Northumbria in the tenth century was a chessboard, and the pieces kept getting knocked over. Olaf Sihtricson became its king in 941, raided Tamworth in 943, made peace with King Edmund of England, then lost the kingdom the next year and ran off to rule Dublin instead. When Edmund died in 946, his successor Eadred accepted pledges of loyalty from Archbishop Wulfstan of York and other Northumbrian leaders - pledges that, by the standards of the time, were aspirational at best. In 948 the Northumbrians installed Eric Bloodaxe as their king and broke their word to Eadred. Eadred raided in retaliation. Eric counter-raided and destroyed Eadred's rearguard at Castleford. The Northumbrians, sensing the wind shifting, abandoned Eric. The next year they invited Olaf back. Then they swapped Olaf for Eric again in 952. It was less a kingdom than a revolving door.

Eric had been a son of Harald Fairhair, the king who first unified Norway. He had ruled there briefly, badly, and was driven out - earning the nickname Bloodaxe along the way for the violence he visited on rival claimants, including some of his own brothers. By the time he arrived in Northumbria, he was a king without a country, a Viking warlord whose menace and lineage made him useful to the Northumbrians as a shield against the West Saxon kings to the south. Archbishop Wulfstan, in particular, welcomed Eric for the protection he offered. Wulfstan was a churchman who understood that ecclesiastical independence needed political muscle behind it. For a few years, Eric provided it.

In 954 the Northumbrians removed Eric one last time. He left Northumbria, possibly heading for Dublin or the Hebrides - the route would have taken him over Stainmore, the bleak ridge between modern Cumbria and County Durham where the A66 still cuts across the Pennines today. Somewhere up there, on ground around 1,400 feet above sea level, he was killed. English sources name his killer as an Earl Maccus, son of Olaf - possibly acting for Eadred, who had a known taste for the old Viking trick of setting one warlord against another. Roger of Wendover writes that Eric was betrayed by Oswulf of Bamburgh. Scandinavian sources say Eric died leading an outnumbered army, with five Hebridean kings and two earls of Orkney at his side. Whichever version you believe, the result was the same: the man who had ruled Norway and then York died on a wind-blasted English moor.

Eric's death ended the independence of Scandinavian York. The city and its territory became part of England. Eadred installed Oswulf of Bamburgh as earl of Northumbria, and from that point on, the region was ruled by earls who answered to English kings rather than by Norse warlords answerable mainly to themselves. Viking raids on England did not resume until the 980s. But the story did not end on Stainmore. Eric's widow Gunnhild left England with their five sons and joined her brother, the Danish king Harald Bluetooth, in Jutland. From there the family began the long campaign to reclaim the throne of Norway - and eventually succeeded, when her son Harald Greycloak took the kingdom around 960. The blood of Bloodaxe ran on, even if Bloodaxe himself was buried somewhere on a moor where the wind still blows.