NORTHUMBRIA’S ambitions north of the River Forth were abruptly ended in 685, when King Ecgfrith’s cousin Bridei mac Bili, King of the Picts, defeated him at Nechtansmere, even as Ethelbald and Offa were restoring Mercia to dominance south of the Humber.

That political decline coincided, however, with the ‘Northumbrian Renaissance’, a flame sparked by the Synod of Whitby in 664. The vigorous Irish monasticism brought to King Oswald’s court by Aidan now blended with the cultural riches of the Byzantine world imported from Rome by Benedict Biscop, and the age of Cuthbert, Bede, Willibrord and Alcuin lit up all England, and the courts of Europe.

Northumbria’s cultural capital, the monastery at Lindisfarne, was sacked by the Vikings in 793; her political capital at York fell to Ivar the Boneless in 866. But the Scandinavian Kingdom of Jorvik lasted only until 927, when Northumbria’s people recognised Alfred the Great’s grandson, Athelstan, as the first ‘King of the English’.