Bernie Taupin was born and raised in Lincolnshire, not “Wessex” (which, incidentally hasn’t existed for almost a millennium) and the counties that once constituted that area are on the other side of the country from Lincolnshire’s north-east coast.
Also, Tostig was not Earl of Wessex, but his dad Godwin was!
However, Tostig was Earl of Northumbria, which contains the modern-day county of Lincolnshire.
The column is In the Elton John song “Levon,” who is Alvin Tostig?
But, how does Northumbria include Lincolnshire, when Lincolnshire is south of the River Humber?
That Staff Report was written about 9 years ago, and David (who wrote it) is no longer on staff and no longer even posts here. I suspect that there’s no one on Staff that would want to take this up to try to figure whether corrections are needed.
We’ve got a couple of choices, mark_dallas.
(a) We could remove the Staff Report from the Archives.
or (b) If you’d like to write me an email with your suggested changes (be specific) and with refernces or cites to back up your info, I’d be happy to try to fix things.
Lemme know. And thanks.
Lincolnshire seems to correspond roughly with the ancient Kingdom of Lindsey, which was at various times independent, part of Northumbria, and part of Mercia, but it seems to have been regarded as part of Mercia in Tostig’s time.
Mark is correct apart from Lincolnshire containing Northumbria. Unless I am a complete moron, the old Northumbria came roughly down to the Humber and thus could be said to be touching modern day Lincolnshire but it certainly isn’t contained within modern day Lincolnshire.
He said Northumbria contained Lincolnshire, not t’other way about (which would be weird).
Actually, he said Northumbria contains Lincolnshire, which – if you can even say there is an area that can be defined as Northumbria these days – certainly isn’t true.
When Northumbria did exist as a kingdom, its borders changed a good deal over time, and it’s possible that at its greatest southern extent it at one time included parts of what is now Lincolnshire, but you’re right that it wouldn’t be usual to consider Lincolnshire as historically part of Northumbria.
Northumbria started out as three ‘kingdoms’ (chiefdoms really) that for the life of me I can’t remember what they were, but the main southern one was something like The Deir. It early on incorporated a Roman left-over based on York, probably run by Angle mercenaries in the name of Rome. Not much later, Oswyth from the North converted to Christianity fell out with brother Osric to the south (or the names reversed) and united the ‘kingdoms’, chieftaincies, over the latter’s dead body.
I believe that Oswyth married the queen of Cumbria, at that time still as Roman as anything in Britain, because she needed a man to do the ‘war-stuff’ and appointing a Commander from her own would have given him the chance to take over in those turbulent times. So Cumbria (including north modern Lancashire) remained ‘British’ with its capital at Carlisle although with a nominal English overlord who did not interfere until the Scots invaded from Ulster.