This book deals with the rise and fall of the kingdom of Northumbria. It examines the mechanisms of ethnic, political, social and religious change which, beginning after the end of the Roman Empire, welded the large and disparate area between the Humber and the Firth of Forth into one of the most powerful kingdoms of early medieval England, and those which led to its disintegration and its replacement by political structures of northern England and southern Scotland. The story is set in a wider European context so that the history of Northumbria is seen as paradigmatic for an understanding of state formation and religious and cultural change in the early medieval world. Full attention is given to archaeological and art-historical material, and the extent to which narrative sources were shaped by sectional interests and created imagined visions of the past.