One of the consequences is essentially the erasure of the Northumbrians from the consciousness of popular history. For much of the 7th and early 8th centuries, Northumbria was the dominant political and military force in England; Bede imagines an Angla-lond largely because he himself is a Northumbrian Anglian, writing at a time when Northumbrian supremacy was at its height. Northumbria gets increasingly sidelined in the historic record as our dependence on the West Saxon Anglo-Saxon Chronicle becomes more pronounced from the mid-9th century onwards, and gets overlooked from the 860s onwards following the capture of York by the Great Army.

The Danelaw has a significant impact in terms of Danish settlers and the linguistic and material culture they bring with them, but as a result the voice of the Northumbrians is increasingly lost. Despite Alfred's reference to 'the English living under the Danes' in 886, we see a fascination with 'Anglo-Danish' culture. Successive political upheaval and even outright rebellions in Northumbria until the 970s are usually seen through a lens of 'proud Viking independence' rather than considering other motives: imagine if you will that in 1945, following the defeat of Germany, President Roosevelt had claimed newly-liberated France as a new state of the the USA, and that subsequent French nationalist independence movements were attributed to German holdouts. Northumbria in the 9th century was a centuries-old Anglian polity that had been the dominant power in England for much of its history, and now suddenly found itself 'liberated' into a Saxon-dominated 'England' with very little say in the matter.