The Norman Conquest (39 page)

Having bought off his main opponent, William embarked on the second part of his plan. As Orderic explains, the king left York and divided his army into smaller contingents that could comb the mountains and forests where the rebels were hiding. They spread out, we are told, over more than a hundred miles of territory, slaying many men and destroying the lairs of others. This, however, was only the beginning of William’s strategy. ‘In his anger’, continues Orderic, ‘he commanded that all crops and herds, chattels and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes with consuming fire, so that the whole region north of the Humber might be stripped of all means of sustenance.’ The Conqueror’s aim was to ensure that no future army, English or Danish, would be able to support itself against him and, as Orderic makes clear, this scorched-earth policy was brutally effective. ‘As a consequence, so serious a scarcity was felt in England, and so terrible a famine fell upon the humble and defenceless people, that more than 100,000 Christian folk of both sexes, young and old alike, perished of hunger.’
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This terrible episode – the so-called ‘Harrying of the North’ – has established itself as one of the most notorious incidents not only of William’s reign but of English history as a whole, and used to damn the king and the Normans down the ages. In recent years there have been attempts to downplay its severity. In particular, attempts have been made to show that the devastation described by the chroniclers is not supported by the economic information recorded in the Domesday Book. As we shall see, these arguments can easily be set aside.
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Moreover, even if we dismiss the most lurid chronicle evidence, what remains is both credible and compelling. John of Worcester, for example, tells us that the famine was so severe that people ate human flesh as well as horses, cats and dogs. Others, adds Simeon of Durham, sold themselves into perpetual slavery to preserve their own existence. At Evesham Abbey in distant Worcestershire, the monks long remembered how large numbers of starving refugees arrived in search of food, but (like concentration-camp survivors in modern times) died from eating too ravenously. Every day, says the abbey’s chronicler, they buried five or six more bodies.
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The last word on the subject, therefore, must still go to Orderic. As we noted at the outset, when Orderic wrote his account of these events he had in front of him the relentlessly pro-Norman words of William of Poitiers, and we have seen that for much of the time he was content to repeat them without demur. When he reached Poitiers’ account of the Harrying, however, Orderic stopped copying. Because the end of the original is lost, we can never know what arguments the Conqueror’s chaplain devised to justify his master’s actions that winter, but they elicited this reaction from the man who had been born in Mercia just five years later:

My narrative has frequently had occasion to praise William, but for this act which condemned the innocent and guilty alike to die by slow starvation I cannot commend him. For when I think of helpless children, young men in the prime of life, and hoary greybeards perishing alike of hunger, I am so moved to pity that I would rather lament the grief and sufferings of the wretched people than make a vain attempt to flatter the perpetrator of such infamy.

Moreover, I declare that assuredly such brutal slaughter cannot remain unpunished. For the almighty Judge watches over high and low alike; he will weigh the deeds of all in an even balance, and as a just avenger will punish wrongdoing, as the eternal law makes clear to all men.
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14

Aftershocks

A
s the year 1069 drew to a close, and with the countryside all around him still smouldering, the Conqueror left his army in camp and went to keep Christmas in York. After the recent waves of violence, and particularly the uncontrollable fire started by the Norman garrisons in September, there can have been few buildings in the city left standing. The cathedral church of York Minster was in a terrible state, ‘completely laid waste and burnt down’, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, its ornaments and documents, according to a later writer, either lost or destroyed. Yet it was almost certainly in the church’s charred remains that William, to quote OrdericVitalis, ‘celebrated the birth of our Saviour’. He was also, of course, celebrating the third anniversary of his own coronation, and this coincidence was not allowed to pass unnoticed. As Orderic explains, at some point during the fighting the king had sent to Winchester for his crown and regalia, and he wore them both in York that Christmas. His northern subjects, so fickle of late in their loyalty, were being reminded that William’s authority was not based simply on overwhelming military might; he was also their legitimate king, anointed by the Holy Church, chosen by God.
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The military might was nevertheless rapidly reapplied. Soon after Christmas William learned the location of some of the English rebel leaders and set out to confront them. When they in turn fled he pursued them across the unforgiving landscape of North Yorkshire, ‘forcing his way through trackless wastes, over ground so rough that he was frequently compelled to go on foot’. At length he came to the banks of the River Tees, where he
camped his army for a fortnight, during which time there were significant submissions. Some prominent rebels, says Orderic, appeared in person and swore an oath of fealty; Earl Gospatric stayed away but swore through proxies. Others, such as Mærleswein and Edgar Ætheling, evidently fled further north, eventually finding their way back to Scotland. It is not entirely clear whether the king himself followed them, but, according to Simeon of Durham, his army ‘spread over all the places between the Tees and the Tyne’. Everywhere they went, though, the Normans ‘found only one continued solitude’. The people of Durham had fled to the woods and the mountains; they had heard about Yorkshire’s terrible fate.
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Towards the end of January 1070, therefore, William decided to abandon the hunt. Returning to York he spent some time rebuilding the castles and re-establishing order, before setting off to deal with the remaining rebels in Mercia. Orderic says simply that he suppressed the risings there ‘with royal power’, but we can safely infer that more harrying occurred: the Domesday Book shows a dramatic drop in values for the counties along the Welsh border. The rebel siege of Shrewsbury was raised and more new castles were constructed at Chester and Stafford. All of this must have taken several weeks, and so it must have been well into March before the king reached Salisbury, at which point his troops were finally dismissed.
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After almost two years of fighting, the English revolt was over. Thousands, probably tens of thousands, had died – the total figure will forever remain unknown, but it must have been far in excess of the death toll at Hastings. The English themselves, of course, had suffered appallingly, cut down in battle or killed indiscriminately as part of the brutal process of repression. Many more had been condemned to a slower death because of the Harrying, and would continue to perish from hunger for months to come. ‘In this year there was great famine’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1070, passing over in silence the fact that much of it had been artificially induced.
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It is important to recognize, however, that for the Normans too these had been terrible days. They had also fallen in battle, or been massacred in great numbers when their castles were overrun. They too had experienced horrendous conditions. Consider, for example,
the description of the Conqueror’s march from York to Chester during the early weeks of 1070 given by Orderic Vitalis:

He pushed on with determination along a road no horseman had attempted before, over steep mountains and precipitous valleys, through rivers and rushing streams and deep abysses. As they stumbled along the path they were lashed with rain and hail. Sometimes all were obliged to feed on horses which had perished in the bogs.

For some of the king’s followers this proved too much to stomach. Even before they had set out for Chester,

The men of Anjou, Brittany and Maine complained loudly that they were grievously burdened with intolerable duties, and repeatedly asked the king to discharge them from his service. They urged in defence of their conduct that they could not obey a lord who went from one hazard to the next and commanded them to do the impossible.

Orderic is clearly copying William of Poitiers here – witness the telltale attempt to blame this dissent on the non-Norman elements in the army. Yet the fact that Poitiers felt compelled to include it at all is highly significant, for it implies a protest so serious that not even the Conqueror’s principal apologist felt able to sweep it under the carpet. During the winter of 1069―70 conditions in William’s army were clearly so bad that there appears to have been something approaching a mutiny; there was certainly widespread desertion, because we are later told that the king ‘counted any who chose to desert him as idle cowards and weaklings’. As before, there was only one inducement that William could offer to the waverers. ‘He promised that the victors should enjoy rest when their great labours were over, assuring them that they could not hope to win rewards without toil.’
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Some may have wanted land, and the king had plenty to spare. A few English rebels, such as Gospatric, had submitted in January and had their estates restored. But many more had been killed or exiled, which meant there had been a new round of confiscations. Those who lost their lands at this point probably included Edgar
Ætheling, and certainly his fellow exile Mærleswein, whose estates were transferred en bloc to a Norman called Ralph Pagnell. Other Normans who received lands around this time included William de Percy, who was active in restoring order to Yorkshire after the rebellion, and Hugh fitz Baldric, who became the county’s new sheriff.
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Yet not everyone can have been rewarded with land, nor can everyone have wanted it. Even the hardiest and hungriest of Normans might have thought twice about accepting estates on such a wild and desolate frontier, and having to wonder whether each day might bring a new English rising or Danish invasion. By the end of the campaign, many of William’s troops would doubtless have preferred to receive the kind of reward they could carry back home to the Continent. Here, however, there seems to have been more of a problem. Land may have been superabundant, but money and other moveable wealth was in short supply. This was hardly surprising, given the huge amount that had already been extracted since 1066 in the form of tribute and taxes. Getting more by such methods was clearly going to be difficult: in many areas of the country the economy had been completely devastated. And yet, at the same time, mercenaries must be paid.

The solution, it seems, was the eleventh-century equivalent of a raid on the bank. As John of Worcester explains, precisely because of the ravaging and violence, many rich Englishmen had secreted their money in monasteries – the assumption being, of course, that valuables would be safer in such theoretically inviolable spaces. But during Lent (i.e. after 17 February 1070) the king ‘ordered that the monasteries all over England be searched, and that the wealth deposited in them be seized and taken to his treasury’. (The idea, we are told, was the brainchild of William fitz Osbern.) The twelfth-century chronicler at Abingdon Abbey relates much the same story, but explains that it was not just the secular stashes that were confiscated. ‘In addition, very many precious goods which could be found within the monks’ precinct – a wealth of gold and silver, vestments, books, and vessels of diverse types, assigned to the use and honour of the church – were indiscriminately taken away.’ There can be little doubt, given the timing of the raid, that this loot became the ‘lavish rewards’ distributed to the king’s troops when they were dismissed at Salisbury a short while later. Such expedients, while they solved the immediate problem of mercenary expectations, can
hardly have done much to improve relations between the conquerors and the conquered.
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At Easter 1070 William was crowned for a second time. The ceremony, which on this occasion took place in Winchester, passed without any reported hitches, and was designed, like the recent crown-wearing in York, to provide an emphatic statement of the Conqueror’s legitimacy. Some time earlier, the king had petitioned his friend and supporter, Pope Alexander, for assistance in bolstering his rule, and Alexander had responded by sending to England a legation composed of two cardinals and a bishop. It was these men, explains Orderic Vitalis, who solemnly re-crowned William that Easter, underscoring his position as the pope’s most cherished son.
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A new coronation was not the only reason for the cardinals’ visit; another was the Normans’ pressing need for atonement. Even by the competitive standards of the eleventh century, the king and his fellow warriors had been responsible for spilling an exceptionally large amount of blood. Indeed, it seems possible that some of the opposition the Conqueror faced during the campaign of 1069–70 might have been due not merely to physical hardship but also to moral objections. Orderic Vitalis names at least one Norman who returned home at this point declining to have any further part in the Conquest, and chronicle accounts of the Harrying suggest that, even in an age familiar with such atrocities, the scale of the human suffering was felt by some to be shocking.
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