WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) Read Online Free Page B

relative, the youthful Edgar the Atheling, they elected the strongest among themselves as their new king. He was Harold Godwineson, the son of the Earl of Wessex. The thanes were prompted to this decision by two strong northern lords, Morcar, Earl of Northumberland, and his brother Edwin. Harold had worked hard to placate these two, even siding with them in a quarrel with his own brother, Tostig. However, this may have led to Harold’s defeat at Hastings. His army had been weakened by having to fight off a Scandinavian invasion, led by Harold Hardraada and Tostig, at Stamford Bridge, before marching rapidly south to deal with William’s invasion from Normandy. During the battle, Harold was killed by an arrow shot in the eye.
    Although there was some bitter fighting against William of Normandy in the north and west of England, he did not respond too harshly – there were no burnings and hangings at the time – and by the time he was crowned king in Westminster Abbey at Christmastide 1066, rebellious thanes, including Morcar and Edwin of Northumberland, had submitted. William could be reasonably sure that his success was complete and he felt no need to be particularly harsh in his dealings with his new subjects and their leading men. He tried initially to rule England with the support of a nobility that was a mixture of Anglo-Saxons and Normans, but no genuine trust developed between the two groups and it was soon clear that William’s policy was doomed to failure. It was to take William and his Norman followers six years of often brutal campaigning in many parts of the country before his will was firmly imposed on his new kingdom.
     
    QUELLING THE NORTH
     
    The most brutal of all William’s responses to rebellion took place in the north of the country. In 1069, Morcar and Edwin of Northumberland took up the sword again on behalf of Edwin the Atheling, arguing that with Harold dead, Edgar was the legitimate heir of Edward the Confessor. Edgar had been proclaimed king in London immediately after the Battle of Hastings, but his claim had been easily brushed aside. Now Morcar and Edwin were raising armies in the former kingdom of Mercia, the heartland of which was in counties centred on the river Trent, while their northern neighbour, Gospatric, Earl of Bernica (who had actually bought his earldom from William), was trying to persuade the great men of Northumbria to rise on behalf of Edgar.
    William led an army north to quell this latest rebellion. As he approached in force, the rebels retreated, Edgar the Atheling fleeing to Scotland and Morcar and Edwin submitting themselves to William’s mercy. Once again, he pardoned the leaders of this latest rebellion. However, he did not treat the ordinary people of the north so lightly. Perhaps he had been angered by the news of the Norman castle that the rebels had razed at York. More likely, he decided that now was the time to show his iron fist and make sure that never again would rebels have the resources to wage war against him.
    Whatever the thinking that impelled him, William acted with extraordinary savagery against the north in the winter of 1069–70. He ordered the destruction of whole villages, the burning of crops and the killing of domestic animals over an area of northern England that stretched from York to Durham in the north and from York down to the county of Derby, and to Stafford and Chester in the south and west. There was wholesale destruction and burnings of much cultivated land and property between the rivers Humber and Tees. Starvation stalked the land.
    The excessive force of William’s ‘harrying of the north’, as his campaign soon came to be called, deeply shocked Anglo-Saxon England. As the monk Simeon of Durham wrote, ‘It was horrible to see human bodies rotting in their houses and on the roads, and there was a terrible smell. And a great silence fell over the land.’ Oderic Vitalis, author of a contemporary Ecclesiastical History , said that