AEthelwald Moll

AEthelwald Moll took the Northumbrian throne after a murder and lost it at a council six years later, which is the ordinary shape of Northumbrian kingship in that century. He was not of the royal line of Ida in any traceable way - the sources give him no genealogy at all, which for an eighth-century king is itself informative - and he became king in 759 after Oswulf, son of the great Eadberht, was killed by his own household at Market Weighton. Whether AEthelwald had a hand in that killing is not recorded and was probably assumed at the time. He fought a three-day battle at Eildon in 761 against a rival called Oswine and won it. He married Aethelthryth in 762 at Catterick. In 765 a council of nobles and churchmen at Pincanheale deposed him, and he either entered a monastery or was put in one; a man of that name appears afterwards as an abbot. Alhred succeeded and was himself driven out nine years later. The kingdom that had produced Bede, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the school at York went through some ten kings in fifty years, of whom most were murdered, deposed or forced into religion, and the disorder had no evident effect on the learning at all. His son AEthelred I ruled twice, reigned when the Vikings sacked Lindisfarne in 793, and was murdered by his own ealdormen in 796. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Northumbrian annals disagree over whether he abdicated or was removed, and neither explains the council's grounds. Coins of his reign survive and name him alongside the archbishop of York, which suggests the church accepted him at the time it accepted him. Pincanheale, where he lost the throne, has never been securely located.

• Nationality: English
• Roles: ruler