 Eardwulf was not, so far as is known, connected to any of the factions that had been warring for the throne up to the mid-790s.Nothing is definitely known of his background, though Symeon of Durham's "History of the Kings", an early twelfth-century work based on the lost late tenth-century chronicle of Byrhtferth, records that his father's name was also Eardwulf, and both father and son are given the title "dux".Historian Barbara Yorke has proposed that he was a descendant of one Eanwine who (according to Symeon of Durham) was killed in 740 on the orders of King Eadberht.