The Rulers of Bamburgh (Old English: Bebbanburh; Old Irish: Dún Guaire; Brittonic: Din Guairoi) were significant regional potentates in what is now northern England and south-eastern Scotland during the Viking Age. Sometimes referred to in modern sources as the Earldom of Bamburgh, their polity existed for roughly two centuries, beginning after the attacks on the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria by the Vikings in the later ninth century, and ending after the Norman Conquest later in the eleventh century. In Scottish and Irish sources of the period the Bamburgh 'earldom' is referred to as the kingship of the Northern English (or the North English kingdom), or simply of the 'Saxons'.
In essence, Bamburgh and the surrounding region (the former realm of Bernicia), the northern component of Northumbria, was ruled in succession by a shadowy series of 'kings', 'earls' (Latin duces) and 'high-reeves' (from Old English heah-gerefa). Most of these were descended from Eadwulf I of Bamburgh, thereafter called the Eadwulfings or House of Bamburgh. Several of these men commanded the whole of Northumbria, and their jurisdiction is also sometimes referred to also as the earldom of Northumbria (not to be confused with the southerly 'official' ealdordom of Northumbria based at York).
Post-867 Kings in English Northumbria
List of pre-Eadwulfing Rulers (possible or certain)
A Danelaw ruler; but Historia de Sancto Cuthberto suggests his kingship extended among the English north of the Tyne, but source is late and there is no contemporary evidence for his rule in the north.[5]
Osberht
fl. 901
A figure with this name 'expelled from the kingship' in one set of Northumbrian annals for 901, witnessed in the twelfth century; but otherwise unknown.[6]
Recorded only in Irish source as Adulf mcEtulfe, which would ordinarily render 'Æthulf' or 'Æthelwulf son of Eadwulf', a figure otherwise unrecorded.[9] It has also been suggested that Adulf here is Ealdred I,[10] or is the rebel Ealdwulf mentioned by William of Malmesbury.[10]
'high reeve' (hæhgerefa); dux ('leader')'; 'nobleman' (eorl)
Son of Eadwulf I. Said in twelfth-century sources to have taken responsibility for the Anglo-Scandinavian regions of southern Northumbria taken by Eadred of England in 954, converted to a new ealdordom (jurisdiction governed by a West Saxon ealdorman) after Oswulf's death.[11]
Son of Oswulf I, he provides the genealogical link between Oswulf and Waltheof I, but is attested as ruler of Bamburgh only in a late source.[12] He may be the same as Ealdred of Lindisfarne.[12]
Son of Waltheof. After 1006 he was ealdorman of Northumbria, i.e. he governed southern Northumbria as an ealdorman, regional governor, of the English king, in addition to rulership of Bamburgh.[14]
McGuigan, Neil (2018), "Bamburgh and the Northern English: Understanding the Realm of Uhtred", in McGuigan, Neil; Woolf, Neil (eds.), The Battle of Carham: A Thousand Years On, Edinburgh: Birlinn / John Donald, pp. 95–150, ISBN 978-0-7486-1110-2
Rollason, David (2003). Northumbria, 500-1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-81335-2.
Woolf, Alex (2007), From Pictland to Alba, 789–1070, The New Edinburgh History of Scotland, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 978-0-7486-1234-5
