William of Normandy sailed across the Channel and conquered England in 1066 – or at least that’s how the story goes. Here, Sophie Thérèse Ambler and James Morris reveal how one northern stronghold remained untouched for another 26 years…
The Bayeux Tapestry depicts one of the best-known episodes in English history: the Norman Conquest of 1066. The cavalry of William, Duke of Normandy, ride into battle at Hastings against the army of King Harold Godwinson, bodies littering the ground. “Here King Harold has been killed,” proclaims the Tapestry’s text, and next: “The English have turned to flight.”
Thus, Duke William became William the Conqueror, seized the kingdom, and imposed long-lasting Norman rule.
We all know the Conquest of 1066 saw the Normans seize England – but this is not entirely true. In fact, William only seized the polity ruled by Harold: the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, whose royal heartlands lay in Wessex and London. But beyond the limits of Harold’s rule lay the Kingdom of Cumbria. This realm was not conquered by William in 1066, and it mostly maintained its independence for another generation. Only in 1092 did William’s son, William II – better known as William Rufus – annex the southern part of the kingdom to the English state, extending Norman rule in the north-west to Hadrian’s Wall.
Fractured by conquest
The answer to this question, perhaps, lies in its lack of longevity. Only emerging in the ninth century AD, the kingdom’s lands had originally been part of the mighty Kingdom of Northumbria, which in its heyday stretched from the Mersey to the Humber estuary in the south, and from Ayrshire to the Firth of Forth in the north. Famously, the Northumbrian kingdom cradled Christianity at Lindisfarne, the community founded by Saint Aidan and Saint Oswald and celebrated by its own great historian, Bede.
In the 860s, Northumbria was fractured by Viking conquest, with the Norse invaders establishing a kingdom south of the Tees, the English rulers at Bamburgh Castle taking the northeast from the Tyne to the Firth of Forth, and the Kingdom of Strathclyde – based around Glasgow – seizing the chance to expand southwards into the Lake District.
In the process, the Kingdom of Cumbria was forged west of the Pennines, breaching Hadrian’s Wall and reaching from southern Scotland into what is now the modern county of Cumbria. By the time Rufus annexed the kingdom, it had only been in existence for around 200 years.
Another reason for its obscurity lies in the relative lack of documentary evidence, compared to other kingdoms. When it comes to studying the Anglo-Saxon state conquered by William I, historians have a phenomenal source: Domesday Book. Compiled in 1086, the survey encompasses every settlement under the king’s rule, reporting landholders and households, cultivation, industry and buildings. With this monumental record, historians can reconstruct the society of Anglo-Saxon England and the process of Norman regime-building: from the slaughter or ejection of the existing aristocracy and their replacement by William’s friends, to the ravaging of Yorkshire now known as the ‘Harrying of the North’.
Yet, the Kingdom of Cumbria was not part of this story, so does not appear in Domesday Book. Nor can Cumbria boast the other written evidence abounding for Anglo-Saxon England – namely the charters recording grants of land and privileges.
In fact, the written evidence generated in Cumbria is limited to a solitary document: a writ issued in the mid- or late-11th century by a man named Gospatric, who was possibly the Earl of Northumbria. In the text, Gospatric addresses his officers “and all men, free and dreng [a tenant by agricultural service], that dwell on all the lands that were Cumbrian”, granting his peace to a man named Thorfynn mac Thore. Moreover, the writ only survives in a flawed, 13th-century copy and is written mostly in Old English, making it a rather enigmatic source.
The kingdom’s archaeological record is also relatively sparse. Cumbria today is famous for its Neolithic Langdale axes, Bronze Age stone circles, brooding Roman fortifications, and late medieval remains of border conflict. But whereas these have all been widely studied, little energy has been dedicated to sites from the early Middle Ages.
A blending of cultures
Fortunately, the focus is now changing, and recent investigations reveal that Roman settlements – once thought to have been abandoned – were occupied during the Kingdom of Cumbria’s existence. At the forts of Maryport and Papcastle, for instance, archaeologists have found evidence of large timber buildings, dating to the early Middle Ages and developed over multiple generations.
Similarly, at Stainton, just north of Carlisle, recent work has uncovered a small settlement consisting of five structures that dates to the period between the eighth and tenth centuries. This is one of few sites seemingly established for the first time in the early Middle Ages, suggesting that the Kingdom of Cumbria was built atop Roman foundations.
Combining history and archaeology with the evidence of language, place names and artefacts also offers a glimpse inside the Cumbrian kingdom. It looked, and sounded, very different to its Anglo-Saxon counterpart. Many of Cumbria’s people were Brittonic speakers, meaning their language was the ancestor of modern Welsh and Cornish. Among them lived settlers from Viking colonies in Ireland and Scotland and the Viking kingdom of York. Viking influence is embedded in the Norse place names scattered across Cumbria – from Scafell to Skiddaw.
This blending of cultures is reflected in sculptures, too. Scandinavian-style ‘hogback’ tombstones preserved at Lowther, on the eastern border of the kingdom, and the Gosforth Cross on Cumbria’s western coast, are among the most notable examples: the latter displaying carved scenes of the Norse myth Ragnarok alongside images of Christ’s crucifixion.
The varied peoples were embraced by their kingdom’s title: the word ‘Cumbria’ is derived from the Brittonic term ‘Cymry’, meaning ‘inhabitants of the same region’.
So – why was this distant, north-western kingdom suddenly so desirable to William Rufus, when his father had ignored it? The answer partly lies in the nature of the rivalries that were emerging in the late-11th century. Rufus had a contender for his throne in Edgar Ætheling, heir to the House of Wessex, who was sheltering at the court of Máel Coluim III, King of Scots.
Máel Coluim held sway in Cumbria, having swept through the kingdom in 1069–70 and installed a client ruler, Dolfin. Then, in 1091, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Scottish king “came from Scotland into England and ravaged a great part of it”. Rufus was able to force Máel Coluim into submission, but he needed a permanent solution. Thus, “[he] went north to Carlisle… drove out Dolfin” and established Norman rule.
But although Rufus was responding to circumstance, his Cumbrian conquest fitted a wider pattern of Norman territorial expansion: Sicily in 1061, England in 1066, and later – in 1098–99 – Antioch, Jerusalem and their hinterlands during the First Crusade. In fact, the Normans thrived on conquest. “When they intend to overrun a country, they are unbridled,” wrote the Byzantine historian Anna Comnena. “Whenever battle and war occur, there is a baying in their hearts.”
Talking of Rufus, English historian William of Malmesbury remarked that he was “without peer in our own times, had he not been overshadowed by his father’s greatness”. The Kingdom of Cumbria enabled Rufus not only to extend the reaches of his realm, but also to cement his reputation for years to come.
Rufus’s campaign brought the mighty Norman war machine to bear on Cumbria. The Bayeux Tapestry reveals what this probably looked like: the amassing of arms and armour, and horses to carry Norman knights. The cavalry was critical to the Norman way of war, which avoided risky pitched battles and aimed instead to force surrender by devastating the target region. One of Rufus’s later campaigns was described by the chronicler Orderic Vitalis: the king “advanced rapidly… burning, plundering and taking prisoners, in this way destroying that fair region’s wealth”.
The Bayeux Tapestry depicts such operations. Under the heading “here a house is burned”, a woman stands helpless, clutching her son’s hand, as Norman troops torch her homestead.
Systematic destruction was also accompanied by the Norman trademark: castle building. The lone documentary record of Rufus’s Cumbrian campaign, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, states that Rufus took Carlisle “and restored the city and built a castle. He drove out Dolfin, who had ruled the land there, then garrisoned the castle”. This was probably a simple wooden castle, with an earthen bank and ditch, erected rapidly by an unskilled workforce (Carlisle’s present-day stone castle was likely begun by Rufus’s successor, Henry I).
The Tapestry portrays Odo, bishop of Bayeux, commanding the construction of one such structure at Hastings, with labourers using picks and spades to build a mound with a wooden keep. Odo’s was a motte and bailey castle but, across the countryside, the Normans built simpler structures without an inner mound and keep, known as ringworks.
Statements of power
In Cumbria, new research is again uncovering what we think is one such site. At Lowther stand the remains of a partial ringwork castle: a monumental mound sited on the edge of a dramatic promontory, overlooking the river Lowther below. A panopticon, engineered to see and to be seen for miles, it would have been a glaring statement of Norman power. The mound – built using alternating layers of earth and local stone – was likely surmounted by a timber palisade, with its entranceway guarded by a gatehouse. Inside, a surface of small river pebbles formed an internal courtyard.
Lowther can also illuminate another key element of Cumbria’s annexation to the Norman realm. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that, “after coming back south he [Rufus] sent many farmers there with their women and livestock to live there and cultivate the land”.
Indeed, in front of the entrance to Lowther’s ringwork castle are the remains of a village, seemingly established at the same time. They are linked by a trackway – a single layer of cobbles only two metres wide – and preliminary investigations suggest the villagers lived in a handful of wooden longhouses, built on levelled rectangular platforms.
So far, excavations have yielded little pottery or metal artefacts, fitting with Rufus’s transplantation to Cumbria of low-status farmers with few possessions. While the castle presided over the surrounding landscape, its gatehouse overlooked the village, providing Lowther’s lord visual dominion over his tenants. The village was bounded to the north by a church, completing the classic configuration for a medieval manor. With these small plantation settlements, Norman royal rule took root slowly in Cumbria.
What happened to Cumbria after Rufus’s campaign?
The next written evidence comes in 1130, courtesy of England’s first surviving Exchequer record. This reveals the Norman formation of Cumberland and Westmorland out of the old Cumbrian kingdom. But these were not shires proper, and were overseen by an administrator rather than fully fledged sheriffs. The evidence mounts for the 12th and 13th centuries, revealing how society across the far north retained longstanding ties with Scotland.
While the King of Scots, David I (died 1153), absorbed the northern part of the old Cumbrian kingdom into Scotland, the borderland lords intermarried with the Scottish aristocracy. Even as the Anglo-Scottish border crystallised in the 13th century, monasteries on both sides led the veneration of saints of the ancient Kingdom of Northumbria: Aidan, Oswald and Bede.
This was the cultural nexus historians have dubbed ‘Middle Britain’ – a cross-border community, straddling both England and Scotland. Yet this too would be ripped asunder by conflict, in the Anglo-Scottish wars.
The shade of the Cumbrian kingdom was summoned in 1974, when the Norman shires of Cumberland and Westmorland were abolished, and County Cumbria created. The modern county reaches beyond the old kingdom’s borders, southward into Lancashire North of the Sands, and incorporating the West Riding of Yorkshire. The lands north of Hadrian’s Wall are resolutely severed, and Cumbria’s heart has migrated, now nestled in the wild beauty of the Lake District: a reminder that political geographies are forever shifting, kingdoms and states ebbing and flowing with the historical tide.
Sophie Thérèse Ambler is a reader in medieval history at Lancaster University; James Morris is a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire