The Harrying of the North
The
plundering of the northern lands of England after the Norman Conquest
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The BBC 2025
documentary Lucy
Worley Investigates William the Conqueror explores the Harrying of the
North.
The battle in
which William I, Duke of Normandy killed Harold Godwineson
and defeated his army on Saturday 14 October 1066 about seven miles from
Hastings is a profound turning point in English history.
After the battle,
the aristocracy and clergy in southern England, rallied to William. Indeed the
Archbishop of York, Aldred, also supported William’s claim. He was crowned at
Edward’s the Confessor’s newly built Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. That
might have been that.
However William
had to reward his army. He started to build wooden castles across the
countryside and they levied taxes and sometimes just robbed the indigenous
population. This gave rise to resistance in the west and in the north.
It was at this
moment that a very last invasion took place by the Danes, and they took York
and there was slaughter at the garrison. Indeed this was the only time when a
Norman castle was subdued. The local population welcomed the Danes.
William got
furious. He decided to adopt a scorched earth policy, and this has become known
as the harrying of the North.
The English
Chronicler and Benedictine monk, Orderic Vitalis (1072 to
1142), wrote the Historia Ecclesistica.
He wrote about the Harrying of the North, and his account described the
campaign as a brutal act of cruelty that punished the innocent with the guilty.
Helpless
children, young men in the prime of life, and hoary grey beards alike were
perishing of hunger.
He made no effort
to restrain his fury and punished the innocent with the guilty. In his anger he
commanded that all crops, herds and food of any kind be brought together and
burned to ashes so that the whole region north of the Humber be deprived of any
source of sustenance.