THE BAILE HILL, YORK
THE SITE OF WILLIAM I.’S SECOND CASTLE

Early in the summer the three sons of Harold repeated their piratical excursion of the previous year. They landed on the 24th of June in the mouth of the Taw with sixty-six ships and raided over a large part of Devonshire, but were beaten off at last by Brian of Penthievre, and vanish therewith from English history.[[213]] The local forces were capable of dealing with an unsupported raid of this kind, but the case was otherwise with the powerful armament which at this time was being prepared in the fiords of Denmark. Swegn Esthrithson at last was about to take action, and the news excited once more the unstable patriotism of the men of Northumbria. The Danish army was recruited from a wide area to the south of the Baltic; there were numerous adventurers from Poland, Frisia, and Saxony, and we read of a contingent of heathen savages from Lithuania. The fleet was reported to consist of two hundred and forty vessels; a number capable, if each ship was fully laden, of carrying a force considerably larger than any army William could put into the field without calling out the native militia. The expedition was under the command of Harold and Cnut, the sons of King Swegn, and Asbiorn, his brother, and included many Danes of high rank, among whom Christian, bishop of Aarhus, is mentioned by name.[[214]]

The fleet set sail towards the end of August, and must have hugged the shores of Frisia and Holland, for it first touched the English coast at Dover. The royal forces were strong enough to prevent a landing both here and at Sandwich, where the Danes repeated the attempt, but the mouth of the Orwell was unguarded, and a body of the invaders disembarked at Ipswich with the intention of plundering the neighbourhood. We are, however, told that the “country people,” by which phrase the English peasantry of the district are probably meant, came out and, after killing thirty of the raiders, drove the rest to seek refuge in their ships. A similar descent on Norwich was repulsed by Ralf de Wader, earl of East Anglia and governor of Norwich castle, and the Danes passed on towards the Humber. In the meantime, news of these events was brought to King William, who, we are told, was hunting at the time in the forest of Dean away on the Welsh border; and he, seeing where the key to the situation really lay, instantly sent a messenger to York to warn the garrison and to direct that they should summon him in person if they were hard pressed by the enemy. He received the reassuring answer that they would require no assistance from him for a year to come, and he accordingly continued to leave the defence of the north in the hands of his subordinates, while the Danes were sailing along the coast of Lindsey.

It is an interesting question how far the men of the English Danelaw may have been led by a remembrance of their Scandinavian origin to make common cause with the army of the king of Denmark at this time. At the beginning of the century Swegn Forkbeard had been welcomed on this account by the men of the shires along the lower Trent, and had fixed his headquarters at Gainsborough in this district. So long as the Anglo-Saxon legal system retained a semblance of vitality a very definite barrier of customary law separated the Danelaw from the counties of the eastern midlands, and the details of its local organisation still preserved not a few peculiar features, plainly referable to a northern origin. On the other hand, in the names of the pre-Conquest owners of land in this district as recorded in Domesday Book the English element distinctly preponderates, while the particularism of Northumbria itself was perhaps rather political than racial. It is probable that the men of Lincolnshire would have preferred a Danish to either a Norman or an English king, but they play no distinctive part in the incidents of this campaign, which centres round the city of York and its approaches by land and water.

While the Danish fleet still hung in the Humber, it was joined by the English exiles from Scotland, Edgar the Etheling, Gospatric, and Marleswegen, with whom Waltheof, the earl of Huntingdon, and others of lesser fame now associated themselves. Edgar, who had been raiding in Lincolnshire independently of his Danish friends, had narrowly escaped capture by the garrison of Lincoln castle; but he reached the Humber in safety though with only two companions, and the combined force, like that of Harold Hardrada three years before, passed on up the Ouse and disembarked for a direct attack on York. Volunteers assembled from all the neighbouring country, and in numbers at least it was a formidable army which on the 21st of September appeared before the northern capital, the English forming the van, the Danish host the rear. The Normans in York made no attempt to hold the city wall, and concentrated their defence on the two fortresses by the Ouse, setting fire to the adjoining buildings, so that their timber might not be used to fill up the castle ditches. The flames spread, the city was gutted, and, what was worse to the medieval mind, the church of St. Peter was involved in the ruin. The struggle which followed was soon over; on the very day of the Danish arrival, while the city was still burning, the garrison of the castles made a sally, were outnumbered by the enemy within the city walls and destroyed, after which the capture of the actual fortifications was an easy matter. The castles themselves were only wooden structures planted on mounds of earth; their defenders had been hopelessly weakened by the failure of the sally, and later tradition recounted in verse how Waltheof, Siward’s son, stood by the gate and smote down the Normans one by one to the number of a hundred with his axe as they tried to break away.[[215]] The castles once taken, the English hatred of these signs of bondage broke out with fury; the wooden buildings were instantly broken up and hurled to the ground, and the luckless William Malet, with his wife and children, a prisoner, was one of the few Normans in York who survived the day.

On the 11th of September, before the Danish army had sighted the walls of York, Archbishop Ealdred, one of the few Englishmen of high rank who accepted the Norman Conquest as irreversible, died, being worn out by extreme age, and grief at the ruin which he foresaw was about to fall on the men of his province. The fall of York was the most serious check which had hitherto crossed King William’s plans in Normandy or England; it might easily lead to the formation of a Danish principality beyond the Humber; it was certain to give encouragement to rebellious movements in the south. In his rage at the news the king caused the fugitives who had told the tale to be horribly mutilated as a warning to his captains against possible treachery[[216]] and then set out for the north. As he drew towards the Northumbrian border, the Danes abandoned their new conquest, and made for their ships, crossing the Humber in them, and established themselves among the marshes of the Isle of Axholme. This movement diverted the king’s march; he struck straight for Lindsey with a force of cavalry and crushed sundry isolated bodies of the enemy which were dispersed among the fens. The Danes, finding their position untenable, took to their ships again and crossed over to the Yorkshire bank, whither William had no means of following them. He therefore left part of his troops under the counts of Mortain and Eu, to protect Lindsey, while he himself turned westwards to suppress a local rising which had broken out at Stafford.

We know nothing as to the persons who were responsible for this last revolt, nor have we any clue as to their objects, but it is quite possible that they were acting in concert with the men who at this time were laying siege to the new castle of Shrewsbury. William in this year was contending with men of Celtic as well as of Scandinavian race; for Bleddyn, king of Gwynedd, for the third time within three years, had taken arms against the Normans on the Welsh border. To the men of North Wales, Edric the Wild brought a contingent from Herefordshire, and the citizens of Chester, which, it would seem, had not as yet been occupied by the Normans, joined in the attack. The allies were successful in burning the town of Shrewsbury and getting away before a Norman force arrived in relief of the castle, but the Staffordshire insurgents were less fortunate. We are merely told that King William “wiped out great numbers of the rebels with an easy victory at Stafford,” but the Domesday survey of the country, in the large proportion of land which it returns as “waste,” suggests that Staffordshire at this time received at William’s hand some measure of the doom which was to fall upon Yorkshire before the year had closed.

In the meantime the revolt of the south-west had run its course. Here as elsewhere the plans of the revolted English do not seem to have extended beyond the capture of individual castles; notably the royal fortress which had been built in Exeter after the the siege of the previous year, and the private stronghold of Count Robert of Mortain at Montacute in Somerset. The command against the besiegers of Montacute was assumed by Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances, who speedily scattered the insurgents with an army drawn from London, Winchester, and Salisbury, the chief towns on the main road from the east to Devon and Somerset. The situation at Exeter was complicated by the attitude of the citizens themselves, who must have been anxious not to forfeit the privileges which they had obtained from King William by the treaty which had so recently concluded their own revolt. Accordingly, when the new castle was beset by a host of Devonians and Cornishmen, the townspeople took the Norman side; and the garrison on making a sally threw the rebels into a state of confusion which was completed by the arrival of Brian of Penthievre, who was advancing to the relief of the castle men.

Now that no further danger was to be apprehended, from the lands between Trent and Severn King William’s hands were free to deal with the Northumbrian difficulty. His lieutenants in Lindsey had contrived to surprise a number of the Danes as they were participating in the village feasts with which the men of that district were anticipating the customary orgies of midwinter and to which they had apparently invited their Danish friends. This, however, was a trivial matter; there was a probability that the Danes would return to take possession of York, and when the Conqueror next appears after the battle of Stafford, he is found at Nottingham on his way to the northern capital. For fifty miles north of Nottingham he followed the route by which he had advanced on to York in the previous year, but he received a sudden check at the point where the road in question crosses the Aire near to the modern town of Pontefract. The bridge was broken, and the river, swollen most probably by the winter’s rains, could neither be forded nor crossed in boats, while the enemy lined the opposite bank in force. On this last account it was impossible to rebuild the bridge, and for three weeks the army was kept inactive by this unexpected obstacle. At last a knight called Lisois de Monasteriis, after examining the river in search of a ford for miles above and below the camp by the broken bridge, discovered a practicable crossing somewhere among the hills to the west of Leeds, and forced a passage with sixty horsemen in despite of the efforts of the enemy on the left bank. Having demonstrated the possibility of a crossing at this point Lisois returned to Pontefract; and under his guidance the whole army passed the Aire, and then wheeled round towards York through the difficult country which borders the great plain of the Ouse. As the army drew near to York, news came that the Danes had evacuated the city, so the king divided his force, sending one detachment to occupy and repair the ruined castles, and another to the Humber to keep the Danes in check. But he himself had other work to do, and did not enter York at this time.

It would seem that the Norman passage of the Aire, hazardous as it had been, had really demoralised the Northumbrian insurgents and their Danish allies. The latter, as we have seen, fell back on the Humber at once without striking a blow; the mass of the native English under arms would seem to have retired simultaneously among the hills of western Yorkshire, for the Conqueror now turned to their pursuit and to the definite reduction of the inhospitable land. With grim determination he worked his way along the wooded valleys which intersect the great mountain chain of northern England, and deliberately harried that region so that no human being might find the means of subsistence there. Resistance isolated and ineffectual he must have met; but now for once submission brought no favour, and those who perished in the nameless struggles in which despairing men flung themselves hopelessly upon the line of his inexorable march, underwent a shorter agony than remained for those who survived to see their homes, with all their substance, smouldering in the track of the destroying army. But the spirit was soon beaten out of the ruined men, and without fearing surprise or ambush William could divide his army still further and quicken the dismal process of destruction. Soon his soldiers were scattered in camps over an area of a hundred miles, and the north and east of Yorkshire underwent the fate which the Conqueror in person had inflicted on the West Riding. Before Christmas it is probable that the whole land from the North Sea to Morecambe Bay had become with the rarest exceptions a deserted wilderness.