30/10/2023
The winter of 1069–1070 was one of the most savage and brutal England had ever seen. A series of campaigns waged by the Conqueror of England was carried out in an attempt to subdue rebellions in the north of the country, these campaigns were called The Harrying of the North.
The population of the north before William of Normandy’s conquest of England was what has become referred to as Anglo-Scandinavian. They had been left mostly to their own devices, and communication with the south of the country was infrequent, Anglo-Saxon kings had primarily left them alone as long as they didn’t cause problems. But despite having submitted to William, Edgar Ætheling, grandson of Edmund Ironside and a claimant to the throne, began to rebel against the new King of England, encouraging the powerful earls of the north to join him in overthrowing King William.
After a series of attacks on William's representatives in the North, the Conqueror took up arms once more and marched North. The rebels fled every time William got close refusing to meet him on the battle field; elsewhere in the country other smaller rebellions were quashed by William’s earls. The king decided it was time to do something drastic, something that would end all rebellion.
Having negotiated with the Danes, for a price, to abandon their alliance with Edgar and return home, he turned his attention to targeting the rebels were it would hurt the most, some historians today describe it as an act of genocide.
William’s army spread out, leaving a trail of total destruction in their wake; whole villages were burnt to the ground, food ruined and livestock slaughtered. Anyone who survived the widespread massacre would soon die of starvation through the coming harsh winter weeks. Their orders were to burn, destroy, and instill terror into the population. Chroniclers of the time say William ‘salted the earth’ making it unusable and showed "such cruelty unseen before" punishing the innocent with the guilty. Some estimates put the death toll at 150,000 people. The devastating effects of the Harrying could still be seen in the diminished food stocks and the displacement of the people of the north fifty years after the event.
Later in the Domesday Book up to 60% of all land in the area was marked down as "wasteas est or hoc est vast" (it is wasted). After the savage put down of the rebels William replaced all Anglo-Saxon earls and leaders with Normans, effectively stamping out the Anglo-Saxon nobility for good.
Sources:
The Norman Conquest of the North: The Region and its Transformation 1000–1135, William E. Kapelle
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/52358
The Yorkshire Countryside: A Landscape History, Richard Muir
