THE NORTHUMBRIANS
NORTH-EAST ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE: A NEW HISTORY
DAN JACKSON
Hurst, 320pp, £14.99
Dan Jackson’s admirably detailed survey of the north-east of England, once the kingdom of Northumbria, the home of St Cuthbert, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Jarrow Marchers, was hailed by Tom Holland in the Times as ‘the very best type of local history’. It was, wrote Holland, ‘a book of deep learning, displaying a knowledge of every detail of Northumbrian history and topography that is never less than staggering. It is also manifestly personal and all the more readable
for it.’ Holland admired how The Northumbrians, which covers an impressive span from the building of Hadrian’s Wall right up to Brexit, was ‘suffused with a warm-hearted local patriotism’.
In the Church Times, John Arnold listed what the Northumbrians have given us. ‘Many of the inventions that have made the modern world, from locomotives to light bulbs. To hill-farming, fishing, and fighting were added mining, heavy engineering and shipbuilding, leading to a distinctive social culture characterised by pride in hard work, discipline, comradeship and communality, courage and persistence, and military, naval and sporting achievements.’ And in the Daily Telegraph, Michael Kerr (though he noted a bit of ‘sloppy’ text editing) praised Tynesider Jackson for a devotion to his fellow Northumbrians which does not preclude their faults: ‘He admits they are prone to sentimentality, that there’s a suspicion of individualism, and that the community spirit can sometimes turn suffocating and racist.’ Interviewed on BBC North East, the author said he had written a work of ‘cultural archaeology’, restoring the reputation of Northumbria as a place that had ‘always valued learning, literacy, storytelling and humour.’