The North Laid Waste

Those who are sceptical about "the harrying of the north" are doubting the medieval chroniclers. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entries for 1069 and 1070; Orderic Vitalis in Books IV and VII on what he thought was the darkest of the Conqueror's crimes; John of Worcester on the ravages of the Normans in the winter of 1069-70 and the severity of the famine that followed; the appalling detail of Simeon of Durham's local reports; and the cool assessment by William of Malmesbury; are virtually unanimous in their despair. The damage inflicted on Yorkshire and Northumbria would take generations to repair.

THE HONOUR OF RICHMOND

Sometime between the horrific winter slaughter of inhabitants and the death of their former earls Morcar and Eadwine, King William I transferred most of the the north of England to his "French"  barons. One of these new "tenants-in-chief" was Alan the Red from Brittany, who received a large parcel of consolidated lands in North Yorkshire.

The core of these manorial estates, the "Land of Count Alan", stretched from the high bleak Pennines in the west to the fertile Vale of York and the Great North Road in the east. The Domesday Survey of 1085 and 1086 describes Alan's lands as forming a "castlery", an estate sufficient in size to support a castle. It names Richmond, then called "Hindelrag", as part of Alan's "possessions".

A total of 216 manors in Yorkshire identified "Count Alan (of Brittany)" as tenant-in-chief. Seventeen of those were situated near and around the provincial town of York. The balance of 199 estates were found further north and formed the Honour of Richmond. 

Entries in Domesday concerning all of Alan's lands in Yorkshire indicate that it would probably take some time for them to make him as wealthy as the sheer number of place-names suggest. Of the 216 mentioned, 88 were completely depopulated. Overall, the surveyors deemed 83 sites as "waste" (of no economic value) and another 55 as "partially waste" (generally operating at 10 to 15 percent of productive capacity).

Under the terms of the Survey, each demesne reported the amount of available arable land, measured as its number of "ploughlands". This was an area that could normally be cultivated by an eight-oxen "plough-team" during the course of one agricultural season.

The Land of Count Alan registered 5,295 ploughlands, but had only 1,049 plough-teams to work that area. Assuming a standard 1 to 1 ratio of plough teams to plough lands, a mere 20% of land suitable for cropping was actually being used to produce grain. There was simply not enough capital (oxen and implements) and labour (peasants) to sow more.

Another measure of seriously depleted productivity is contained in Domesday's comparison of "annual values" payable to the feudal lord. Information was collected from a baseline year of 1066, a few years before the harrying, and the current year of 1086, a decade and a half after.

In 1066 the 216 parcels of land generated income of £323/12/11 for the previous Anglo-Danish owners. In 1086 the same manors returned a much reduced £137/14/9 to Alan the Red. This was 42.5%, or less than half the former sum from twenty years before.

Data from the Domesday Book provides conclusive evidence supporting the chroniclers' versions of events. There was a blighted period lasting for decades after the Norman suppression of the north.

The difference between a ploughlands/plough-teams measure of 80% capacity shrinkage and a financial rents contraction of 60% is not a question of conflicting information within the Survey. Instead it reflects the survivors' adaptation to a radically altered environment ― abandoning poorer, rougher land in the Yorkshire Dales and concentrating their remaining, fewer resources on better land in the Vale of York. 

The number of ploughlands sown stayed the same but the potential yields were higher. This effect was possibly enhanced by price inflation of grain in the years of food shortage. It is a reminder of how critical labour and animal power were to the feudal economy. Without these essential elements, great quantities of land were correctly classified as Waste.

VINDICTIVE PUNISHMENT

The wrath of William I was imagined by the monk Orderic Vitalis, who put the words of a death-bed confession in the monarch's mouth. 

       "In mad fury I descended on the English like a raging lion, and ordered that their homes and crops with all their equipment and furnishings should be burnt at once and their great flocks and herds of sheep and cattle slaughtered everywhere."

Orderic believed that, "to his lasting disgrace", the king "yielded to his worst impulse, and set no bounds to his fury". His systematic cruelty unjustly condemned the innocent and the guilty, both non-combatants and rebels alike, by stripping away "at once all that could serve for the support of life in the whole country lying beyond the Humber".

There was really no need for the monk to imagine anything. The inevitable result of the king's 'scorched earth' policy ― "the corn and the cattle, with the implements of husbandry and every sort of provisions, to be collected in heaps and set on fire till the whole was consumed" ― was to punish the population of the northern England well into the future. Despite his orders being against his own best interest, the king was determined to embed economic scarcity.

Simeon of Durham, a near contemporary witness, wrote of the shroud of silence that then fell on the region:

       "Meanwhile, the land being thus deprived of anyone to cultivate it for nine years, an extensive solitude prevailed all around. There was no village inhabited between York and Durham; they became lurking places to wild beasts and robbers, and were a great dread to travellers."

Historians can be overly cautious when interpreting the narrative style of individual chroniclers. In this case, a sense of ongoing emptiness in a wasted landscape is repeated by another source. 

William of Malmesbury, writing some sixty years after the Conqueror's harrying, reports of a "province once fertile and a nurse of tyrants", now being "hamstrung by fire, rapine and bloodshed". The intervening decades have seen little improvement:

       "...the ground for sixty miles or more left entirely uncultivated, the soil quite bare even down to this day...if anyone sees them now, he sighs if he is a stranger, and if he is a native surviving from the past, he does not recognise them."

RICHMOND CASTLE

The 'gift' of the Honour of Richmond to Alan the Red fell short of a rich reward for a royal favourite. King William was more about appointing a dependable military lieutenant to perform a particular job, and signing over the necessary land platform from which to do it.

The seriousness with which William viewed his delegated task is perhaps shown by Count Alan's decision to build a castle in stone. The annual returns of the Honour certainly did not justify the additional expense and effort required. The position of the Honour near the frontier with Scotland probably did.

Richmond Castle was an early enclosure-type castle, not an impregnable Keep. It was similar in plan to another stone castle erected to please the king, Peveril's Castle on Peak's Arse in Derbyshire. At both sites, a Norman donjon was added later, but at first a Hall within the walls was considered sufficient comfort for the castle constable. The emphasis was on housing a garrison rather than a lord.

Situated on the north side of the river Swale, its southern boundary was defended by 20 metre cliffs rising up from the waterway. From there the east and west walls punched north to a fortified arched gateway, defending a triangular space 91 metres long (n-s) and 137 metres wide (e-w), or about 0.75 hectares. The eastern wall was strengthened by three projecting stone towers, barrel-vaulted and containing chapels, garderobes, armouries and battlements. The modest two-level Hall was built in the higher south-eastern corner and contained a private withdrawing chamber at the end of the upper floor. 

The key attribute of these features is that they are reliably dated to within the last three decades of the eleventh century, between 1070 and 1100 AD. These parts of the castle fabric are therefore the work of Alan the Red (d. 1093) or his brother Alan the Black (d. 1100).

Richmond Castle is consequently one of the rare few from the Norman Conquest era to be more substantial than the familiar earth and timber motte-and-bailey constructions. Like fitzOsbern's  Chepstow Castle in the Welsh Marches, this prominent piece of masonry on the Swale river crossing in North Yorkshire was making a statement of permanent authority.

From the king's point of view, Yorkshire and Northumbria continued to be militarily unstable. He had taught his northern vassals a savage lesson on disloyalty but experience had taught him that the remnants of the old English nobility could never be trusted, no matter how grim their defeat. Now it was the turn of a new elite to enforce martial law, equipped with a resident force of chain-mailed knights and sergeants capable of riding out and quashing unrest before it became a problem.

OVERLAYING AN IMPERIAL TEMPLATE

The Normans' precedent for subduing the unruly north was Ancient Rome. The Roman legions occupied much of Britain for the first four centuries of the new millennia. They achieved their long rule largely  by roadbuilding, then securing these vital lines of communication and reinforcement by a series of military forts at regular intervals along them.

It is no accident that Richmond Castle was situated close to one of these corridors; Earningas Street leading to Northumbria and beyond to Scotland. The Norman Castle had a clear line of site to the former Roman fort at Catterick which previously controlled the Swale river crossing. Ancillary motte-and-bailey mounds probably also guarded the key intersection of 'Scotch Corner' and a couple of Tees river crossings to the north of Count Alan's new fortress.

The strategic concerns identified by King William in the 1070s were similar to those facing the defenders of Roman Britain. The main threats to stability were the Caledonian tribes and Hadrian's wall was built to keep them out. Two major roads to support the troops on this front line crossing the island above York were Earningas and Stainmoor. 

The particular siting of a stone castle at  Richmond formed a sort of early-warning station of Scottish raids south. This garrison, a permanent reserve of armed and mounted soldiers secured in an 'enclosure' or bailey-type of military base, was a force effectively containing two of the main approaches of possible invasion ―across the Pennines to Cumbria and Strath-Clyde, or down through Northumbria and Durham County. 

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REFERENCES:

OH Creighton, 2004, 'The Rich Man in his Castle, the Poor Man at his Gate', Castle Baileys and Settlement Patterns in Norman England, Chateau Gaillard , 21,25-36

J Horrocks, 2013, 'The Early Norman Castles of the North of England', PhD dissertation, University of Central Lancashire

L Butler, 1992, 'The Origins of the Honour of Richmond and its Castles', Chateau Gaillard, XVI, 69-80, in Ch 4, Anglo-Norman Castles.

Richmond Castle, <english-heritage.org.uk>, Listing 1010627

Honour of Richmond, <british-history.ac.uk>

Alan Rufus, <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan-Rufus>

'Land of Count Alan', <opendomesday.org/hundred/land-of-count-alan>, Anna Powell-Smith and Hull Domesday Project, 

Orderic Vitalis, Bk VII, vol IV, & Bk IV, Ch V, <openlibrary.org/works/OL4467557W/Historia-ecclesiastica>

Simeon of Durham, (History of the Kings of England), trans. Rev J Stevenson, 1855, Pt II, 848-1129 AD, 

P Dalton, 1990, 'Feudal Politics in Yorkshire 1066 X 1135', PhD thesis, Sheffield University,

<etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/1870/1/DX182025.pdf>

 

JC Holt, 1983, 'The introduction of knight service into England', Anglo-Norman Studies, 6, 89-106