AEthelred I of Northumbria

AEthelred I of Northumbria was king when the Vikings sacked Lindisfarne, and his reign is a fair illustration of why the kingdom could not respond. He was the son of King AEthelwald Moll, came to the throne as a boy in 774, and was driven out five years later by a conspiracy of ealdormen; he spent a decade in exile while three other men held the kingdom and were killed or deposed in turn, and returned in 790 by the same means. He then set about removing rivals with a thoroughness that alarmed even by the standards of eighth-century Northumbria: the sons of a former king were dragged from sanctuary at York and drowned, and another claimant was killed in 791. He married a daughter of Offa of Mercia in 792, which was the nearest thing to a foreign policy he had. On 8 June 793 raiders from Scandinavia attacked the monastery on Lindisfarne, killed or drowned monks, and carried off the treasures of the most famous religious house in northern Britain. The event shocked Christian Europe, and Alcuin of York, then at Charlemagne's court, wrote to AEthelred about it - a letter asking what should be expected for other towns when the church of Saint Cuthbert had been spattered with the blood of the priests of God, and telling the king plainly that the luxury and violence of his court had invited the judgement. AEthelred was murdered by his own men at Corbridge in April 796. Northumbria's kingship never stabilised again, and within eighty years the Danes had taken York. Alcuin's letter is the earliest written reaction to a Viking raid on Britain that survives. Northumbria had produced Bede, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the school at York within the previous century, and its political disorder had nothing to do with its learning. AEthelred's murderers were his own ealdormen, the same class that had removed him once before.

• Nationality: English
• Roles: ruler