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 Normans conquered England in 1066 – 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
So why has the Kingdom of Cumbria been largely forgotten by history? The answer, 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 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 for
