919. In this year King Edward went, after autumn, with a force to Thelwall,* and commanded the burgh to be built, and inhabited, and manned; and commanded another force also of the Mercian nation, while he there sat, to reduce Manchester in Northumbria,* and repair and man it. In this year died archbishop Plegmund:* in this year king Ragnall won York.*
920. In this year, before Midsummer, king Edward went with a force to Nottingham, and commanded the burgh to be built on the south side of the river, opposite to the other; and the bridge over the Trent, betwixt the two burghs; and then went thence into Peakland,* to Bakewell, and commanded a burgh to be built and manned there in the immediate neighbourhood. And then the king of the Scots and all the nation of Scots, and Ragnall, and the sons of Eadulf,* and all those who dwell in Northumbria, as well English as Danish and Northmen, and others, and also the king of the Strathclyde Welsh,* and all the Strathclyde Welsh, chose him for father and for lord.*
translated by Benjamin Thorpe
* Today a suburban village in Warrington, Cheshire.
* This shows how large the Kingdom of Northumbria, with its capital in York, still was early in the tenth century. Since the soulless Local Government Reorganization Act of 1972, effective from 1974, Manchester has lain in the Metropolitan County of Greater Manchester, but traditionally the bulk of the city lay in Lancashire, with the southern suburbs, beyond the diminutive River Mersey (the city’s chief river is the Irwell), in Cheshire. Thanks to the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, Manchester is now the third-largest city in England.
* Plegemund or Plegmund was Archbishop of Canterbury from 890 until his death, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as falling in the same year that Viking warlord Ragnall took York. Most historians agree that Ragnall had taken York by 919. Plegmund is regarded as a saint, and his feast day is August 2nd.
* Ragnald or Ragnall, properly Ragnall ua Ímair (?-921), King of York and the Isle of Man, and said to be a grandson of Ivar the Boneless, King of Dublin, who appears to be a romanticised blend of Ingwaer (?-873) and his brother Halfdan (?-877), leaders of the Great Heathen Army who ravaged England in 857-73 and martyred Edmund of the East Angles in 870: see The Martyrdom of St Edmund the King.
* The Peakland, known today as the Peak District, refers to the uplands at the southern end of the Pennine Hills, chiefly in northern Derbyshire but spreading into Cheshire, Lancashire, Staffordshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire.
* Eadwulf or Eadulf (?-913) was a ruler of Northumbria. His sons seem to have been four: Ealdred and Uhtred, both mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Adulf (?i.e. Æthelwulf), King of the Northern Saxons according to the Annals of Clonmacnoise; and Oswulf, according to a genealogy in De Northumbria post Britannos.
* The Kingdom of Strathclyde was at this time ruled by Owain ap Dyfnwal. A Christian, Owain allied with Æthelflæd to resist the encroachment of pagan Vikings, but in 937 he rebelled against the expansion of England under Edward’s son Athelstan, only to be defeated in The Battle of Brunanburh.
* See also Edgar and the Ship of Kings.