Page 34 - BBC History - September 2017

Viking Britain

Bloodaxe’s

!nal stand

The battle of Stainmore AD 954
COMBATANTS: Eric Bloodaxe and King Eadred
of Wessex
OUTCOME: Northumbria loses its
independence

The battle of Stainmore might not have been a battle
at all, but it was remembered as one by those who came
after – the last breath of independence of the ancient
kingdom of Northumbria.
Northumbria had been under Viking domination since
AD 866 when the city of York was captured by the Viking
micel here (‘great horde’). Over the following nine decades,
Scandinavian culture had seeped into many aspects of life
in England’s most northerly realm, changing habits of
language, dress, belief and identity. But the Northumbrians
remained a proud people with a long and distinguished
history and, if pushed, they preferred a foreign Viking king
to the heavy hand of the West Saxon dynasty. And in
the mid-10th century this was precisely what they ended
up with when the former king of Norway, Eric Bloodaxe,
occupied the Northumbrian throne.
King Eric was not a good man. He had earned his
nickname by killing off most of his own brothers to become
king of Norway, and he was so brutal and unpopular as
king that he was swiftly kicked out by his surviving brother,
Haakon ‘Athelstan’s-foster-son’ (a man who, as his
nickname suggests, grew up in the English court of King
Æthelstan, Edward the Elder’s son). Eric fled to England
and, though we don’t know how he managed it (bloody
axes may well have been involved), convinced the
Northumbrians to adopt him as their king. He proved just
as unsuccessful in Northumbria as he had been in Norway,
getting kicked out in AD 948 for upsetting King Eadred of
Wessex (by slaughtering a West Saxon army at Castleford).
In AD 952 Eric was invited back by the Northumbrians
when Eadred wasn’t looking, but in AD 954 he was shown
the door for a second time. He travelled west over the
Pennines, taking the Stainmore pass through the hills
towards Cumbria – striking, perhaps, for the Irish Sea.
He never arrived. According to English sources, Eric
died a squalid death on the road, “treacherously killed
by Earl Maccus”.
But Scandinavian sources tell a different story: that Eric
met his foes at the head of an outnumbered army and
there on the high, wind-scoured pass, he died the glorious
death of the archetypal Viking warlord. A poem commis-
sioned by his wife pictured Eric
arriving at Valhalla, welcomed
by Valkyries, to feast and
fight by Odin’s side until
the breaking of the world:
a fitting epitaph for the
last king of an indepen-
dent Northumbria.

A coin inscribed ‘Eric Stainmore Gap, where Eric Bloodaxe
Rex’. The sword hints – accepted twice by the Northumbrians
at the violence of King as their king – met his death
Eric Bloodaxe’s reign

34 BBC History Magazine