Probably many people remember the surprise they felt when they first learned that the county called Northumberland lay north of the Tyne, not of the Humber; and though the glib explanation usually given — that the name had once a wider signification, but was afterwards restricted to its present meaning — might quash all the critical doubts of childhood, it cannot certainly be considered a wholly adequate or satisfactory answer for grown-up intelligence. As a matter of fact, the history of Northumberland, either as a name or as a county, cannot be got rid of in quite so summary a manner. The tale that hangs thereby is both long and interesting. The earliest English settlement on the Northumbrian coast seems to have been made in the neighbourhood of Bamborough, at some unknown date and by some unknown leader. It is usual to assume, indeed, from a single meagre entry in the English Chronicle, that one Ida was the first king, about a century after the English colonisation of Kent; but in reality the Chronicle merely tells us that at that time “Ida came to the Kingdom,” or, as we should now say, ascended the throne; while the assumption that he was the first English conqueror of Northumbria is only a bit of that uncritical guesswork which often passes for superior historical knowledge. It is highly improbable, indeed, that the English pirates would take the trouble to round the Forelands and settle in distant Hampshire before they had attempted a landing on the nearest and least protected shore of Britain in the Lothians and Northumberland. What is certain amounts to no more than this: that in the middle of the sixth century an English prince named Ida ruled over a petty principality among the rocky braes of the Northumbrian coast; that he “timbered Bamborough that was first betyned with a hedge, and thereafter with a wall”; and gave it its name, Bebbanburh, in honour of Bebba, his Christian Welsh wife. That is the first fixed starting-point in the history of the modern county of Northumberland.
As yet, however, the name of Northumberland was quite unknown. The English people of this northern principality, which spread in time from the Tyne through what are now the Scotch Lowlands to the Forth, called themselves the Beornice; and the native title for their country is most familiar to us in Bede’s Latinised form of Bernicia. South of it, from Tyne to Humber, stretched a second considerable principality — that of the Dere, also Latinised as Deira, and comprising the modern counties of Durham and Yorks, though the first-named seems to have fluctuated between the two tribes. Both principalities were themselves doubtless built up by the coalescence of several earlier and minor chieftainships, whose names have in some cases been preserved to us: and under Edwin, the first Christian King at York, if not also under his heathen predecessor, Athelfrith, the two larger principalities were in turn united into a single powerful kingdom, which stretched uninterruptedly from the Humber to the Forth. To this new and important State the name of Northan-hymbra-land came to be applied — meaning quite strictly, not the land north of the Humber, but the land of the Northan-hymbras or Northumbrians. It is an ethnical, not a territorial title. Similarly, the people beyond the Humber, afterwards known as Myrce or Mercians, were commonly described in early times as Suthan-hymbre, or South-humbrians. But though the two northern principalities were thus politically united, they did not socially coalesce; and from time to time we hear for a while of separate kings reigning once more in Deira and Bernicia respectively. The old Roman provincial capital of York continued to be the metropolis of Deira, while Bernicia had as its chief city Ida’s royal stronghold itself. So, too, after the universal introduction of Christianity the northern Archbishop had his see fixed at York, the capital of Edwin; while the suffragan Bishop of the Beornicas took up his abode at Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, not far from the Bernician capital of Bamborough.
Up to the period of the Danish invasions Northumbria, as a whole, remained the most flourishing and civilised part of Britain. It had been the seat of the Roman prefecture; it had kept up the traditions of Roman culture; and the struggle of the English with the natives had not apparently been so severe or so crushing as in Wessex and the south. In the pages of Bede we see Northumbria, including what are now the Lothians, described as the centre of light and learning for the whole island, and the special seat of monasteries and convents. Bede himself was a monk of Jarrow; Cædmon, the great epic poet, was a lay brother at Whitby; and Cynewulf, the sweetest early English lyrical writer, was a member of some other, though doubtful, Northumbrian religious house. But even before the Danish troubles the position of Northumbria had begun to decline; and the native kings were at last obliged by force of arms to recognise the supremacy of Egbert of Wessex. Nevertheless, they continued to rule as under-kings in York for a couple of generations longer. When the northern pirates, however, began to fall upon Britain in full force they naturally directed their first attacks against Northumbria, as the English themselves had probably done four centuries before them. Deira fell almost without a blow at the very earliest invasion, and York became the capital of the first Danish kingdom in Britain. Thus Yorkshire was merged for a time in the Denalagu or Danish territory. But the northern part of Northumbria, stretching from the Tees to the Forth, and including the modern counties of Durham and Northumberland, as well as the Lothians, did not fall into the hands of the Danes. A branch of the native royal house continued to rule at Bamborough; and the northern pirates, in their eagerness to attack the rich plains of Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex, did not trouble themselves about the rocky upland kingdom of the braes. Hence this northern fragment of the old Northumbrian realm, alone remaining in the hands of its English natives, kept the style and title of Northumberland, while the Danish kingdom to the south began a little later to be known as Yorkshire.
As yet, however, the name Northumberland, even in this restricted sense, applied to a far wider district than the modern county. When King Edward of Wessex recovered the overlordship of the north, Ragnald, Danish King of York, did homage (to use the familiar term of later feudalism) for Yorkshire; while Ealdred, English lord of Bamborough, appeared as the under-king of all the rest of old Northumbria. In the reign of Edgar, when the whole of England was first thoroughly united, Northumberland once more underwent a serious clipping. Deira was finally handed over to Earl Oslac: Oswulf, the representative of the native dynasty, was also compelled to accept the title of earl, and was recognised as ruler of the central portion between Tees and Tweed; while the whole of the northern portion, from Tweed to Forth, was granted as a fief to Kenneth, King of Scots, and has ever since remained an integral portion of the Scottish realm. Such at least is the statement given by the English historians, and accepted by the great authority of Dr. Freeman; and though the Scotch have a more patriotic version of the affair on their own account, the question is rather one connected with the annals of the Lothians than with the annals of Northumberland. Edinburgh, originally an English border fortress, built by Edwin of Deira, whose name it bears, thus became the capital of the Celtic Scotch kings; and English Lothian became the richest and most important portion of the later historical Scotland.
For another century Northumberland was held to include the whole district between the Tees and the Tweed; till after the Norman Conquest it received yet a further mutilation in the loss of its southern half. The See of St. Cuthbert and of the Beornice, driven for a while by the Danes from Lindisfarne to Melrose, had been restored to Durham. The country between the Tees and the Tyne, the old debateable border of Deira and Bernicia, was now separated as the county palatine of Durham, and the prince-bishop himself was regarded as the guardian of the frontier against the Scottish kings: for the Lothians, once an integral part of the Bernician realm, had now become the hostile march of an unfriendly power. Durham still retains one noteworthy mark of its post-Norman origin in the fact that it is always spoken of as the county of Durham, and never as Durhamshire. At the date of its creation as a county the French word had officially superseded the native English term.
As for Northumberland itself, it was first finally reduced to its modern limits; and as it was cruelly harried by William, partly in retribution for revolt, and partly as a convenient means of creating a waste between himself and his troublesome vassal, the King of Scots, it almost disappears for a while from English history. It was many ages, indeed, before it fully recovered from the blow; and its comparatively modern rise in its present form is attested by the curiously latter-day tone of the name borne by its county town, Newcastle. The existing shire thus lineally represents the old Northumbrian kingdom of which it forms the last central fragment; while, strangely enough, it also contains the original nucleus of Ida’s ancient principality, and the primitive Northumbrian capital of Bamborough.