The Harrying of the North was a series of military campaigns waged by William the Conqueror in the winter of 1069–1070 to subjugate Northern England, where the presence of the last Wessex claimant, Edgar Ætheling, had encouraged Anglo-Saxon Northumbrian, Anglo-Scandinavian and Danish rebellions. William paid the Danes to go home, but the remaining rebels refused to meet him in battle, and he decided to starve them out by laying waste to the northern shires using scorched earth tactics, especially in the historic county of Yorkshire and the city of York, before relieving the local aristocracy of their positions, and installing Norman aristocrats throughout the region.
Contemporary chronicles vividly record the savagery of the campaign, the huge scale of the destruction and the widespread famine caused by looting, burning and slaughtering. Some present-day scholars have labelled the campaigns a genocide, although others doubt whether William could have assembled enough troops to inflict so much damage and have suggested that the records may have been exaggerated or misinterpreted. Records from the Domesday Book of 1086 suggest that as much as 75% of the population could have died or never returned.
Background
At the time of the Norman Conquest, the earldom of Northumbria differed from much of the rest of the Kingdom of England in its geography, political traditions and cultural identity. The region retained strong Anglo-Scandinavian influences and was governed through powerful regional earls who exercised considerable authority on behalf of the English crown. Combined with difficult communications with southern England and close political ties across the North Sea and with Scotland, these factors made the region particularly difficult for William to bring under effective royal control.
The population of the north in the eleventh century, particularly in modern Yorkshire, can be described as "Anglo-Scandinavian" carrying a cultural continuity from a mixing of Viking and Anglo-Saxon traditions during the time of Scandinavian dominance in York. The dialect of English spoken in Yorkshire may well have been different to people from the south of England, and the aristocracy south of the Tees (an area roughly analogous to modern day Yorkshire) was partly Danish in origin.
Geographically, "the North" was separated from the rest of England by natural barriers such as the river Humber and consisted of what became Yorkshire, Durham, and Northumberland in the east and Lancashire with the southern parts of Cumberland and Westmorland in the west. As well as the terrain the poor state of the roads also made communication between the north and south difficult. The more popular route between York and the south was by ship. In 962 Edgar the Peaceful had granted legal autonomy to the northern earls of the Danelaw in return for their loyalty; this had limited the powers of the Anglo-Saxon kings who succeeded him north of the Humber, particularly with tax. Efforts by the Wessex born earl Tostig to bring the tax closer to English levels led to the Northumbrian Revolt of 1065 that deposed him. The Anglo-Saxon earldom of Northumbria bordering the Danelaw stretched from the Tees to the Tweed.
The northern frontier with the Kingdom of Scotland was permeable and changeable in a way England's south coast was not. Scottish kings had long intervened in the politics of Northumbria, while English exiles and rival claimants could readily seek refuge at the Scottish court. Similarly a powerful Earl of Northumbria could affect politics in Scotland, with Earl Siward deposing Macbeth.
Norman Conquest
After the defeat of the English army and death of Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings, English resistance to the conquest was centred on Edgar Ætheling, the grandson of Edmund Ironside. Ironside was half-brother to Edward the Confessor. It is said the English conceded defeat not at Hastings but at Berkhamsted two months later when Edgar and his supporters submitted to William in December 1066. However, of all the men who submitted to William at Berkhamsted it was only Ealdred, Archbishop of York, who would remain loyal to the Norman king. William faced a series of rebellions and border skirmishes in Dover, Exeter, Hereford, Nottingham, Durham, York and Peterborough.
Copsi, a supporter of Tostig (a previous Anglo-Saxon earl of Northumbria who had been banished by Edward the Confessor), was a native of Northumbria and his family had a history of being rulers of Bernicia, and at times Northumbria. Copsi had fought in Harald Hardrada's army with Tostig, against Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. He had managed to escape after Harald's defeat. When Copsi offered homage to William at Barking in 1067, William rewarded him by making him earl of Northumbria. After just five weeks as earl, Copsi was murdered by Osulf, son of Earl Eadwulf IV of Bernicia. When, in turn, the usurping Osulf was also killed, his cousin, Gospatric, bought the earldom from William. He was not long in power before he joined Edgar Ætheling in rebellion against William in 1068.
With two earls murdered and one changing sides, William decided to intervene personally in Northumbria. He marched north and arrived in York during the summer of 1068. The opposition melted away, with some of them – including Edgar – taking refuge at the court of the King Malcolm III of Scotland.
Back in Northumbria, William changed tactics and appointed a Flemish mercenery, Robert de Comines, as earl, rather than an Anglo-Saxon. Despite warnings from Bishop Ethelwin that a rebel army was mobilised against him, Robert rode into Durham with a party of men on 28 January 1069, where he and his men were surrounded and slaughtered. The rebels then turned their attention to York where they killed the guardian of the castle there plus a large number of his men William's response was swift and brutal: he returned to York where he fell on the besiegers, killing or putting them to flight.
Possibly emboldened by the fighting in the north, rebellions broke out in other parts of the country. William sent earls to deal with problems in Dorset, Shrewsbury and Devon, while he dealt with rebels in the Midlands and Stafford. Edgar Ætheling had sought assistance from King Sweyn II of Denmark, who claimed that he had been promised the English throne by Edward the Confessor. Sweyn assembled a fleet of ships under the command of his sons. The fleet sailed up the east coast of England raiding as they went. The Danes with their English allies retook the city of York. Then, in the winter of 1069, William marched his army from Nottingham to York with the intention of engaging the rebel army. However, by the time William's army had reached York, the rebel army had fled, with Edgar returning to Scotland. As they had nowhere suitable on land to stay for the winter, the Danes decided to go back to their ships in the Humber estuary. William agreed to pay them a danegeld to return home without a fight. William then turned to the rebels. As they were not prepared to meet his army in pitched battle, he employed a strategy that would attack the rebel army's sources of support and their food supply.
Campaign
William's strategy, implemented during the winter of 1069–70 (he spent Christmas 1069 in York), has been described by William E. Kapelle and some other modern scholars as an act of genocide. Contemporary biographers of William consider it to be his cruellest act and a "stain upon his soul". Writing about the Harrying of the North over 50 years later, the Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis wrote (paraphrased):
The King stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies. He cut down many people and destroyed homes and land. Nowhere else had he shown such cruelty. This made a real change. To his shame, William made no effort to control his fury, punishing the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food be burned to ashes. More than 100,000 people perished of starvation. I have often praised William in this book, but I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.
The land was ravaged on either side of William's route north from the River Aire. His army destroyed crops and settlements and forced rebels into hiding. By January 1070 he split his army into smaller units and sent them out to burn, loot, and terrify. From the Humber to the Tees, William's men burnt whole villages and slaughtered the inhabitants. Food stores and livestock were destroyed so that anyone surviving the initial massacre would succumb to starvation over the winter.
Florence of Worcester writing in the 12th century states:
[King William] assembled an army, and hastened into Northumbria, giving way to his resentment; and spent the whole winter in laying waste the country, slaughtering the inhabitants, and inflicting every sort of evil, without cessation.
There are credible reports of survivors being reduced to cannibalism. In the early 12th century Symeon of Durham wrote:
... so great a famine prevailed that men, compelled by hunger, devoured human flesh, that of horses, dogs, and cats, and whatever custom abhors; others sold themselves to perpetual slavery, so that they might in any way preserve their wretched existence.
Refugees from the harrying are mentioned as far away as Worcestershire in the Evesham Abbey chronicle.
Other refugees fled to lowland Scotland.
In 1086, Yorkshire still had large areas of waste territory. The Domesday Book entries indicate wasteas est or hoc est vast ("it is wasted") for estate after estate; 60% of all holdings were waste, and 66% of all villages contained wasted manors. Even the prosperous areas of the county had lost 60% of its value compared to 1066. Only 25% of the population and plough teams remained with a reported loss of 80,000 oxen and 150,000 people. The Domesday Book records a drastic decline in land values between 1066 and 1086, for Yorkshire, and between 1086 and 1100 there was a corresponding drop in the value of the land for tax purposes.
Independent archaeological evidence supports the massive destruction and displacement of people. Archaeologist Richard Ernest Muir wrote that there was evidence for the "violent disruption [that] took place in Yorkshire in 1069–71, in the form of hoards of coins which were buried by the inhabitants."
Legacy
B. K. Roberts in his book The Making of the English Village, suggests the reason that large numbers of villages have been laid out in regular pattern in Durham and Yorkshire was through a restructuring at a single point in time, as opposed to natural settlement growth. He goes on to say that it is highly unlikely that such plans could have resulted from piecemeal additions and must have been necessary after the Harrying of the North. The dating is thought to be secure as it is known that Norman lords used similar regular plans in founding new towns in the 'plantation' of rural settlements in other conquered parts of the British Isles.
In 1076 William appointed another Earl of Northumbria. This time it was Walcher, a Lotharingian, who had been appointed the first non-English Bishop of Durham in 1071. Having effectively subdued the population, William carried out a complete replacement of Anglo-Saxon leaders with Norman ones in the north. The new aristocracy in England was predominantly of Norman extraction; however, one exception was that of Alan Rufus, a trusted Breton lord, who obtained in 1069–1071 a substantial fiefdom in north Yorkshire, which the Domesday Book calls "the Hundred of the Land of Count Alan", later known as Richmondshire. Here Alan governed, as it were, his own principality: the only location held by the king in this area was Ainderby Steeple on its eastern edge, while Robert of Mortain held one village on its southern fringe; the other Norman lords were excluded, whereas Alan retained the surviving Anglo-Danish lords or their heirs. Alan also exercised patronage in York, where he founded St Mary's Abbey in 1088. By 1086 Alan was one of the richest and most powerful men in England.
King Malcolm III of Scotland married the Edgar Ætheling's sister, Margaret, in 1071. Edgar sought Malcolm's assistance in his struggle against William. The marriage profoundly affected the history of both England and Scotland. The influence of Margaret and her sons brought about the Anglicisation of the Lowlands and provided the Scottish king with an excuse for forays into England, which he could claim were to redress the wrongs against his brother-in-law. The formal link between the royal house of Scotland and Wessex was a threat to William, who marched up to Scotland in 1072 to confront Malcolm. The two kings negotiated the Treaty of Abernethy (1072), through which, according to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, Malcolm became William's vassal; among the other provisions was the expulsion of Edgar from the Scottish court. Edgar finally submitted to William in 1074. William's hold on the crown was then theoretically uncontested.