Alhred of Northumbria
Alhred took a Northumbrian throne that had become lethal and was driven off it after nine years. He came to power in 765 when a council of nobles and churchmen at Pincanheale deposed Aethelwald Moll, and his own claim was thin enough that he had to marry Osgifu, a daughter of the previous king Eadberht, to make it stand up. Eighth-century Northumbria is the illustration of a kingdom that had everything except a rule for the succession. Between 758 and 810 its kings were repeatedly murdered, deposed or tonsured, and the same assemblies of nobles that made them unmade them. His reign is nonetheless the one in which the kingdom's intellectual life reaches its height: this is the Northumbria of the school at York under Aelberht, where Alcuin was trained before Charlemagne took him to Aachen. He and Osgifu wrote to Lull, the English archbishop of Mainz, and sent missionaries to the continent - the letters survive and are the clearest evidence of what the correspondence between the English church and its German daughter looked like. In 774 his nobles abandoned him at York at Easter and he fled to the Pictish king at Forteviot. Aethelred, the son of the man he had replaced, took the throne and was himself deposed within five years. Nothing is recorded of his death or of where he ended. The kingdom that produced Bede and the Lindisfarne Gospels lost Lindisfarne to the first Viking raid in 793, twenty years after he was driven out, and was annexed by Wessex within a century. Alcuin, writing from Charlemagne's court when the news of the raid reached him, blamed the killing of kings.
- Nationality: Northumbrian
- Roles: head_of_state
