ments in Northumbria, on the contrary, had no knowledge of runes.
In one of the old Norse records we are told of Old Northumbria, that ‘Nord-imbraland is for the most part inhabited by Northmen. Many of the names are in the Norræna tongue Grimsbær (Grimsby), and Hauksfljot (Hawkflot), and many others.’[1] This refers to the older and larger Northumberland, and includes, apparently, part of South Humberland or Lincolnshire. The earliest runic inscriptions of old Northumbria are not within the limits of the present county, but are within the kingdom of the Northumbrian Anglians. Among them are those on the Bewcastle column in north-west Cumberland, and on the Ruthwell cross in Dumfries. The date of the Bewcastle[2] monument is about A.D. 670, and the words used in the inscription on the Ruthwell cross show that it cannot well be later than the middle of the eighth century,[3] The inscriptions on the Collingham cross in Yorkshire, and on a slab found at Lancaster, have been assigned to the seventh century.[4] All these and others are inscriptions of the Anglians, and not of the later Danes or Norse, whose runic letters differed in some instances from those of the earlier Anglian.
One of the Old English tribes that can be clearly recognised in Northumbria is that of Lindisfarne. This name was not originally given to the island off the Northumbrian coast, but to a strip of country along it. Lindisfaran was part of the mainland along the courses of two rivers—the Lindis, which was the old name for the Low, and the Waran, that ran into the sea a little north of Bamburgh.[5] This island was the island of the Lindisfarne people or territory, as mentioned by Bede. This small Anglian tribe is one of the most interesting of which
