Northman of Escomb information

Northman (Old English: Norþman; fl. 994) was a late 10th-century English earl, with a territorial base in Northumbria north of the River Tees. A figure with this name appears in two different strands of source material. These are, namely, a textual tradition from Durham witnessed by Historia de Sancto Cuthberto and by the Durham Liber Vitae; and the other an appearance in a witness list of a charter of King Æthelred II dated to 994. The latter is Northman's only appearance south of the Humber, and occurred the year after Northumbria was attacked by Vikings.^[1]

Almost nothing is known about Northman besides his title and status as a landowner and ecclesiastical donor in northern Northumbia, our ignorance extending to the identities of his parents and any children or spouses he may have had. Northman is never given a patronymic, and although he is associated with landholdings in what would later become County Durham there is no explicit statement about the geography of any "earldom" he held. There is a possibility therefore that the two appearances of Northman represent different characters, though they are generally thought to be the same.^[2]