The Harrying of the North

The Harrying of the North was a series of campaigns waged by William the Conqueror in the winter of 1069–70 to subjugate northern England. The presence of the last Wessex claimant, Edgar Atheling, had encouraged Anglo-Danish rebellions that broke the Norman hold on the North. 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, especially the city of York, before installing a Norman aristocracy 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. But some scholars doubt whether William could have assembled enough troops to inflict so much damage, and the records may have been partly misinterpreted or exaggerated.

At the time of the Norman Conquest the North consisted of what became Yorkshire, Durham, and Northumberland in the east and Lancashire with the southern parts of Cumberland and Westmorland in the west. The population of the north pre-conquest can be described as "Anglo-Scandinavian" carrying a cultural continuity from a mixing of Viking and Anglo-Saxon traditions. The dialect of English spoken in Yorkshire may well have been unintelligible to people from the south of England, and the aristocracy was primarily Danish in origin. Further, communications between the north and south were difficult, partly due to the terrain but also because of the poor state of the roads. 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. The earldom of Northumbria stretched from the Tees to the Tweed.

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