THE NORTH EAST is probably England's most distinctive region. A place of strong character with a very special sense of its past, it is, as William Hutchinson remarked in 1778, `truly historical ground'. This is a book about both the ancient Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, which stretched from the Humber to the Scottish border, and the ways in which the idea of being a Northumbrian, or a northerner, or someone from the `North East', persisted in the area long after the early English kingdom had f...