In the alternative reality where 2020 was not dominated by a global pandemic, the paper that forms the basis for this essay would have been presented in the Historic Reading Room of the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Prior to the creation of the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester in 1974, Manchester was in the historic county of Lancashire; 2020 would therefore have been the first time that the Battle Conference for Anglo-Norman Studies had taken place in Lancashire (or its historic footprint). A paper focused on the history of Lancashire during the tenth century seemed, in this context, entirely appropriate. It is also true that while we think of Manchester as very much a modern industrial city – the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, even – the modern city has ancient origins. There was a Roman castrum in Mamucium, the remains of which lie in the modern Manchester suburb of Castlefield, and the Anglo-Saxon settlement that followed even warranted a mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in an entry which will be discussed below.

This research that underpins this essay also forms part of a larger project looking at political and cultural interaction on the eastern seaboard of the Irish Sea between the mid-ninth and mid-tenth centuries, in particular the northern part of the Anglo-Welsh frontier (the modern counties of Cheshire and Flint) and west Lancashire/ Merseyside. The following discussion will suggest that these were highly liminal spaces and that control of this area (roughly coterminous with modern west Lancashire and Merseyside) and contestation of that control were central issues for the way in which politics in the Irish Sea zone was configured in the early tenth century. In particular, this essay will offer some reframing of the way in which the fortification programme carried out in northern Mercia by Æthelflæd, ‘Domina Merciorum’, and, following her death, her brother Edward the Elder is understood by historians.

The period covered by the following discussion, from the late ninth century through to the mid-tenth century, was also one of exceptional political and cultural fluidity in the Irish Sea region. It is, of course, instinctive to all historians to see their particular corner of the discipline as the most exciting/interesting/fundamental, but this period, which saw extensive Scandinavian activity in the Irish Sea, including significant settlement on both the eastern and western seaboards, was more compelling than most.