Firstly may I say how much I enjoy your books both Sharpe and the Viking series. I have been researching for a brief talk to our local History Society about Elie House in Fife where I live. As ever one bit of research fires off into another bit like a chain reaction. In the course of checking the background I found that Northumbria extended as far north as the Firth of Forth and that Edinburgh was a major settlement in the Kindom of Northumbria but was lost to the King of Alba (aka Scotland) in about 1018 together with all of Northumbria north of the Tweed. The small maps at the beginning of your books shows Northumbria up to what is about the present day Scottish border whereas that did not occur until a few decades before the Norman Conquest. It is interesting to think that from my pub in Elie I can look over to what was less than 1000 years ago a foreign country from where pilgrims came to visit the shrine of St Andrew (long before golf took over the pilgrimage destination function!). It must have been like an earlier Sarah Palin looking across to Russia.