The 16-year reign of King Edgar, the peacemaker, between 959 and 975, is often said to have been, as his name suggests, a relatively peaceful period in England.

Sandwiched as it was between two brutal epochs of Viking invasion and

dynastic turmoil. For the most part, this is a relatively accurate assessment, the West Saxon

political elite busying themselves during those years in personally administrating the recently acquired

areas of the five boroughs and the Dane Law.

The King, meanwhile, is said to have patrolled his waters at the head of a battle-ready fleet of Anglo-Danish longships.

Many of them manned by the descendants of the very same warriors who had overwhelmed Britain a century earlier at the time of the

Great Eathen army.

Upon their annexation by Wessex in the 910s and 920s, these Anglo-Danish Thames and

warrior lords found themselves integrated into a newly forged political system,

that of the ascendant Anglo-Saxon state, with its power base very much centered in the

southwestern heartlands of Wessex.

The Westex In the North, however, the situation was different.

Though the now mostly Danish ruled territories of East Anglia and the five boroughs had

been annexed by the West Saxon warrior elite some 50 years earlier, the old kingdom

of Northumbria,

traditionally encompassing the majority of the lands between the River Humber in the south

to the coast of Lothian in the far north, had only fully been incorporated into England

a handful of years before Edgar's reign, by his uncle, Erdred, in 954.

Prior to this time, it being comprised of two independent realms. The southernmost of these territories, centred around the metropolis of Yorkic,

by far the largest settlement in the north of Britain at this time, was an Anglo-Scanadian

realm, ruled over by an amalgamation of the old Dairan

...