Harrying England
1066 unleashed a horrendous Norman occupation upon the English, who endured decades of armed repression and civil wars
William the Conqueror brutally subjugated England
For the English, the Norman conquest of 1066 was a catastrophe. Anglo-saxon England had already suffered brutal invasions and occupations by Vikings for centuries, but the Normans were different. While their Norse ancestors had only temporarily ruled at various times in England, the Normans were more organised and combined martial prowess with a military occupation that was brutally enforced.
The Harrying of the North
Although Wales, Scotland and Ireland later felt the wrath of the Normans to different degrees, England was the most direct victim of their oppression. William the Conqueror was crowned king but the English resisted his rule. In the late 1060s William consolidated his conquest by building castles in major towns, but rebellions broke out across England, which had to be continually put down. In 1069 his authority did not extend beyond York, and in that year a Norman expeditionary force had been destroyed at Durham.
A Danish invasion fleet also arrived on the Humber River and allied with the Northumbrians. They refused to fight William in battle when he marched on York, and the king managed to bribe the Danes to leave. With only the Northumbrians to defeat, William divided his army into raiding parties and committed a scorched-earth campaign. This ruthless strategy’s aim was to force the northern English into submitting to Norman rule. The results were cataclysmic.
Known as the ‘Harrying of the North’, William’s troops moved across 160 kilometres (100 miles) of territory to the Tyne River between 1069-70 and burned and destroyed all in their path. Later chroniclers wrote that local people were reduced to cannibalism and tens of thousands died of famine. England’s population was only 2 million people at that time so the loss of life would have been apocalyptic. It was written that no village between York and Durham remained inhabited and the countryside was uncultivated for years. Some sense of the devastation can be gleaned from William’s famous statistical survey of England, which became known as the ‘Domesday Book’. Although it was compiled years later, in 1086, one-third of the land in Yorkshire was still recorded as “waste”.
The Harrying of the North was successful in purely military terms and all England submitted to the Normans, but it was only the beginning of their violent impact on the kingdom.
The Anarchy
After William’s brutal subjugation, the English were politically and economically displaced, and the Normans ruled England with an iron fist. Decades later, William’s grandchildren Matilda and Stephen fought a vicious civil war for the crown and destabilised the kingdom between 1135-53. The English were mere pawns in this chaotic power struggle between the Normans, and the period became known as ‘The Anarchy’.
England became militarised with many new fortifications, and a network of castles was constructed. Even villages and churches were fortified, including Hereford Cathedral, which had catapults placed on its tower. Like the previous ‘Harrying’, many areas of the kingdom were devastated. Landowners were forced to bury hoards of coins from looters, and strategic areas such as the Isle of Ely suffered multiple sieges. Such was the scale of the Anarchy that the Anglo-saxon Chronicle famously recorded, “Men said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep.”
The conflict was only resolved when King Stephen agreed to allow Matilda’s son Henry Plantagenet to become king after his death.
The agreement ended the direct rule of the Norman dynasty, and when Stephen was succeeded by Henry II in 1154 one of his first acts was to demilitarise the English countryside and demolish the castles that had been built during the Anarchy.
This period was a sorry end to Norman rule in England. Although the Plantagenets were themselves of direct Norman descent through Matilda, their vast French and
English territories ensured that Norman influence became diluted into ‘Angevin’ or ‘Anglo-norman’ government. It was through this indirect dynastic change that the
English subtly exacted revenge against their oppressors. A key part of the occupation was the linguistic introduction of Norman French among the echelons of power to separate the rulers from the conquered English. However, once Normandy was lost to the French in
1204, the Normans in England were forced to assimilate into local society and the Anglosaxon language prevailed. English is a now a global lingua franca and a living testament to the passive resistance of the conquered Anglo-saxons against the Normans.
“CHRONICLERS WROTE THAT LOCAL PEOPLE WERE REDUCED TO CANNIBALISM AND TENS OF THOUSANDS DIED OF FAMINE”