William Had Retaken York - Then His Army Began Destroying the North's Food Supplies

In my last medieval post, we followed the rebellion at York in 1069, when English and Danish forces captured both of William the Conqueror's castles. William marched north and recovered the city, but the trouble was far from over. The Danish fleet remained in the Humber, and there was every possibility that his enemies would rise against him again.

Over the winter of 1069-1070, William's soldiers destroyed settlements and food supplies across parts of northern England, particularly Yorkshire. Homes were burned, livestock killed and stores of grain destroyed. This became known as the Harrying of the North.

William wanted to make further rebellion more difficult, but the people who suffered were not necessarily those who had taken up arms against him. Ordinary families depended on their harvests and animals to survive the winter. Losing those supplies could mean facing months without enough food, and there were accounts of people fleeing their homes as famine affected the region.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that William laid waste to Yorkshire and that he was in York on Christmas Day in 1069. It was a particularly harsh time of year to carry out such a campaign, with families already depending on whatever food they had managed to store.

Orderic Vitalis, writing several decades later, described just how terrible he believed the suffering had been. He condemned William's actions and claimed that more than 100,000 people died from starvation. Historians question this figure, and we have no reliable way of knowing how many people actually died. Even so, there is evidence that people suffered terribly.

When the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, many Yorkshire properties were recorded as 'waste'. This could refer to land producing no recorded surplus value for its lord, rather than necessarily being completely destroyed or abandoned. Historians still debate how much of this was caused by William's campaign and how much resulted from other upheavals during the conquest.

I can understand why William wanted to prevent another rebellion, but I find it difficult to imagine what this must have been like for families who had no part in the fighting. They could lose their homes, animals and food, with the winter still ahead of them.

Do you think William believed he had no other choice after the rebellions in York, or did his punishment of the northern population go too far?

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Image: Bayeux Tapestry, Scene 47, showing a house being burned during the Norman invasion of 1066. An 11th-century embroidery, not a depiction of the Harrying of the North in 1069. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.