By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  The King sent out contingents of troops to devastate the region in a systematic and thorough fashion. Some sources mention it in a cursory fashion. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle baldly states that ‘King William marched into that shire and completely devastated it,’ and that he ‘plundered and utterly lay waste the shire’.13 Henry of Huntingdon makes only an oblique reference to events: the King ‘destroyed the English of that province’.14 Hugh the Chantor records that ‘York and the whole district round it’ was ‘destroyed by the Normans with sword, famine and flame’ and offers some details of church destruction.15

  If this were all that historians had to go on, the Harrying of the North would not, even with oral history, have become such a notorious event. But the harrying made more of an impression on other chroniclers, mainly writing in the early twelfth century, who were appalled by what had occurred. John (‘Florence’) of Worcester seems to have had access to a lost version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and his slightly longer report was important in influencing other chroniclers, who would embellish or add to his account with their own knowledge, sometimes supplemented by local testimony, verbal tradition and knowledge. John tells us that William assembled his army and ‘hastened, with an angry heart, into Northumbria, where he did not cease for the whole winter to lay waste the land, to murder the inhabitants, and to inflict numerous injuries’. More tellingly, he describes the cumulative consequences of William’s strategy of ravaging: ‘[S]o great a famine prevailed that men were forced to consume the flesh of horses, dogs, cats, and even that of human beings.’16 William of Malmesbury writes that William ‘ordered both the towns and fields of the whole district to be laid waste; the fruits and grain to be destroyed by fire or by water’, adding that ‘fire, slaughter and devastation’ had left ‘the ground, for more than sixty miles around, totally uncultivated and barren, remaining bare even to this present day’.17

  Simeon of Durham, in keeping with the trend to become less restrained the further the writer was in time from events, augments John of Worcester’s account with grim details. Corpses lay rotting in houses and in the streets, ‘for no one was left to bury them, all being cut down either by the sword or by famine’; survivors fled in search of food or sold themselves into slavery; the land was therefore left without anyone to cultivate it for nine years; ‘the dwellings were everywhere deserted, the inhabitants seeking safety in flight, or lying hidden in the woods or the fastness of the mountains’; no village between Durham and York remained inhabited.18 It is little wonder that one of the Latin verbs used by writers to describe ravaging is depopulare. But the most vivid and passionate detailed narrative, and the one by which the harrying has become so infamous, stems from the quill of Orderic Vitalis. William

  continued to comb forests and remote mountainous places, stopping at nothing to hunt out the enemy hidden there. His camps were spread out over an area of a hundred miles. He cut down many in his vengeance; destroyed the lairs of others; harried the land, and burned homes to ashes. Nowhere else had William shown such cruelty. Shamefully he succumbed to this vice, for he made no effort to restrain his fury and punished the innocent with the guilty. In his anger 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. In consequence, so serious a scarcity was felt in England, and so terrible a famine fell upon the homeless and defenceless, that more than 100,000 Christian folk of both sexes, young and old alike, perished of hunger. 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.

  Orderic goes on to lament the deaths of ‘helpless children’ and others, all the result of William’s act of ‘infamy’ in initiating this ‘brutal slaughter’.19 Orderic may have been writing some sixty years after the events he describes, but as Ann Williams notes, ‘He was born in Shropshire in 1075 and spent the first ten years of his life there, while memories of the Harrying of the North, and of Mercia, were still fresh. Orderic may well have heard tales from those who suffered from it’.20 (The importance of oral tradition is increasingly being recognized by many medievalists.)

  Some historians have tended to play down these reports as typical monkish hyperbole; however, just as this criticism has been overdone for clerics writing on war, so it is here, too. Undoubtedly, there is exaggeration, especially in Orderic’s figure of over a hundred thousand dead, but there is more of substance than just the anti-Norman prejudice of a conquered people. William of Malmesbury warns against reproaching the king out of ‘national hatred’; he, for his part, with both English and Norman blood flowing in his veins, vows not to conceal any of William’s ‘good deeds’ or ‘bad conduct’.21 And Orderic himself went native in Normandy, having spent his entire life there after he was ten. The taciturnity of contemporary Norman sources also suggests that William’s actions were so extreme they were best glossed over. It has rightly been noticed that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s brief remarks on the harrying are less dramatic than the more detailed and violent comments on the Danish ravaging of 1066. This may simply be a case of inconsistency in the chronicle, although it could be explained on other grounds: the Viking legacy in England was one of pagan pillaging; in some respects, Denmark was still missionary territory; and in 1066 William had not yet had the chance to plunder English monasteries (as he was to in 1070).

  The English sources stress the effects of famine above all else; this was the worst killer. The Normans ‘massacred many peasants outright, but the large number who must have escaped were ultimately doomed as completely’.22 Ravaging in summer meant torching fields of crops; in winter it meant destroying stockpiles of food and grain stored from the last harvest for consumption in these very months of scarcity. The destruction of agricultural implements and corn for sowing compounded the loss by removing the very means to prepare for the next harvest, further adding to the sense of despair and futility by extending the famine for another year. Those that were able fled before the Normans targeted their villages, taking to the hills and forests with what they could. No wonder fear, fire and famine depopulated the area so catastrophically. Sixteen years on, the Domesday Book was reporting large expanses as still derelict. Refugees spread far and wide. Some travelled as far south as Evesham, where they were taken in by the abbey, thereby further contributing to the dissemination of news of the disaster through the monastic network.

  Some historians who have taken the exaggerations of the chroniclers as an admonition to question the extreme severity of the harrying have also re-examined the Domesday Book evidence of 1086. This national survey of land ownership and values for tax offers a rare, official quantification of the state of holdings in the shires. The Domesday Book reveals many entries for ‘waste’ in the counties of the North and the Midlands, and this is taken as being indicative of damages caused by war. Thus, it is sometimes considered that the trail of destruction caused by a ravaging army on the move can be traced by the Domesday record. But recent scholarship has suggested that ‘waste’ was probably just an administrative term for financial imbalances that owed little to warfare, and, as a study of William’s depredations around London in 1066 concludes, the ‘assumption that war damage inflicts characteristic patterns which can almost always be detected in the record of Domesday valuations is flawed’.23 (However, Pipe Roll records from the reigns of Henry II and John tend to make the connection of waste to military activity more explicitly.) Despite the fact that Domesday attests to almost fifty per cent of Yorkshire being classified as waste or as being without resources sixteen years after the harrying, the extent of William’s campaign of 1069–70 is still regarded sceptically by some.

  However, more recent scholarship still, in the form of an important article by John Palmer on Domesday waste and the Harrying of the North, concludes that, as a result of military activity, ‘the losses in
Yorkshire were truly staggering’.24 Different places recovered from the effects of the ravaging at different rates: in some cases, especially in the West, recovery occurred after a couple of years; in Yorkshire, it sometimes took decades. The French historian Robert Fossier actually believed that ravaging could be good for the land, with the ashes helping next year’s productivity (farmers, after all, seasonally clear the post-harvest stubble off their fields by burning it). It is right to declare, as some have, that the medieval landscape was remarkably resilient; but that slightly misses the point. It was not the land that suffered so grievously, but its people. The depopulated area described by the chronicles could not tend itself. Survivors fled the region because they wished to avoid the initial onslaught, or because they feared more to come, and because there was little to stay for after the destruction. They did not return any time soon because they waited for the Normans to finish their operations and, with little if anything sown, there was nothing to sustain them if they did go back. Manors that did recover more quickly may have been those considered safe for an early return of tenants, or owned by lords who had access to resources that could facilitate recovery.

  The harrying extended beyond Yorkshire to Shropshire, Staffordshire, Cheshire and Derbyshire. William’s strategy specifically targeted the rural population; it was a military campaign not against castles or armies, but against non-combatants. There are two main reasons given to explain the severity of the campaign. The first and most widely countenanced is that William wanted to ensure that Northumbria would be in no position to threaten rebellion again for a very long time, and thereby crush any thought of separatism. By destroying the land and its produce, William was denying enemy forces provisions for an army in the field and crippling the infrastructure that provided the economic support for waging war. It is also worth adding that by depopulating the area he was scattering the manpower that might otherwise be recruited into an enemy army. There is some dispute as to how far the lands of the native aristocracy were targeted: that a particular estate one would have expected to be attacked can be seen to be doing well in the Domesday Book might suggest that the harrying was not as extensive as has been made out. But the richer estates are the very ones where the owners had the resources mentioned above to promote a faster recovery, especially when the magnates had come to an accommodation, temporary or otherwise, with William, and the complex web of politics, patronage and expediency was spun anew. Besides, as Palmer has noted, not only did the majority of the lands devastated in Yorkshire belong to rebel leaders, they were also hit hard.

  The second reason for William’s action is more compelling in my view. This explanation affords greater priority to the Danish threat. For William, a rebellion in England was far more serious when it was backed up with the considerable military capability of another state. The devastation of Yorkshire would equally deny an invading army the supplies necessary to sustain a campaign. The Count of Toulouse employed a scorched-earth policy in retreat from the advancing French during the Albigensian Crusade in 1226, denying them supplies for the crusaders and, critically, their animals. As mentioned above, Philip VI acted similarly in 1339 with the Black Prince. With its North Sea coastline, strength of resistance to Norman hegemony, and its distance from William’s relatively secure base in the South, Yorkshire’s seaboard offered Danish fleets an obvious bridgehead for operations in England.

  It is no surprise that the Danish forces bottled in at the Humber came to terms with William when supplies disappeared along with allies. William’s ravaging of the hinterland must have had in mind the need to dissuade the Danes on the Humber from making incursions back into the volatile region when spring came. Without the ability to forage and live off the land, any Danish operations would have been highly impracticable; when the Danes reneged on their deal with William, and King Sven sailed to the Danes on the Humber in the spring of 1070 (rather than the other way round as was the agreement), it is a measure of the success of William’s ruthless campaign that they sailed down the coast and moved their new offensive southwards into East Anglia. As Stephen Morillo has explained, the fleet-based army of the Danes was unlike a baronial or continental one that could be contained in a base such as a town or a castle; the presence of ships gave it the freedom and mobility to withdraw and turn up somewhere else. Thus we may deduce that in comprehensively ravaging Yorkshire, William was ensuring that any future Danish fleet arriving there would be met with a barren wasteland incapable of supporting an invading army. William of Malmesbury actually makes this point in his History, writing that William ordered the coastal districts to be especially targeted. Yes, the Danes would appear elsewhere, but crucially it would not be to join up with allies in the hostile, inflammatory and separatist North. This was William’s primary objective, and this is what the Harrying of the North achieved.

  Historians have recognized the outstanding military achievements of William’s early campaigns as king of England. The Harrying of the North did succeed in preventing any further rebellions: there were no more general uprisings during his reign. The Danish problem remained, but greatly diminished as the Norse were denied allies of substance and a northern power base to support them in England. The campaign of 1069–70 sealed William’s conquest of England that had begun in 1066. The terrible devastation wrought by William was not just a military victory that spectacularly achieved its objectives, it was also ‘an act of state, of a sort not confined to any period, and the political reasons at the time no doubt seemed as compelling as such reasons always do’.25

  King David’s Scottish Invasions, 1138

  The marcher regions of the North were a problem for English kings throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. In 1138 the largest and most serious Scottish incursions across the border yet to occur were launched, prompting a chronicler of the time to write, ‘The root and origin of all evil arose in that part of England called Northumbria to produce plunder and arson, strife and war’.26 King David I of Scotland led no less than three invasions of England in the first half of that year (January, April and July), leaving the North in a constant state of war or war readiness. David has the reputation of being a conventionally pious king and statesman, ‘the real architect of the medieval Scottish kingdom’ over which his long reign exerted impressive ‘civilising influences’, and who ‘ostentatiously adhered to the chivalric conventions of Anglo-Norman warfare’.27 Yet these invasions marked a new level of savagery in the already bitter Anglo-Scottish conflict.

  The present border with Scotland is rather different from that of the fluctuating one in the twelfth century. Scottish kings had genuine claims to much of the North of England, and in 1136 and 1138 David took advantage of the turmoil in England to assert his rights in Northumbria and Cumbria. This turmoil has defined the reign of Stephen of England. Following Henry I’s death, in December 1135, Stephen seized the crown (and, just as vitally, the treasury) to usurp the anointed successor, Henry’s daughter Matilda. Matilda was married to Count Goffrey of Anjou, one of the most powerful magnates in France, who put his huge resources behind Matilda’s military attempts to sit on the throne as queen of England. To make matters worse for Stephen, David was Matilda’s uncle. The death of a king was a traditional time of political unrest and the troubles built up to a storm that unleashed itself against Stephen in 1136 on all fronts: an Angevin incursion into Normandy, risings in Wales, trouble in the South-West, and invasions in the North. With each of the enemies taking strategic advantage from the movements of the others, Stephen became so hard pressed he had to ‘let Wales and the Marches run riot in 1136’,28 leading to the worst Norman defeats in Wales for forty years. Instead, he led substantial armies against the rebels in the West Country and against the Scots in the North (he was to do the same again in 1138). Even his foes recognized Stephen’s bravery and martial ability, most famously displayed before his capture at the battle of Lincoln in 1141; Stephen needed both in abundance, especially in the early years of his reign.

  The S
cottish invasion of 1136 (actually begun in the last week of December 1135) was a major affair, eliciting from Stephen a response that saw him march to Durham ‘with an army that was greater than any in living memory in England’.29 By this time (early February), David had already taken five major castles, but the sheer size of Stephen’s host cowed the Scottish king into negotiation. The result was the first treaty of Durham, which gave to David the reward of Doncaster and Carlisle, while granting an early, and therefore important, success to Stephen. A few chronicles make a perfunctory mention of the military campaign. One notes that David ravaged and laid waste many districts, but, unlike accounts from Wales in the same year, there is no talk of atrocities. It was a very different story two years later.

  The truce arranged at Durham expired in December 1137. The question of Northumbria needed addressing, but Stephen refused to entertain any thought of discussing the matter. War inevitably, and quickly, followed; David invaded England in mid-January. As we shall shortly see, the campaign marked an escalation in outright savagery. After a costly and fruitless siege at Wark, the Scottish king moved southwards, leaving a small force behind to contain the garrison and thereby safeguard his line of communications. While moving into the area north of Durham, David halted his brutal ravaging campaign and retreated on hearing of Stephen’s approach in early February. Stephen raised the siege at Wark and embarked on some ravaging of his own in the Lowlands, only to return suddenly to England, probably due to a lack of supplies (although one chronicle hints, with some plausibility, that Stephen was not entirely certain of some of his leading men’s loyalty).