The arrival of two hundred and forty ships in the Humber, under the command of Jarl Osbern, the Danish king’s brother, summoned Edgar and his partizans in the following autumn to make one more effort to free their native land from the Norman yoke, even at the cost of delivering it to the Danes; and the united armies, marching upon York, stormed the two Norman castles, putting more than three thousand soldiers to the sword, when the Danes, satisfied with the amount of their success, returned at once to their ships, whilst Edgar and his adherents lost no time in again retiring beyond the Tyne. On receiving the intelligence of the destruction of his castles, and the lamentable slaughter of his men, William swore to exact a fearful vengeance, and with unflinching rigour he fulfilled his oath. He soon discovered the proper weapons for combating Jarl Osbern, who was ready to sacrifice the interest of his brother for his own personal emolument; and it was secretly arranged that the hostilities of the Danish admiral should be limited during the winter to pillaging the coast, and that in the following spring he should return to Denmark without offering any serious opposition to the movements of the Norman king. Secure against attack from Jarl Osbern, William marched to the north, giving over the whole country between the Humber and the Tyne throughout the ensuing winter to the unbridled license of his soldiery.[154]
A. D. 1070.
With the approach of spring he returned to the south, to institute a searching and rigorous scrutiny into the coffers of the English monasteries; but scarcely were the inhabitants of the devastated provinces relieved from the presence of the Norman army, than they were destined to experience a repetition of their sufferings from a sudden invasion of the Scots. In the confusion of the period Malcolm had seized upon Cumberland, retaining it hitherto by open force, and its possession enabling him to penetrate into England without crossing the territories of his Northumbrian allies, he poured his followers down the Vale of Teesdale into the North Riding of Yorkshire. At a spot known as “the Hundred Springs,” long since covered by the luxuriant woods of Castle Howard, he reached the limits of his incursion, and dispatching homewards a portion of the army laden with the plunder of the expedition, he sought to entice the population of the districts which had hitherto been spared, from the caves and forests to which they had hurriedly fled on the first tidings of his inroad. The stratagem of the Scottish leader was only too successful, and the miserable inhabitants of Cleveland, Hartness, and the eastern coasts of Durham, were soon startled from their fancied security by the unexpected approach of the very army which they had vainly imagined to have quitted the country, and to have been already far advanced on its homeward march towards the north.[155]
By this time, however, the confederates, in whose behalf Malcolm had taken up arms, had ceased to be formidable to the English king. The Danish fleet, after plundering Peterborough, quitted the English coasts in June; and Osbern, meeting with his just reward, was banished from the court of his indignant brother Sweyne. Not a few of the insurgents had already made their peace with William—a similar transaction to that which had corrupted Osbern, purchasing for Cospatric the Earldom of Northumberland, on which he had claims through the descent of his mother from Earl Uchtred. The rest of the Northumbrian leaders were preparing to leave a country in which they could now no longer hope to dwell in safety; and Malcolm, upon his arrival at Wearmouth, found a vessel in the harbour with the Atheling on board, who, with his mother and his sisters, Siward Beorn, Merlesweyne, and others of his most faithful adherents, was only awaiting a favourable wind to quit for ever his native land. The Scottish king hastened to assure the illustrious exiles of a welcome reception at his own court, and his offer of an asylum was readily accepted, though the courtesy of Malcolm towards the representatives of Anglo-Saxon royalty tended very little to alleviate the sufferings of their subjects. The work of destruction proceeded as before, and the king was contemplating the burning ruins of St. Peter’s Church, fired by his own retainers, when intelligence arrived that Earl Cospatric was signalizing his newly-born fidelity to the English king at the expense of the Scottish possessions in Cumberland. The fury of Malcolm knew no bounds; but a few months had elapsed since Scotland had sheltered Cospatric from William’s vengeance; and her king, during his recent inroad, had purposely abstained from any outrage upon the territory of Northumberland. Hitherto plunder had been the object of the Scottish army, but henceforth their aim was revenge; and though the walls of Bamborough sheltered Cospatric with the spoils of wasted Cumberland, his earldom was open to fire and sword, and dearly did its devoted inhabitants rue the untoward zeal with which their earl had repaid his recent appointment. No mercy was shown to either age, sex, or infancy; all who escaped the massacre were driven in crowds along the homeward path of the invaders; and though multitudes of the captives perished miserably by the way, enough survived to satisfy the cupidity of their captors, and to supply every hovel beyond the Borders with slaves of English race.[156]
An incalculable amount of misery and loss of human life resulted from these northern wars; for not a village was left standing between York and Durham, nor for nine years was any attempt made at cultivation over a space of sixty miles and upwards. Waste is the term ominously affixed in Domesday to all the possessions of Edwin, Morkar, and the northern prelates, as well as to the lands of Waltheof and Cospatric, of Siward Beorn, and Merlesweyne; and a province, once flourishing and prosperous, became the haunt of beasts of prey, wild cattle, and outlaws. To add still more to the wretchedness of the period, a partial dearth, which had arisen from the ravages of William, was increased by the events of the two succeeding years, until it became a famine of the most intense description. Many sold themselves to slavery to escape starvation; others were reduced to support life by the most revolting substitutes for their accustomed food, such as carrion and human flesh; houses and streets were filled with the unburied bodies of the dead, none stopping to perform the last offices of interment; and the roadsides were covered with dying wretches, perishing in a vain attempt to seek a refuge in exile. Multitudes of every class abandoned their native land during this frightful period of misery and despair; Scotland became their asylum and adopted home, and in the veins of many of the bravest and noblest of her sons, there flowed, in after times, the best and purest blood of ancient Northumbria.[157]
An additional stimulus must have been afforded to this emigration by the union of Malcolm, after his return from the south, with Margaret, one of the sisters of the Atheling. History has left no record of the fate of Ingebiorge, and possibly she was no longer living, though her death is by no means necessarily to be implied from the second marriage of Malcolm, as a laxity in the dissolution of the marriage tie was not confined to the Gaelic people alone at that period.[158] Margaret is said to have been at first averse to the marriage, not for any personal dislike to her future husband, but because the misfortunes of her country and of her family had sunk deeply into her heart, inclining her to seek a refuge in the cloister, to which her sister Christina subsequently retired. But the advantages of the connection with the Scottish king were too obvious to be overlooked; her scruples were at length overcome by her brother and his followers, and her gentle disposition and sincere piety were destined to exercise a mild and beneficent influence over the characters of her husband and her youthful family.[159]
The English king was occupied during the following year in repressing the rebellion of Edwin and Morkar, A. D. 1071.and in crushing the attempt made by the latter earl to maintain a stand in conjunction with Hereward, Siward Beorn, and Aylwyn bishop of Durham, amid the fens and marshes surrounding Ely; but the invasion of Malcolm was neither forgotten nor forgiven, and towards the close of the next summer A. D. 1072. August. William marched to the north with a formidable array of mounted chivalry, supported by a numerous fleet, in the full determination of exacting vengeance, both for the open hostility of the Scottish king, and for the support invariably afforded in the same quarter to his disaffected subjects beyond the Humber. If he had expected to find any of the insurgents in Scotland, he was doomed, on this occasion, to disappointment, as they had undoubtedly escaped elsewhere on the first rumours of the magnitude of the expedition.[160] Edgar was apparently in Flanders,[161] a country which, ever since the accession of Robert the Frison, had become the asylum of all who fled from the wrath of the Conqueror; as the connection of the count, by marriage, with the Danish and French kings, both at enmity with the king of England, as well as the assistance rendered by William to the nephew of Robert in his attempts upon the appanage of his uncle, caused a ready welcome to be accorded in Flanders to all who were disposed to assist the count in his attacks upon the duchy of Normandy.
When William had penetrated as far as Abernethy in the county of Fife[162] he was met by the army of his adversary; but as neither king was really anxious to proceed to extremities, before long they mutually agreed to the following arrangement. Malcolm received a grant of certain manors in England, with the promise of a yearly payment of twelve marks of gold, performing the usual homage in return for the grant of English fiefs, and giving up Duncan, his son by his former marriage, as a hostage for the fulfilment of his obligations.[163] The Conqueror then retraced his steps to the south. His predominance in the north at length established, Cospatric could be safely taxed, both with his alleged connivance in the death of Robert Comyn, and with his actual presence at the storm of the castles of York. Neither of these charges had interfered with his advancement to the earldom of Northumberland when it had been the aim of William to detach a formidable opponent from the ranks of his enemies; nor did his innocence of the first crime avail him now, and his fief was given to Waltheof, whose feats at York upon the same occasion, where he long defended the gate with his single arm, cutting down the Normans one after another as they entered, were for the present either pardoned or overlooked. Cospatric escaped by a timely flight, and after a brief residence in Flanders, rejoined his countrymen in Scotland, where he received from Malcolm, who seems to have forgotten his former resentment against the Earl, the important fortress of Dunbar with an ample portion of the surrounding territory, and he became the ancestor of the noble family of Dunbar, long prominent amongst the barons of southern Scotland as Earls of Lothian or the March.[164]
A. D. 1073.
Not long after the treaty of Abernethy, Edgar returned from the continent to Scotland, where, though he was received with every mark of honour and respect by his sister and her husband, Malcolm earnestly pressed upon him the advantage of accepting the castle of Montreuil, offered by the king of France for the purpose of establishing a troublesome neighbour in the vicinity of the Norman possessions of their mutual foe. Edgar accordingly once more left Scotland laden with the costly presents of his relatives, but like most men of his character the Atheling was doomed to misfortune, and ere long Scotland again received him, a shipwrecked and homeless wanderer. It was no part of the policy of Malcolm to risk the vengeance of the Conqueror in fruitless attempts at assisting his feeble brother-in-law, and he now strongly advised him to tender his submission to the English king. It was accepted most willingly; and with much empty ceremony and parade, Edgar was conducted to the English frontier, and from thence to Normandy, where he resigned his pretensions to the English crown, and passed the remainder of his life, for the most part, in indolent and peaceful insignificance.[165]