History of England 1-6

To the victor came the spoils. William set about ordering his new kingdom. He confiscated the estates of his English opponents, particularly of those who had fought against him at Hastings. Some of the English thegns had fled, and others had gone into exile. Just as Canute had done before him, he raised a large sum with a sudden tax. He was greedy, with the appetite of a conqueror. Another sign of his strength rose upon his new lands. Wherever he went, he planted a castle. One was soon built in London itself, on the site of the present Tower.

He was helped in his enterprise by many survivors of the old regime. William realized, as other foreign conquerors before him, that he needed the experience and knowledge of English administrators. In the first years of his rule he retained the English sheriffs. The monasteries were still being governed by English abbots, despite the fact that two of their number had fought at Hastings. Regenbald, head of the writing office under Edward the Confessor, became William’s chancellor.

Yet others among the English decided to fight. William’s power did not really prevail beyond the southeast of the country, and Harold’s own immediate family established a base in the southwest at Exeter. They took advantage of William’s absence in Normandy to raise the banner of revolt in 1068. The senior protagonist in this affair was Harold’s mother, Gytha, with the assistance of the Irish and perhaps even of the Danes. Gytha was the aunt of the king of Denmark. William realized the gravity of a rebellion that might embroil the whole of northern and western England and, immediately on his return, he took his army to the walls of Exeter. He laid siege to the city for eighteen days, and in the end Gytha made her escape down the river Exe; the citizens then surrendered.

This was only a prelude to a much more significant revolt in the northern counties, when in 1069 the English of that region enlisted the help of the Danes to take York. Memories of the Danelaw were still strong. William marched up the country, planting castles wherever he halted. He did not immediately attack York, but employed the tactics he had used against London three years before; he left a trail of destruction across the surrounding lands. This became known as ‘the harrowing of the north’ and consisted of nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the people and the territory in William’s path. He fell upon them as if in a lightning storm. The men and the animals were killed, the crops destroyed, the towns and villages wasted. All the reserves of food were put to the torch, creating widespread famine; 100,000 people were reported to have died. No cultivated land was left between York and Durham, and a century later the ruins of the destruction were still be to be found. The villages of the region were described in the Domesday Book as ‘waste’. Yet the north would rise against William no more. He had created a desert, and called it peace. William is supposed to have confessed on his deathbed that ‘I fell on the English of the northern shires like a ravening lion.’

In the harrowing of the north William had not behaved as an English king. He had behaved like a tyrant. That is why other local insurrections emerged, and many of the English formed what would now be called guerrilla forces to harass the invaders. 10,000 Normans were attempting to control a country of 3 or 4 million natives, and the only weapons they had at their disposal were those of brute power and terror. Spies and collaborators, punishment beatings and secret murders – the whole panoply of occupation and insurgency – were indispensable. An English chronicler of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Orderic Vitalis, wrote that the English ‘were groaning under the yoke of the Normans, and suffering from the oppressions of proud lords who did not obey the king’s injunctions’. The Norman lords, in other words, were pushing their power to extremes. So, in the first four or five years of Norman rule, there was talk everywhere of revolt. The English rose against William every year between 1067 and 1070.