#northumbria

What was the North like before? (i am trying to keep this short and well-ordered but immediately failing)

The Kingdom of Northumbria (which isn't just Northumberland, it included Lancashire, Cumbria, Co. Durham, most of North Yorkshire, and the Lothians) was a pretty big deal between around 650-950. It wasn't, like, the greatest country in the world or anything, but it was important. It was one of the first kingdoms since the Romans left northern Europe to mint its own coinage. It was a religious hub for British and Scandinavian churches, although it also had a lot of pagans of various stripes. From the 7th to 8th centuries, it had an artistic and philosophical golden age which strongly influenced Continental art and culture going forwards. it was basically a normal-shading-to-impressive early medieval kingdom.

It fell apart a bit when the Great Heathen Army (the "Viking invasion", a massive alliance of Scandinavian earldoms and kingdoms) invaded Britain in the 9th century. The Vikings successfully took over basically the whole southern half of Northumbria, founding the Kingdom of York. The Scots took the advantage to invade from the north, taking not only the Lothians (they kept those for most of the following 1100 years!) but also pretty much the entire North-West (down to Liverpool).

So by the 11th century, we no longer have a Kingdom of Northumbria, but we do still have its cultural institutions (Lindisfarne and Durham being the most obvious). Much of the Danelaw has been succeeded by Saxon kingdoms, so we have the Kingdom of York as the main remaining Danish kingdom. We have the Earldom of Northumbria, which has been being awkwardly passed between Scottish and English control since the last Northumbrian King died in 954. We also have the Haliwerfolk, the Community of St Cuthbert, ruling between Tyne and Wear. so it's fractured, but it's still distinct in many ways: mainly, none of it is entirely England. (we do not have the Lothians back, they get to sit this one out)

It's much more culturally and ethnically mixed than most of Britain at the time - a range of Danes, Saxons, Angles, Scots, and probably some others (which may be why Northumbria was admittedly very violent and politically unstable - their kings only reigned for an average of 6-7 years before being deposed, killed, or forced to take holy orders). It's not heavily-populated, but it's at a normal population concentration for the time, unlike the North since. It's fairly well-off, I think mostly from the wool trade, but not, like... startlingly wealthy. it IS bigger than england though, and it's still a hot property.

aand that's basically our starting point here.

1066 and All That (1065-1068)

idk how much you covered of the Norman Conquest at school, but I'm going to assume about the same that I did: there were three claimants to the throne of England, Harold Godwinson killed Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge and then William's army shot Godwinson in the eye at Hastings. they did a tapestry about it or something idk

ANYWAY a key part of the stage-setting here is that, out of those three, Hardrada probably had the least claim. Godwinson had been named as King Edward's successor on Edward's deathbed, and William was Edward's cousin. Hardrada was the King of Norway, and he had already tried to usurp the throne of Denmark unsuccessfully, kind of a massive loser actually.

Hardrada got involved because of Northumbria. Specifically, as I mentioned in my other post, because Tostig Godwinson (Harold Godwinson's brother) invited him over to do an invasion, to try to reclaim Northumbria and stop getting passed between England and Scotland.

Harald gets his arse kicked. Harold gets his arse kicked too. William the Bastard becomes William the Conqueror. blah blah blah you learnt this at school.

Obviously, invasions aren't neat and tidy, and most people aren't like "ooh, hooray, a foreign conquest!" so the lords of England nominate a different king - Edgar the Aethling, who is... I think King Edward's grand-nephew? Something like that. Anyway, Edgar was only not nominated in the first place because he was a teenager and not at all up to the political crises, hence the selection of Harold Godwinson, hence the whole "arrow-in-the-eye" incident. but the Anglo-Saxons decide they'd rather have a 14-year-old than some Norman bastard, so they bring him in. Another key point: two of the most important lords in this process are Ealdred (the Archbishop of York) and Morcar (the Earl of Northumberland).

they set up to crown King Edgar. William marches on London to stop them. they cave immediately and Edgar (who was never actually crowned) surrenders to William and is kept in his household for a couple of years. he'll be important later keep an eye on him OOP IT'S 1067 AND HE'S ESCAPED.

Murders, Murders Everywhere (1067-1069)

so I went into this in my other post, but Tostig, the Earl of Northumbria, died with Hardrada at Stamford Bridge. William replaces him with this guy Copsi, who everyone in Northumbria fucking hates. Not only did he run away from Stamford Bridge and immediately swear loyalty to the enemy (William), but he's also seen (correctly) as an outrider of Norman rule and a tax collector for William.

So Oswulf, the son of the Earl of Bamburgh, starts collecting an army against Copsi immediately. it goes super easy because, again: everyone hates the guy. and five weeks after Copsi gets the earldom, he's violently killed (very dishonourably, it involves surprising him at a banquet and then chasing him into a church that they set on fire) and Oswulf reclaims Bamburgh in March of 1067.

Nobody actually seems to mind this? There's no attempts to dethrone him. William might make an attempt, buuuuut news travels slow, he's busy, and in any case: six months later, Oswulf himself is killed, not by an army but while chasing down an outlaw.

His cousin, Gospatric (or Cospatrick, depending on your source) sees his chance, and offers William a metric shitton of money to be given the Earldom. William accepts his fealty and his cash, and Gospatric promptly joins Morcar (remember him?), Edgar, and the Earl of Mercia in starting an uprising.

William, clearly losing patience, personally brings an army to York and smashes the uprising, takes away land from any Saxon or Anglo-Scandinavian he can find and gives it to Normans instead, and drives Edgar and his followers up to take refuge with King Malcolm III of Scotland.

"fuck this," thinks William, "if I'm doing this I'm doing this," and he gives the earldom to a Norman, too. This is Robert de Comines, who rides up to Durham pretty soon after (January 1069) and is promptly slaughtered by a rebel army. The rebels then pack up and ride down to besiege York. William has to come back up to fight them. Again. He is getting pissed off - this is noted as a particularly brutal battle.

everyone else in England, looking at Northumbria and Durham, goes "hey you know what this is a great time for a rebellion actually". Rebellions spring up in Stafford, Dorset, Devon, Shrewsbury, and the Midlands. now is the time for Hereward the Wake and Eadric the Wild. shit is popping off. William rides south again to deal with it.

Hey, We Brought Friends (1069)

Remember how a bunch of rebels, including the other royal claimant, just fled up to King Malcolm's court? Remember how Northumbria has connections all over the place? Remember how nobody likes William?

In 1069, a coalition force of Northumbrians, Scots, and Danes come together under Edgar's banner. The King of Denmark assembles a fleet for them, and they sail down the east coast of England, raiding as they go. They take Lindsey. They take the Humber. They join up with more rebels in Yorkshire and they take York.

William is pissed off. and, like, say what you will about William the Conqueror, he is genuinely a very good commander. When he comes north, the uprising fractures. He pays off the Danes, giving them a substantial amount of money to get back in their boats and go home. With the Danes gone, the Scots withdraw. This leaves the Northern rebels and an incredibly angry king.

The Actual Harrying (1069-1071)

William stays in the North all that winter (he spends Christmas fortifying York), and he is not fucking around.

He sets off north from the River Aire, in Yorkshire, and he kills anyone he comes across. More importantly, he conducts a slash-and-burn campaign all along the Aire and the Humber, destroying crops and settlements as he goes. He consciously destroys food stores - it is winter, after all, and he plans on starving the enemy out.

His army is divided into raiding bands. They move up towards the Tees, burning villages and massacring the inhabitants. They loot everything they can carry, and burn everything they can't.

By January, the north is starving. By March, there are credible reports of cannibalism (per Simeon of Durham, writing around 40 years later) and of people selling themselves into slavery for the hope of escaping the region. Refugees pop up all across Scotland and England, and as far afield as Ireland and France. This entire time, William is still very much there, killing any Northumbrian he comes across.

Historians dispute whether this constitutes genocide, but it's important to note that the question here isn't "would this be genocide if it happened today" i will not make a comment about current affairs i will not make a comment about current affairs i will not make a comment about current affairs but "is it fair to apply a modern term to 11th-century warfare?" The important thing is that no serious scholar - not at the time, and not since - has held that this was proportional, just, or normal. This was one of the most outright exterminationist campaigns we know of in the medieval period. It was brutal.

William lays off a little in 1070, partly because the winter has smashed much of the resistance he was facing, but he continues to actively attack settlements and farmland in the region until 1071 at least.

(He also actually applied similar tactics against rebel regions further south - Cheshire, Shropshire, Derbyshire, and Stafford in particular - and those are also important, but they were a fraction of the devastation that was caused in Northumbria and York. Those campaigns were notably brutal, but within the norms of the time. The Northumbrian campaign was enough to shock the Pope out of planning crusades long enough to tsk and shake his head.)

The cost of the Harrying

12th century sources (so people who may or may not have been there, but who were writing decades after the fact) cite 100,000 dead in this campaign. We don't know how true that is, and casualty counts at that period are rarely accurate, but we do know that the recorded population drops massively between the initial Domesday Book record in 1066 and the 1086 record.

So does the value of Northumbrian and Yorkshire properties - which, like, we are in a pre-landlordism feudal economy here. The value of these lands is in their production - the land value is a measure of its food viability, not of industrialisation. so bear that in mind when I tell you that in 1086, fifteen years after the Harrying, the value of northern estates had dropped by anything from 50% to 92%. The 1086 Domesday Book - again, fifteen years later - still describes 60% of Yorkshire and Northumberland estates as being "waste". in other words, the damage was so significant that, over a decade later, less than half of the land was back to full usage.

The population density of the north of England never reached the same level (in relation to the south and other neighbouring countries) that it had held before the Harrying. like. we have a sense of the north as being inherently sparsely-populated, but it wasn't, not by the standards of medieval kingdoms at that latitude. that's the thing that really gets me.

Edgar flees back to Scotland with King Malcolm, and while he doesn't make another serious attempt at taking the throne, his sister does marry Malcolm. this is really important to Scottish and English history - this is where the Anglicisation of lowland Scotland really starts, and the connection between the Scottish and English crowns, which will ultimately and tortuously lead (in no particular order) to the Battle of Flodden, Mary Queen of Scots, James I/VI, the Jacobite Uprising, and the Highland Clearances.

After the Harrying, William was free to move in and replace almost every remaining Northumbrian or York lord with a Norman. (not Richmond, funnily enough. Richmond always has to be weird.) He basically consolidated his power, yoinked a bit of the Borders back from Scotland, and having vented his spleen for a year and a half, went back down south. In 1075, as I mentioned, he appoints a new Earl of Northumbria and Bishop of Durham, Bishop Walcher. He starts building abbeys throughout the north (in a lot of ways the Norman rebuilding of the north resembles the Norman plantations in Ireland; the use of abbeys to embed loyal clergy is a big part of both).

and, basically... he won. He led an exterminationist campaign of starvation, massacre, and destruction, which left scars on the landscape and population which can still be seen a thousand years later, and it worked. He won.

Fuck, There's A Sequel (1080)

Again, touched on this in my other post, but: in 1075 he appointed Bishop Walcher as the Earl of Northumbria.

In 1079, the Scots invaded. listen, the rebellion was over, border raids gonna border raid. The Scottish raid lasted for three weeks, and was almost entirely unopposed. Cue political fury, leading to Walcher's men attacking a Northumbrian nobleman (Ligulf) at his home in the middle of the night and killing everyone inside.

This, in turn, leads to the remaining Northumbrian nobles losing their fucking minds. They threaten to rebel again, Harrying or no Harrying. Walcher meets with them, refuses all their demands, is attacked and chased into a church, which they then set on fire, killing Walcher and his men as they fled the blaze. This... seems to happen a lot in Northumbria. Don't go into churches in the north-east, I guess.

The Northumbrian rebels then attacked and besieged Durham Castle for four days before giving up and going home. But the damage was very much done. Once again, William is pissed.

He doesn't come up himself, this time. He sends his half-brother Odo, who does his own Harrying of the North. This one's further north - the first one was mostly from the Humber to the Tees, this one is from the Tees to the Borders. Odo takes the same tactic as William: slash-and-burn, massacring and tearing down settlements, and killing indiscriminately. The reported casualty rate is lower, but it's taking place in a region that's already on its last legs.

This is what finally takes the fight out of Northumbria. By now, there are no native Northumbrian lords, no native Northumbrian landowners. The Northumbrian population are largely dead, exiled, or reduced to serfdom/slavery (regardless of their previous status).

Don't Read This Part It's An Inflammatory Opinion Piece About Contemporary Politics

Important thing about the Normans: they weren't interested in being the only people in a kingdom. They wanted to be the lords and nobles, but they allowed the locals to stay on as labour, and bought in other non-Norman labourers from elsewhere. The interesting thing about that is that, despite all of the above, Northumbria kind of remembered being Northumbria. The country disappeared, but the people didn't.

(you can see the same phenomenon in other Norman conquests, like Wales and Ireland - the leadership changes, but the working populace remains. This is not the case for all medieval conquests, although it's not unique to the Normans, either.)

not to push my own thesis but, given the bounds of the north-south divide and how continuously it's existed ever since: I will die on the hill that the Harrying is the root cause of why the North historically dislikes and mistrusts the South, and why it has never fully integrated into England even nearly a thousand years later. There were enough Northumbrians left in Northumbria that the Norman-occupied north remained culturally distinct from the Norman-occupied south. And I don't think that the North has ever really considered itself aligned with the South since then, there's this underlying suspicion of southern intent that can always be pegged to the last bad thing - it was Thatcher, it was the Industrial Revolution, it was the mishandling of the wool trade, it was the Rising of the North.... - but which ultimately is closer to the Welsh mistrust of England: a slaughter and an ongoing occupation, economic exploitation, and a refutation of cultural identity.

Except we stopped teaching the Harrying of the North, and so unlike Wales or even Cornwall, Northumbria can't put a name to its colonisation. It's a thousand-year-old cultural resentment which just festers under the surface, and compounds over time as we gather other resentments into the same pot. When I learned about the Norman Conquest in school, in County Durham, I learned about 1066 and the Battle of Hastings, and Northumbria and York were discussed as though they were uncomplicatedly already an accepted part of England. Pretty much all my knowledge of this came independent of my schooling, and I took History through to A-level (and got good grades!)

I hate to be the person going "ugh why didn't they tell us about that at school", but the thing is, they actually didn't. (My planned research project next year is an historiographical study of how well-known the Harrying is among different English and Lothian populations, so check back in in a year and I'll tell you whether that was a problem with my school or whether it's generally the case across former-Northumbria. I already know - anecdotally - that it's the case in most of the south, and that my parents didn't learn it.)

and I do think that, post-Brexit, post-Red Wall, post-"levelling up", in a time where the north-south divide feels extremely present and a lot of discussion of it seems to boil down to "idk they're backwards up there", there's value in properly digging into the roots of that division?