page_title: History of Cumbria
section_title: Church and state
hierarchical_section_title: History of Cumbria / Medieval Cumbria / Early medieval Cumbria, 410–1066 / Church and state
caption_attribution_description: English: The Ormside bowl in the British Museum. It is a silver and glass double bowl dating from the AD 750-800 which was found in 1823 buried next to a Viking warrior in Ormside, Cumbria
context_page_description: The history of Cumbria as a county of England begins with the Local Government Act 1972. Its territory and constituent parts however have a long history under various other administrative and historic units of governance. Cumbria is an upland, coastal and rural area, with a history of invasions, migration and settlement, as well as battles and skirmishes between the English and the Scots.
context_section_description: The relation between church and state may have led to the end of Northumbrian control in the Cumbria region.
  
  Legend has it that Cuthbert foresaw the death of Ecgfrith (at Dun Nechtain), while visiting the church at Carlisle, warning Ecgfrith's (second) wife Eormenburg whom he was accompanying. Bede reckoned that the decline of Northumbrian power dated from this year (685), but military set-backs were only part of the picture. Inter-family struggles amongst the various branches of the royal family played a part, as did the granting of royal estates (the so-called villae) to the Northumbrian Roman church (in return for support for the various attempts on the throne), encouraged by the aristocracy who wished to lessen the burden of royal power and taxation. Cuthbert's grant of lands around Cartmel was one example of this process of degradation of royal resources and power.
   
  The huge estates given to the Church meant that it became an alternative power-base to the king. In Cumbria, there were monasteries at Carlisle, Dacre, and Heversham, known from literary sources; and at Knells, Workington and Beckermet, known from stone inscriptions; and possible sites at Irton, with its early 9th-century cross, Urswick and Addingham without any evidence attached to them. Anglian sculpture was invariably to be found at monastic sites (which, in turn, were to be found in good agricultural areas). The crosses themselves were not grave markers (a few cemeteries had grave slabs), but were "memorials to the saints and to the dead."
  The rise of the church, and the parallel decline in fortune of the secular royal power, meant that Northumbria and its Cumbrian appendage were not strong enough militarily to fend off the next set of raiders and settlers (who first attacked the Lindisfarne monastery in 793) – the Vikings. By 875, the Northumbrian kingdom had been taken over by Danish Vikings. Cumbria was to go through a period of Irish-Scandinavian (Norse) settlement with the addition, from the late 9th century on, of the influx of more Brittonic Celts.
caption: The Ormside bowl, probably late 8th century and made in Northumbria; possibly looted from York by a Viking warrior and buried with him at Great Ormside
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