Rædwulf was king of Northumbria for a short time. His ancestry is not known, but it is possible that he was a kinsman of Osberht and Ælla.
Rædwulf became king when Æthelred son of Eanred was deposed. Coins from his reign are known, but other than a report of his death fighting pagans (i.e., Vikings) in Roger of Wendover's Flores Historiarum, nothing more is recorded of him.
Annals incorporated in Flores Historiarum date this reign to 844, but the annalist's chronology is not necessarily reliable. The recent discovery of a coin of King Eanred, dated on stylistic grounds to circa 850, led to a reappraisal of the reigns of Northumbrian rulers in the 9th century.H. E. Pagan, ‘Northumbrian numismatic chronology in the ninth century’, British Numismatic Journal, 38 (1969), pp. 1–15. As a result, Rædwulf's reign is now thought to have been c. 858 rather than 844.
The numismatic and written evidence agrees that Æthelred was restored to the kingship after Rædwulf's death.
Notes
References Kirby, D.P., The Earliest English Kings. London: Unwin, 1991. Higham, N.J., The Kingdom of Northumbria AD 350–1100. Stroud: Sutton, 1993.
Yorke, Barbara, Kings and Kingdoms of early Anglo-Saxon England. London: Seaby, 1990.
External links
The Fitzwilliam Museum's Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds website