac.uk/record/person/526/ Date last accessed: Monday 27 April, 2026.