Aelred of Rievaulx was born of English parents at Hexham in about 1110, that is only thirty years after the final Norman punitive harrying of the north and thirty-four years after the execution of earl Waltheof, grandfather of Aelred’s lifelong friend, Waldef. Aelred’s father was the last of a long line of English ‘hereditary’ priests of Hexham, a foundation of Saint Wilfred which lay within the patrimony of Saint Cuthbert; Cuthbert and Wilfred were kept alive in Northumbria by the writings of Bede whose bones Aelred’s great-grandfather had stolen in a dawn raid on Jarrow and brought to Durham, where Aelred’s father ended his days as one of Cuthbert’s monks. Such a background could be expected to have given Aelred a strong sense of the difference between Norman and Englishman and of his own Englishness. But national identity in Northumbria in the first half of the twelfth century was a complex affair.