The Harrying of the North
In the winter of 1069 to 1070, William the Conqueror put down a rebellion in the north of England by destroying the means to live there. His army burned villages, killed livestock, and set fire to the seed corn and the ploughs, so that anyone who survived the soldiers would starve before spring. It is called the Harrying of the North, and Yorkshire, Sheffield included, was at the centre of it. This is a guide to what happened, why, what it did to the country around Sheffield, and how far the old accounts can be trusted.
Why the north rose
Three years after Hastings, the north still hadn’t accepted the new king. Edgar Ætheling, the last claimant of the old West Saxon royal line, had backing from the Northumbrians, the Anglo-Scandinavian families of Yorkshire, and the Danes. On 28 January 1069 rebels surrounded the new Norman earl, Robert de Comines, at Durham and killed him and his men. They moved on to York, attacked the castle there and killed its keeper and many of his garrison. William came north, broke the siege, and left. Then a Danish fleet sent by King Sweyn II arrived in the Humber, and York fell again.
William paid the Danes to go away, and Edgar escaped to Scotland. The rebels who were left wouldn’t stand and fight a battle they knew they would lose. So William decided to starve them out instead, and everyone who lived near them along with them.
What William did
William kept Christmas 1069 in York. By January 1070 he had broken his army into small units and sent them across the county to burn, loot and frighten. The monk Orderic Vitalis, writing in the next century, put it plainly: “He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food be burned to ashes.” Food stores and livestock were destroyed on purpose, so that whoever escaped the swords would die of hunger during the winter.
The chroniclers describe what came next. Orderic says “more than 100,000 people perished of starvation”. Symeon of Durham wrote that people, “compelled by hunger, devoured human flesh,” along with horses, dogs and cats, and that others sold themselves into slavery to eat. Refugees turn up in the records of Evesham Abbey, as far away as Worcestershire, and others went over the border into lowland Scotland.
Domesday: the north written down as waste
Sixteen years later the Domesday survey counted what was left. In Yorkshire, around 60 per cent of holdings were entered as “waste”, and about two-thirds of villages had at least one wasted manor. Estate values were about 60 per cent below what they had been in 1066. On one estimate, only about a quarter of the population and plough teams were left, with something like 80,000 oxen and 150,000 people gone.
Sheffield and Hallam
The Sheffield area was devastated in the harrying, and Domesday shows it. It is also where the area first appears in writing, as the manor of “Hallun”, or Hallam: “In Hallam, one manor with its sixteen hamlets, there are twenty-nine carucates to be taxed. There Earl Waltheof had an ‘Aula’”, a hall. Before the Conquest the manor was worth eight marks of silver. By 1086 it was down to forty shillings, well under half. The land had passed to Waltheof’s widow, Judith, a niece of the Conqueror, and was held for her by Roger de Busli, one of the new Norman magnates.
Waltheof’s story is the harrying in one life. He was an English earl who submitted to William after Hastings and kept his title. In 1069 he joined Edgar and the Danes in the attack on York. When the Danes left in 1070 he submitted again, was restored to his earldom, and married Judith that same year. Then in 1075 he was drawn into the Revolt of the Earls, for reasons nobody has been able to pin down. After almost a year in custody he was beheaded at St Giles’s Hill near Winchester on 31 May 1076. He was buried at Crowland Abbey. When his coffin was opened in 1092, the monks found the body intact, the head joined back to the trunk, and pilgrims started to come.
The name Hallam outlived him. Hallamshire, run from the castle where the Don meets the Sheaf, became the old name for the country around Sheffield, and still is.
The king’s confession
Orderic gives William a deathbed speech in 1087 in which the old king owns up to it: “I attacked the English of the Northern Shires like a lion,” ordering homes, crops and livestock destroyed and leaving thousands to die of famine. It makes a good scene. Modern historians doubt William ever said it. David Bates calls the speech “entirely Orderic’s invention and an idealized version of what he thought ought to have happened”, so it tells us what one 12th-century monk thought of the harrying, not what William said.
How bad was it, really?
Historians still argue about the scale. William Kapelle and others have called it genocide. Mark Hagger argues that it wasn’t, that William was fighting by the rules of his day and was no worse than his contemporaries. Paul Dalton doubts that William had the time, the men or the weather to turn the whole north into a desert, when most of his troops were tied up guarding castles in the south. Some of the damage may have been done by raiding Danes and Scots, and “waste” in Domesday may sometimes mean an estate being reorganised, a tax break, or simply that the commissioners didn’t know. Orderic’s 100,000 may be a figure of speech. David Horspool’s verdict is that the destruction and the death toll may both have been exaggerated. Nobody, though, argues that it didn’t happen.
From the harrying of the North to the harrying of the netherlands
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, has a harrying of its own. In 1959 a netherlander clansman called Brecon Mashiesh raised a revolt, and in 1960 he marched on the Farantees and sacked what he could reach. The reply came in 1961. The exacids, the nascenti muscle, went out into the netherlands and put the revolt down so thoroughly that it got a name: the harrying of the netherlands. They burned the shanties back to the peat. Mashiesh was taken alive and flogged in public, then let go, because a man limping home tells the story better than a corpse. Pip Rippon tells it in the history chapter of the Curated Guide to Hellsborough. Foked is the free solo RPG set in the same world, and the real ground under it is covered in the S6 field guide and the story of the Peak’s name. For the genre all of it belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: the rebellion, the campaign, Orderic, Symeon, the refugees, the Domesday figures and the historians’ debate from Wikipedia; Bates on the deathbed speech from Mental Floss; the deathbed quotation from Wikiquote; Waltheof and the Hallam Domesday entry from Wikipedia; Sheffield in the harrying and the manor’s values from Wikipedia; Hallamshire from Wikipedia.
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