True toll of the Harrying

Marc Morris’s essay on the consequences of the Norman conquest ( What the Normans Did for Us, November) was typically thought-provoking and challenging. However, he appears to have lost his sense of proportion in at least one respect. He asserts that the 100,000 people killed during the Harrying of the North represented “only a small fraction of the country’s population of around 2 million”. In fact, it wasn’t just a small fraction, as he claims – it was around 5 per cent (and perhaps more than 10 per cent of the population in the north).

The population of England is today around 53 million; if 5 per cent of that population was lost today, that would represent the killing of 2.6 million people (the entire population of Greater Manchester) – and I doubt that Morris would regard that as trifling. It must have been the same for the people of the north in 1069. Peter Booth, Prunay- Cassereau, France

Marc Morris replies: Firstly, just to be clear, I don’t regard the Harrying as ‘trifling’, nor did I use that word or anything like it. The word I used in the paragraph in question was “terrible”.

Mr Booth thinks I have lost a “sense of proportion”. The point, clearly made in my article, was that a 5 per cent drop in the overall population was proportionally small compared with the losses suffered by the Old English aristocracy, more than 90 per cent of whom were killed or displaced as a result of the Conquest.

Terrible as it was (to repeat the phrase I used in the article), a 5 per cent drop in the overall population would have had little impact on England’s culture. The replacement of more than 90 per cent of the ruling class, by contrast, had profound and irreversible effects on the country’s politics, law, language, architecture and attitudes.