The harrying of Yorkshire is one of the few events of the kind in regard to which the customary rhetoric of the medieval chronicler is only substantiated by documentary evidence. From the narratives of Ordericus Vitalis and Simeon of Durham alone, we should gain a fair impression of the ghastly reality of the great devastation, but a few columns of the Domesday survey of Yorkshire, where the attempt is made to estimate the result of the havoc for the purposes of the royal treasury, are infinitely the more suggestive. On page after page, with deadly iteration, manor after manor is reported “waste,” and even in the places where agricultural life had been re-instituted, and the burned villages rebuilt, the men who inhabited them formed but pitiful little groups in the midst of the surrounding ruin. As to the fate of the individuals who had fled before King William’s army, in the fatal December, no certain tale can be told. Many sold themselves into slavery in return for food, many tried to make their way southward into the more prosperous midland shires; the local history of Evesham Abbey relates how crowds of fugitives from the districts visited by the Conqueror in this campaign thronged the streets of the little town, and how each day five of six of them, worn out by hunger and weariness, died, and received burial by the prior of the monastery. Many no doubt tried to keep themselves alive in the neighbourhood of their old homes until the rigour of the winter had passed away; but fifty years later it was well remembered in the north how the bodies of those who were now overtaken by famine lay rotting by the roadsides. Even so late as Stephen’s time, a southern writer, William of Malmesbury, tells us how the fertile lands of the north still bore abundant traces of what had passed during the winter of 1069.
The festival of Christmas caused a short break in the grim progress of King William. His work was not by any means completed in the north; the Danes were still in the Humber; Chester remained in virtual independence. And so the regalia and royal plate were brought from the treasury at Winchester, and the Christmas feast was held at York with so much of the traditional splendour as the place and occasion permitted. The ceremony over, the campaign was resumed, and in the New Year the Conqueror set out to hunt down a body of Englishmen who seem to have entrenched themselves among the marshes which then lay between the Cleveland hills and the estuary of the Tees.[[217]] The rebels, however, decamped by night on hearing of the king’s advance, and William spent fifteen days by the Tees, during which time Earl Waltheof made his submission in person and Gospatric sent envoys who swore fealty on his behalf. Gospatric was therefore restored to his earldom, and William returned to York, keeping to the difficult country of the East Riding in preference to the Roman road which led southward from the Tees near Darlington down the plain of the Ouse.[[218]] It is probable that William chose this route with the object of hunting down any scattered bands of outlawed Englishmen which might have hung together thus far in this inaccessible region; but his force suffered severely through the cold, many of the horses died, and on one occasion he himself lost his way and became separated from his army with only six companions for an entire night. York, however, was reached in safety at last, and the reduction of Northumbria was accomplished.
It was now possible to enter upon the final stage of the campaign, and, after making the arrangements necessary for the safety of York, William set out on the last and most formidable of the many marches of this memorable winter, towards the one important town in England which had never submitted to his rule. Chester still held out in English hands, and apart from its strategical importance the citizens of the great port had definitely attracted King William’s attention by the part which they had played in the recent siege of Shrewsbury. His hold on the north would never be secure until he had reduced the town where Irish Vikings and Welsh mountaineers might at any time collect their forces for an attack upon the settled midlands. On the other hand, the geographical difficulties in the way of a direct march from York to Chester were enormous. From the edge of the plain of York to the Mersey Valley, the altitude of the ground never descends to a point below 500 feet above sea level; and, since the Roman highway from York to Manchester had fallen into ruin, no roads crossed this wild country except such tracks as served for communication between village and village. But a more serious cause of danger lay in the fact that the army itself now began to show ominous symptoms which might easily develop into actual mutiny. The strain of the protracted campaign was telling upon the men; and the mercenary portion of the army, represented by the soldiers from Anjou, Brittany, and Maine, began to clamour for their discharge, complaining that these incessant marches were more intolerable than even the irksome duty of castle guard. The Conqueror in reply merely declared that he had no use for the cowards who wished to desert him,[[219]] and, trusting himself to the loyalty of his own subjects in the army, he plunged straightway into the hills which separate the modern counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Part at least of the route now followed at the close of January must have lain through districts which had been swept bare of all provisions in the great harrying of December; and the army was at times reduced to feed on the horses which had perished in the swamps, that continually intercepted the line of advance. The storms of rain and hail which fell at this time were considered worthy of mention in the earliest account of the march which we possess, and we can see that nothing but the example of King William’s own courage and endurance held the army together and brought it down in safety into the Cheshire plain. Chester would appear to have surrendered without daring to stand a siege, and with its submission, guaranteed as usual by the foundation of a castle,[[220]] the Conqueror’s work was done at last in the north. From Chester he moved to Stafford, where another castle was raised and garrisoned, and then marched directly across England to Salisbury, at which place the army was disbanded, with the exception of the men who had protested against the present expedition and were now kept under arms for forty days longer as a mark of the king’s disfavour.
In the meantime, by a skilful piece of diplomacy, William had been insuring himself against active hostility on the part of the Danish fleet. Earl Asbiorn and his associates had taken but little gain as yet from their English adventure; and the earl proved very amenable when a secret embassy came to him from the king, promising him a large sum of money and the right of provisioning his men at the expense of the dwellers along the coast for the remainder of the winter, on the sole condition that he should keep the peace towards the royal troops thenceforward until his departure. The earl, thus made secure of some personal profit, agreed to the terms, and until the spring was far advanced, the Danish ships still hung in the English waters.
The harrying of Northumbria, the most salient event of these twelve months of ceaseless activity, was a measure which it would be impossible to justify and impertinent to excuse. It was the logical result of the opposition of an irreconcilable people to an inflexible conqueror. After the battle of Hastings had shattered the specious unity of the old English state, each of its component parts might still have secured peace by full submission, or honour by consistent and coherent resistance; the men of Northumbria took the one course which was certain to invite disaster, nor, terrible as was the resultant suffering, can we say that vengeance was undeserved. War in the eleventh century was at best a cruel business, but we cannot fairly accuse the Conqueror of deliberately aggravating its horrors without the impulse of what he must have regarded as necessity. He had to deal with a people whom he could not trust, who had sworn submission and had broken their oaths, and the means at his disposal were few. He could not deport the population of Northumbria as Cromwell was to deport the native Irish under not dissimilar circumstances; his Normans were too few as yet to garrison effectively all the wild land between the Humber and the Scottish border. The one course which remained to the Conqueror was for him to place the rebels beyond the possibility of revolting again, and he followed this course with terrible success. And it was on this account—that Northumbria was wasted, not in the heat of wars, but deliberately, at the bidding of political necessity—that the act seemed most dreadful to the chroniclers who have described it. Men were only too well accustomed to the sight of ruined villages, of starving women and children; but these things seemed less terrible as the work of Scotch and Danish freebooters than as the conscious intention of the crowned king of the land. Nor must we forget that we do not know how far King William was really sinning against the current military practice of his time. The monastic chroniclers, whose opinion of the case commends itself to us in virtue of its humanity, were men brought by the fact of their vocation to a clearer sense of the value of the individual life than that possessed by the lay world around them. We know what Ordericus Vitalis thought of the great harrying, perhaps even what William of Poitiers, the Conqueror’s own chaplain, thought of it, but we do not know how it appeared to William Fitz Osbern or Roger de Montgomery.
According to his approved custom, the Conqueror kept the Easter following these events at Westminster, and the feast was attended by three papal legates of high rank whose presence marks the beginning of the ecclesiastical reformation which we shall have to consider in its place as the counterpart of the legal and administrative changes produced by the Norman Conquest. In the meantime, however, the broken national party was gathering its forces for a last stand, and the focal point of the English resistance shifts to the extreme east of the land.
At each stage in the Norman Conquest there is always one particular district round which the main interest centres for the time, the operations of war elsewhere being of subsidiary importance. It was the men of Kent and Sussex who bore the brunt of the first shock of the invasion; it was the men of the north who held the field in 1069, and now, in the last period of English resistance, our attention is concentrated on the rectangular tract of land which lies between Welland, Ermine Street, Ouse, and Wash. Even at the present day, after eight centuries of drainage, it is not difficult to reconstruct the geographical features which in 1070 made the Fenland the most inaccessible part of England south of the Humber. Except for a narrow tract north of Huntingdon and St. Ives, no part of this district rises to one hundred feet above sea-level, and in great part it was still covered with the swamps and meres of stagnant water which gave to the eastern half of this region the name of the Isle of Ely. In so far as cultivation had already extended into this inhospitable quarter, it may fairly be set down to the credit of the five great abbeys of Peterborough, Thorney, Crowland, Ramsey, and Ely, which dominated the fens and round which the events of the campaign of 1070 arrange themselves.
Abbot Brand of Peterborough, whose recognition of Edgar the Etheling as king had so deeply moved the Conqueror’s wrath at the time of his coronation, had died on November 27, 1069.[[221]] At this moment King William was in the thick of his Northumbrian difficulties, and it does not appear that any appointment to Peterborough was made until the quieter times of the following spring. In or before May, however, the abbey was given to a man whose selection for the post proves that the king had received warning of the coming disquiet in the east. Thorold of Fécamp, abbot of Malmesbury, had probably made himself useful in north Wiltshire while William was engaged beyond the Humber, for the reputation for militant severity which he had created in the south was the reason for his translation to a post of danger in the Fenland. “By God’s splendour,” said King William, “if he is more of a knight than an abbot I will find him a man who will meet all his attacks, where he can prove his valour and his knighthood and practise the art of war.”[[222]] The man in question was no other than the famous Hereward, and Thorold was not long before he saw traces of his handiwork.
The amount of authentic fact which we know about Hereward is in very small proportion to the great mass of legend which has gathered round his name. His parentage is quite unknown, but there are several incidental entries in Domesday which connect him with the western edge of the Fenland and which all occur in the Lincolnshire portion of the survey. From these entries we learn that Hereward had been a tenant of two of the great Fenland abbeys, namely Crowland and Peterborough, and we also gather that the former house had found him an unsatisfactory person with whom to have dealings. The jurors of Aveland Wapentake in Lincolnshire told the Domesday commissioners that Abbot Ulfketil of Crowland had let the abbey’s estate in the vill of Rippingale to Hereward on terms to be arranged mutually year by year, but they add that the abbot took possession of the land again before Hereward fled from the country because he did not keep to his agreement.[[223]] On the other hand, Hereward was seemingly still in the possession of the lands which he held of Peterborough abbey at the moment when his name first appears in the national history.
At some time in the course of May, but before Abbot Thorold had taken possession of his abbey, the Danish fleet, of which we have heard nothing since the previous year, sailed up the Ouse to Ely. Thus far its leaders would seem to have kept the agreement which they had made with King William after his capture of York, and the fact that they now appear as taking the offensive once more is probably explained by a statement in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that King Swegn of Denmark had come in person to the Humber.[[224]] The men of the Fenland were clearly expecting a Danish reconquest of England, and on the appearance of Earl Asbiorn at Ely they joined him in great numbers. Among them, and probably at their head, was Hereward, and the first fruit of the alliance was a successful raid on the wealthy and unprotected monastery of Peterborough. The monks received just sufficient warning of approaching danger to enable them to send an urgent message to Abbot Thorold, asking for help, and also to hide some of the more precious treasures of their house, and then at mid-day Hereward and his gang were on them. They came by boat, for even at this date there were canals which connected the Ouse at Ely with the Nene at Peterborough, and began to clamour for admission to the abbey.[[225]] But the monks had closed their doors and defended them stoutly, so that Hereward was driven to burn the houses which clustered round the abbey gate in order to force an entrance. Incidentally the whole of Peterborough was burned down, with the exception of the church and a single house, but the outlaws had got inside the monastery. The monks begged them to do no harm, but, without heeding, they burst into the church, seized all the movable articles of value on which they could lay their hands, and tried to tear down the great rood cross. To the clamours of the monks around them they shouted that they did it all for the good of the church, and as Hereward was a tenant of the abbey the monks believed him. Indeed, Hereward himself in after years declared that he had been guided in this matter by the best intentions, for he believed that the Danes would beat King William and he thought that it would be better that the treasures of the church should remain in the hands of his friends for a little while, than that they should fall for ever into the possession of the Frenchmen.