Original subtitles

Christmas Day,

1069, Northern England.

A warrior king makes his way through the ruins of York Cathedral.

The king's name is William I of England,

but you might know him better by his later name,

"William the Conqueror".

Most of us think the Norman Conquest

of England happened in 1066,

at the Battle of Hastings.

One battle won, and the defeated nation bent the knee.

But actually, that was just the beginning.

So, how do you go about taking over,

conquering an entire country?

In this series, I'm reinvestigating

some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters

in British history.

Oh, yes! Here we go.

And now you're face-to-face with William the Conqueror.

They know that sex sells and that violence sells.

These stories form part of our national mythology.

They harbour mysteries that have intrigued us for centuries...

It turns very dark here.

It sounds like a network of informers, doesn't it?

They're such

graphic images of religious violence.

..but with the passage of time,

we have new ways to unlock their secrets,

using scientific advances

and a modern perspective.

He was what we would now call a "foreign fighter".

I'm going to uncover forgotten witnesses,

I'm going to re-examine old evidence

and follow new clues...

A human hand.

..to get closer to the truth.

It's like fake news. You're questioning whether

we can actually take that seriously, as a piece of evidence?

1066 is one of the best-known years

in British history.

We know this date because of the Battle of Hastings,

but very few of us know the whole story.

The Norman Conquest was the biggest land grab

in Western medieval history.

This prosperous, stable country called England

was just taken by William, Duke of Normandy,

seemingly, overnight,

and stone castles like this one sprang up all over the land.

This is Pevensey Castle,

the first Norman castle on English soil,

but it's actually a repurposed Roman fort.

Of course, England had been invaded before.

There were the Romans,

but they eventually left.

Then the Vikings, but they

never gained complete control.

But when the Normans invaded in 1066,

they created a regime that lasted.

They transformed the country,

and they left traces that we can still see to this day.

DRUMMING

In fact, we can trace a line from William the Conqueror...

CHEERING

..to our current monarch,

King Charles III.

But this belies the truth of how difficult the Conquest really was.

It took two decades for William to cement Norman rule.

So, how did he do it?

And was William a conqueror or a war criminal?

I think I'll begin my investigation

in the place where William's master plan for conquest

was originally formed -

Normandy, in North West France.

Duke William built his castle here at Caen in 1060.

He did it to consolidate his control

over all of this part of France, here.

He was a Norman, the word coming from "North man",

or even "Norse man",

because William's ancestors were warlike Vikings from Scandinavia.

They came down here and they settled,

and once they'd made this their home,

they renamed it as "Normandy".

At this point, William wasn't known as "William the Conqueror",

but "William the Bastard".

He'd risen a long way

as the illegitimate son of Robert I of Normandy.

Now, he wanted to expand his territory

and conquer the lands across the English Channel.

If William ever came up here himself,

I think he'd have spent his time looking in that direction,

because 100 miles over there is the English coast,

and on the 5th of January, 1066,

the English King, Edward the Confessor,

died, without leaving an obvious successor,

and William believed that he was the rightful heir

to the English crown.

There's one astonishing historical artefact

just a few miles away, in the town of Bayeux,

which might explain exactly why

William believed this.

It's not a book or a manuscript...

..it's almost 70 metres long

and it's over 900 years old.

It's kept in the dark, quite literally,

for its own protection.

Oh!

There it is,

the Bayeux Tapestry.

This tapestry shows the invasion of England

and the Battle of Hastings in 1066

as a heroic enterprise.

It's basically a medieval movie.

It tells the story scene by scene,

from beginning to end.

And did you know it's not actually a tapestry at all?

The pictures are stitched on,

which is embroidery.

This is women's work,

and I suspect that the men who give names to things like this

don't necessarily know what they're looking at.

But the first thing that strikes me is the sheer scale of it.

Look how long it is!

And it goes off, right round the corner.

It's just a stunning piece of work.

And here's the scene I'm looking for.

It depicts a pact which allegedly took place

between two of the main contenders for the English throne.

The hero of the tapestry - that's William -

and Harold, King Edward the Confessor's brother-in-law.

This is Harold, and you can tell because of his ginger moustache.

The Anglo-Saxons have moustaches, the Normans are all clean-shaven.

And what's happening here?

It says in the caption -

this is the bit where Harold,

he "fecit" a "sacramentum".

He makes an oath to Duke William of Normandy, who's that chap there.

And Harold is touching a casket full of holy relics

to make the oath even more powerful,

and in his oath, he swears he will support William's claim to be King.

Let's see what happens next.

Well...

Ah, here we go.

Edward the Confessor dies.

There's his dead body.

He's "defunctus".

LAUGHING: He's "defunct".

And in this scene...

SHE GASPS

..Harold has made himself King!

"Rex Anglorum", "King of the English", it says.

Huh...

So, in this version of the story, at least -

the Norman version of the story -

Harold has betrayed William.

This is why William is justified in invading England.

But like all historical sources,

the tapestry has an agenda.

It was commissioned by William's half-brother, Odo,

Bishop of Bayeux,

and it was basically propaganda,

justifying William's invasion of England.

On the 28th of September, 1066,

William's fleet of hundreds of ships, carrying thousands of men,

landed here at Pevensey,

on the south coast of England.

This is the very beach where the Normans landed,

but the battle took place a few miles away in that direction, at Hastings.

It was a brutal fight.

It lasted for more than nine hours.

BATTLE CRIES ECHO

You could be forgiven for thinking

that although William's victory was hard-won,

it was basically inevitable.

The tapestry suggests that the Normans

had enormous military superiority.

Here are the Norman knights,

and what's brilliant is the way that you see them moving off.

They're starting to gallop, they're off! It's really exciting.

And here are the Norman archers.

It's really striking that the Normans have got better weapons.

They've got these horses, they've got bows and arrows.

The poor Anglo-Saxons have only got

things like axes and clubs.

You do get the impression of this indomitable Norman war machine.

The stormtroopers are coming!

The Bayeux Tapestry famously ends

with the death of Harold.

An arrow from a Norman archer

hits him in the eye.

It's a heroic end to the story.

Harold is dead, and William - the rightful King - is triumphant.

But is this what really happened?

There's another source

that historians now believe to be

one of the earliest depictions

of the Battle of Hastings.

This Latin poem, probably dating from 1068,

has a very different story to tell

about Harold's last moments.

It's called the Carmen, or the Song of the Battle of Hastings,

written two years after the battle, we think.

And according to this version,

it took four Norman soldiers to finish him off.

It's quite hard to read,

but I've got some notes here from the translation.

It says, "The first of them did the job

"of shattering his breast through his shield.

"The second, by his sword, severed the head.

"The third of them, by his spear..." SHE TRILLS

"..poured forth the body's entrails."

Oof! And then the fourth of them

"Hewed off a leg".

Some other translations say it was a different body part than that.

And then, being removed,

"he drove it afar" - he threw the body part away.

So that makes it sound like Harold was really difficult to kill.

And there's no mention at all of the arrow going into his eye.

Unlike the tapestry,

the poem is an unsanitised,

hyper-violent account of the battle.

Harold's body was so mutilated,

it could only be identified by some marks on his skin.

One of those four Normans who killed Harold was William himself.

I wonder if this poem is the more accurate

predictor of the violence still to come after the battle.

When it was over and William had won,

he wasn't automatically King of England.

He was kind of in limbo.

He waited for the English to formally surrender to him...

..but nobody came.

Somebody was coming,

but they weren't coming to offer William the throne.

They were coming for a fight.

Hundreds of miles from Hastings,

in the North of England,

two brothers would play a significant part in this resistance.

Edwin, Earl of Mercia,

and Morcar, Earl of Northumbria,

saw William as a foreign aggressor,

who was trying to take over their country.

Their rightful King was the teenager Edgar Atheling,

and they were gearing up to lead

the counteroffensive in his name.

I'm meeting a medieval specialist

to find out what happened next.

It's just after the Battle of Hastings, in 1066.

What does William the Conqueror now need to do to consolidate his win?

There's a lot of unrest, still, within the kingdom.

People have fled the battlefield, so there's still warriors around.

Fled the battlefield, political elite gathering in London.

He's killed one King on the battlefield,

but there is a contender still for the throne.

This is a teenage boy, Edgar Atheling,

and he is in London with Edwin and Morcar,

and they come with the crucial thing - military force.

So William needs to get himself to London,

and he needs to get the support of a bishop,

so that he can get himself crowned. Ideally, an archbishop. Hmm.

How is William going to hold the land in Kent and Sussex

that he's already gained control over,

once he sets off to London?

So, part of that is through the castles that he builds.

They're quick wooden castles, put up, really, just to secure

the area as a place of fortification and defence for his men.

And they are a way of holding power over the local area,

because you have your garrison, your troops, positioned there,

in order to perhaps fight off any disturbances that arise.

What was in store for the local people living in Kent and Sussex?

Yeah, I think it must have been a really terrifying time for them.

They must have seen William's troops committing atrocities around them -

burning houses, taking crops, livestock.

There's also the reinforcements that William calls from Normandy,

who come to another part of the south coast,

possibly around Chichester.

Those communities en route are clearly having houses burnt,

there's pillaging of supplies and livestock

in order to feed the army as they go.

There's a picture on the Bayeux Tapestry

that, actually, we can have a little look at.

A mother and child fleeing from a burning building.

Oh...

It says "hic domus incenditur" -

"here, this building is being burnt".

So this is probably depicting the scenes at Pevensey or Hastings.

The torch is setting alight to the roof,

where you can see the flames rising.

And this poor little boy,

I think he's got his mouth open,

because he's crying his eyes out.

He's being led away by his... Do you think that's his mother?

She's saying, "Come on, get out of here!" Yeah. "It's really dangerous!"

And I think it's a really moving scene.

It's clearly showing us... Refugees. Yeah, refugees.

The women and children who lost their homes

as part of this conquest.

I can understand why the Normans took the food,

but I can't understand why they burnt the houses.

Was there also just an element of pure intimidation in doing that

and destroying the homes of people, do you think?

I think there must have been, and I think William needs to use

this kind of intimidating factor

in order to remove pockets of resistance,

and also, as a warning to other communities and a clear statement

that William means business,

that William is not going to go lightly,

if there is opposition, he's going to go in all guns blazing.

What was meant to be a quick operation

was becoming a brutal campaign of intimidation.

And these castles were key.

They were a way of crushing local resistance

and securing a strong supply line from Normandy.

So, this is a map

of South East England.

It's not a brilliant map, but you get the idea.

You'll recognise it a bit better

when I put in France and Normandy.

And this is the Channel.

And William landed pretty close to here,

and quickly built a castle

at Pevensey, where I am right now.

It was just over there.

Quite quickly, another castle

sprang up at Hastings,

and then one at Dover,

just along the coast there.

But where he really wanted to be

was over here,

at London.

London was the political heart

of Anglo-Saxon England,

but getting there wasn't

as simple as it looked.

With Edwin and Morcar in London,

William realised a direct assault

from the south was too difficult,

so he marched west,

devastating the land as he went.

LOUD RUMBLING

He secured the strategic crossing

of the Thames at Wallingford

and advanced to Berkhamsted.

This was where he waited

for the Anglo-Saxon earls,

Edgar and other leaders.

At this point, Edwin and Morcar realised they'd been outmanoeuvred.

William promised leniency and protection

to those who submitted immediately...

..so they surrendered and bent the knee...

..for now.

William finally marched on London in December, 1066.

He was crowned William, King of the English, on Christmas Day.

He then set about building his most notorious castle,

the Tower of London.

But William only controlled the South East.

None of this made the whole of England his.

I want to examine William's next move,

and it wasn't a military one.

There's something that's nearly a thousand years old,

and I'm so eager to see it.

It's a world-famous treasure

and it lives in a super-secure vault.

It's...the Domesday Book.

The Domesday Book was compiled

later in William's reign,

but I think it might reveal

his political strategy after 1066.

I'm about to see the most precious document...

..in the National Archives

that I think means it's the most precious document in British history,

and it's just in here.

SHE GASPS

Oh, yes!

SHE LAUGHS

There it is!

It's amazing to see it.

Not in a case!

If it ever comes out of this strongroom,

it would be displayed with

high security.

The real thing.

This is the volume of what's called Great Domesday.

It's made up of more than 800 pages,

handwritten by just one scribe.

I think a lot of people will have heard of the Domesday Book

without being aware of what's actually in it,

and seeing it laid out like this in the columns

is making me realise that it's basically a spreadsheet,

detailing who owns all the land.

It's a survey of nearly every town and manor in England,

down to the last peasant,

plough and goat.

And the reason for doing this?

Money.

William wanted to know how much tax

he could get out of his new country.

But the book also reveals something more sinister.

I asked if I could see the entry for Grimsby, the town my dad's from.

Now, at this point,

my Medieval Latin is letting me down,

so I'm going to get a bit of help

from the translation copy

I've got here.

There is land for four-and-a-half ploughs.

There is a church and a priest.

There's a mill that produces four shillings...

..and a ferry that renders five shillings.

And before the Conquest,

it was owned by an Anglo-Saxon lady

called Eadgifu.

After the Conquest, it's owned

by...a man called Richard.

That's a Norman name.

So it's gone from an Anglo-Saxon lady to a Norman man.

And this incredible detail is replicated throughout the whole book.

There are 13,000 settlements,

from little villages to towns,

and in each case, the story is the same -

the transfer of ownership from the Anglo-Saxons to the Normans.

So it looks like William's confiscating people's land

for at least a decade after 1066.

At first, some of the English had been able to keep their property

by acknowledging William as King,

but by 1086, the majority of

Anglo-Saxons were disinherited.

"Domesday" means "the Day of Judgment".

There's no arguing with this book.

This is the last word in Norman power.

William's brutal tactics are now becoming clearer to me.

Firstly, there was the military victory at Hastings,

then there was the building of castles

to keep people under control,

and now, by seizing Anglo-Saxon property and assets,

William was further reducing their ability to resist.

The Domesday Book is more evidence of a conquest taking shape.

But you can't conquer a country with hard power alone.

As well as subjugating people,

you also have to win

hearts and minds.

What's known as "soft power".

I'm meeting a specialist in medieval women's history.

She's unearthed a source that reveals how the Normans used this power

in ordinary daily life.

Do you think it's possible that when William was looking at

the future "management" of the country of England,

he saw marriage, intermarriage, as something that would

be a tool at his disposal?

I think he certainly, at the start of the Conquest, had that plan,

but from the first, say, ten,

15 years after the Conquest,

we don't have that many. And the reason for that is, we think,

that the women were obviously very reluctant

to be used as pawns in this game of the Conquest.

From an English woman's perspective,

if your parents had to arrange a marriage for you,

you would rather be married, presumably, to an Englishman

than to one of these bullies

who came from the other side of the Channel

because, you know, you couldn't be sure that you would be safe.

What did the Anglo-Saxon women who were in that position

feel about it? What did they do?

They obviously were very anxious about this,

and some of them took matters in their own hands. And... Ooh!

..I have here this absolutely fascinating piece of evidence,

which is a 12th-century manuscript.

And interestingly, the text refers to women

taking refuge in monasteries.

It refers to those women who not out of love for the religion,

"non amore religione..." Yes. "..set timor francigenaro..."

That's... ..but out of fear from the French... Fear!

Fear of the French! ..have taken refuge in these institutions.

So these poor women going to the nunneries,

they were feeling vulnerable sexually, you know,

in the immediate physical sense... Mm.

..and also, perhaps vulnerable, if they own land,

to being sucked into marriages, so that the Normans would be

taking their land off them. Absolutely.

It's really hard to hear the voices of women

in the whole story of the Norman Conquest,

but here, we've got a little echo, and it's...it's a chilling echo.

You're absolutely right.

That is what this very important document shows us,

um, and it's not generally known.

The Norman Conquest is not only a story about soldiers and battles,

but it is about mothers and sisters and wives.

It's so distressing to think of these Anglo-Saxon women

hiding themselves away, out of fear of being forced to marry

these Norman men.

They would have understood that marriage was part and parcel

of a wider strategy of conquest.

Anglo-Norman marriages would lead to Anglo-Norman children,

which would mean that the Normans' claims to the lands they'd taken

would be legitimised, forever.

William tried this soft-power approach in his own court.

In 1067, he brought Edwin and Morcar home with him to Normandy

and promised Edwin a marriage to his daughter.

It was a strategy of

"keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."

Outwardly, they were guests,

but in truth, they were hostages.

William wanted a trouble-free takeover of England,

but the Anglo-Saxons were still mobilising.

That same year, a revolt began

in the Welsh borders...

..and Exeter, in the South West,

rose up, forcing William

to besiege the city for 18 days.

In the end, Exeter surrendered,

allowing William to build a castle

in the city and consolidate his hold

over the West Country.

The farther you ventured from the centre of William's power in London,

the more the insurrection intensified.

In 1068, sensing it was now or never,

Edwin and Morcar escaped William's court

and raised rebellion in the Midlands.

William suppressed this, but by now,

the flames of revolt were spreading northward.

Morcar and a growing gang of other English nobles

started plotting another rebellion against William.

One of the English Chronicles tells us that they were motivated

by hatred of William for the injustice and the tyranny

he inflicted upon the English.

I know that the Northerners mounted a much tougher

and more prolonged resistance against William,

but what was it about their rebellion

that made it so difficult to extinguish?

Hello. Hi, Lucy.

You'll be Katherine! Yes.

I'm meeting a cultural historian in a village that Morcar used to own -

Middleton - which, in the 1060s,

was in his earldom of Northumbria.

There's an ancient sculpture here

that she wants to show me.

Gosh, look at these!

They're amazing.

The shape of the cross is such a potent symbol

of kind of mystic power.

So this is a grave marker,

or some sort of commemorative monument for the person

depicted on the front. Who is this

little person with the pointed hat?

Look at that!

SHE CHUCKLES

It might look cute, but he's meant to look quite terrifying, I think,

because if you look closely, you can see that he is

dressed in military gear.

He's surrounded by weaponry.

So I think that this is somebody who might have been a Viking.

Is that his sword I can see there? There's his sword,

and shield, here. And he's got

a kind of a chopper, here?

So that's his axe.

We can see he's got a knife as well

that's slung up to his belt.

We can see somebody who comes from

a military background. Power

and strength are shown through military imagery.

He has settled here, and he is now the Lord of the local area.

Katherine, what was our

Viking warrior doing here,

in this part of England? Well,

we often think of Vikings as raiders,

but from the middle of the ninth century,

they came to England in much larger armies.

And did they settle down? Yes,

they conquered and settled the lands.

So if we think about it,

in 1066, there had been 200 years of Scandinavian influence

in the North of England,

and so we can see - from lots of different kinds of evidence -

that they grew together and became one community.

So some of the words that we still use today come from Old Norse.

A nice example is "window". Window? It means "wind eye".

"Husband" is another one. That comes from the Old Norse "husbondi",

which is sort of the master of the household.

And one that is quite well known and really frequent

is place names that end in "by", which means, really, "a farmstead".

So we can think of Whitby, for example,

or Selby, near York. Grimsby.

So Grimsby is the farm of Mr Grim, from Scandinavia? Yes.

And we even see this in, like, small landscape features as well,

like a "beck" or a "fell" or a "dale" -

these all come from Old Norse.

So is it fair to say, then,

that when the Normans arrived in England,

this area of the North, Yorkshire and so on,

it had its own quite distinctive culture?

Yeah, I think that's definitely fair to say.

I'm getting the impression, Katherine, then,

that these people would have been particularly not keen on

the Normans coming in and taking over. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I think that's true.

I wonder if William the Conqueror knew what he was getting into

when he tried to subdue these folk up here.

Hmm...

So, I've learnt that the people who lived in Northumbria

had a different centre of gravity.

It wasn't London, down South,

it was Scandinavia.

The region had its own separate identity.

And the English rulers before 1066 kind of went along with that.

They were happy to have a hands-off relationship with the North.

But when William, Duke of Normandy, came along,

he intended to change all that.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

the King was informed that the people in the North

had gathered together and planned to make

a stand against him if he came near.

In 1068, William marched -

first, to Mercia,

where he suppressed all revolts,

and then on to York,

where he built a castle.

Then he installed one of his Norman

enforcers as Earl of Northumbria.

But his control was illusory.

In January 1069,

the Northumbrians killed William's Norman Earl in Durham

and marched to York.

Then they brought in Danish reinforcements.

In September, these combined forces

stormed York...

..and torched William's

two Norman castles there.

Almost all of the Norman garrison were slaughtered.

They then proclaimed Edgar Atheling

as the true King of the English.

William now faced a serious challenge

to his conquest of England.

He was on the back foot!

Was this the moment to go hard or go home?

I want to know how William's going to respond,

so I'm going to turn to one of the key, key sources for the period.

This is the work of a monk called Orderic Vitalis.

He was one of these Anglo-Normans -

he had an English mum and a French dad -

and these pages are from his most famous book,

the Historia Ecclesiastica.

The bit I want is about York,

so I'm looking in the Latin text for "Eboracum",

which is here!

That's what I want to read.

But for ease of reading, let's go over to the translation.

"They approached York

"looking for rebels.

"The King..." - that's William himself -

"..cut down many in his vengeance,

"destroyed the lairs of others,

"harried the land,

"and burned homes to ashes.

"Nowhere else had William

"shown such cruelty."

So this is William's vengeance,

his punishment upon the North for having rebelled.

And this word "harried" is very significant.

It means to lay waste, to devastate.

And in this context,

it forms part of one of the most resonant phrases in British history,

"The Harrying of the North."

But these are just words on a page.

I wonder what it was like

to experience harrying as a weapon of war.

I've come to York Castle

to meet a senior curator at Yorkshire Museum...

Hi. Nice to meet you, Lucy.

..who has some unusual archaeological evidence.

Why did you suggest that we meet here, at the top of the tower?

Well, the tower is perhaps the best example

of William the Conqueror's attempt to pacify York

and across the region, really.

This building, the motte underneath it,

was built in 1068 for William to try and control

this unruly part of the country.

So this is perhaps the best symbol

of the Harrying of the North still standing.

Rebellious people in Yorkshire, right? I mean,

hard to believe, right?

But, yes, Yorkshire and most of the North is in open rebellion

against William for most of the late 1060s.

And what have you brought here? They look very precious.

I have brought you three coins,

which are the protagonists of 1066.

On the left here, you have Edward the Confessor.

So his death, in early 1066, sparks

all of the events that happen later.

If I do that,

hopefully, you get a good chance... Oh, I can see his little face,

yes. And is he wearing a crown, Andy? He is wearing a crown.

So he's looking off to the right... Yes. ..with a sort of pointy nose,

and he's wearing this rather elaborate crown

and holding the sceptre, so the symbols of state.

OK. So that's the ruler before

the Battle of Hastings. It is.

What have you... What are

the other ones that you've got? Sure.

This is Harold Godwinson.

Now, a slightly less clear portrait,

but hopefully, you can see he's looking the other way. He's looking

the other way, isn't he? He's got quite chubby cheeks, has Harold.

He has. Is that really rare? Yeah.

We only have two of Harold Godwinson.

We don't often bring this one out, so I'm pleased to be able

to share it with you today, actually. Oh, what a treat!

So who's this one?

Now you're face-to-face with the man himself -

William, Duke of Normandy.

I have to say, I feel intimidated

by being face-to-face with William, Duke of Normandy.

I think he's made a very clever choice, there,

to be looking right at me.

I find him more scary than Harold,

for that reason alone.

Maybe because I know about the Harrying of the North

and what he did, I'm extrapolating here,

but I just don't like the look in his eyes.

So, did all of these three coins

belong to the same person? No.

So these are from different hoards.

So we get groups of coins buried in the ground,

and we call them a "hoard". And why would they

be burying their coins in the ground?

In a world before banks, you buried your money in times of challenge,

times of crisis, and you come back and dig it up

when the crisis blows over. But the crucial question, in some ways, is,

"Why didn't they come and dig them back up again?"

And I guess if you're in York in 1068 or '69,

you know there's an army coming towards you,

you bury your wealth, you might escape town,

and you might not ever be able to come and dig it back up again.

Gosh, that's horrifying to think of

people in fear and panic, thinking,

"The Normans are coming". And the people who buried these little coins

never came back to get them. Yeah, in some ways,

the evidence of the coins, particularly the hoards from York,

are some of the best archaeological evidence we actually have

for the Harrying of the North and its effect upon the people.

There are more coin hoards buried within the city walls of York

than there are across the whole of Southern England at the same time.

The reason these were buried in the ground,

the reason that we're looking at them today,

is all because the person who had them

was probably terrified of the arrival of the Norman army

and may have lost their life to it.

In times of conflict,

international alliances are forged and broken.

In late 1069, William bought off the Danish allies

who'd come to the aid of the Northerners.

He then took back the city of York.

On Christmas Day, exactly three years after his coronation,

he paraded through the ruins of York Cathedral.

But William didn't want the Northerners

to be able to use any of their lands to raise another army against him.

He ordered the systematic

destruction of villages, homes,

livestock and crops in all the land

north of the Humber River.

I'm going to one of the places

that experienced William's wrath -

Levisham, in the Yorkshire Moors -

to see if I can glimpse the human impact of this.

I'd like to see what these different chronicles have to say.

Here's my friend, Orderic Vitalis.

Oh...

But he says that, "In his anger, he..." -

that's William -

"..commanded that all the crops and food be burnt to ashes,

"so that there was no food left

"in the whole of the region..." -

"regione" -

"..beyond..." - "trans" -

"..the River Humber" - "Umbrana."

My goodness! And he says that

100,000 people died in a famine.

This chronicle's by another monk, Symeon of Durham,

and he says people were so desperate for food

that they ate the flesh of

"horses and dogs and humans".

And this chronicle is from the Abbey of Evesham,

which is in Worcestershire,

so that's not in the North at all.

But they were getting refugees

from up here, from Yorkshire,

and some of these refugees

were so famished that when the monks

gave them food - "cibum" -

they ate it so ravenously

that their bodies couldn't handle it, and they died.

I really feel that William has got blood on his hands for this.

William had obliterated the rebellion in the North,

but he'd also engineered a famine.

Inflicting violence like this on people leaves a legacy,

as I think the Domesday Book

might be able to show us.

This page covers "Jorvikshire" -

or Yorkshire, the biggest county in the North,

one that was right in the firing line.

And I'm going to pick out this little place here,

within Yorkshire, called Asselby.

Before the Conquest,

it was worth ten shillings

and eight pence. But now,

after the Conquest, it's worth nothing.

Nothing at all. And that's because

it's in "waste".

It's been laid waste to. And now

I've spotted that tiny word, "waste",

it's catching my eye.

I can see it's coming up again and again.

This place, and this place,

and this one too.

It's like Yorkshire's been wiped off the face of the Earth.

At first sight, you think that this book is about accountancy

and taxation, but actually, there's also a story here

about a huge amount of destruction and human suffering.

The Harrying of the North marked

the end of Edwin and Morcar's power.

Morcar and other die-hard rebels

joined the last desperate resistance to the Normans

at Ely, in Cambridgeshire...

..but it was quashed.

As far as we know, it was in a Norman prison that he died.

As for his brother, Edwin,

he was ultimately betrayed by fellow Englishmen.

They took his head to William himself,

as a tribute to the Conqueror's power.

For some, the Harrying of the North

was a step too far, even by medieval standards,

and many of William's supporters now turned on him.

Here's the monk Orderic Vitalis once again.

Now, Orderic's generally on William's side,

but not when it comes to the Harrying of the North.

Where are my notes from the translation?

Here we are. He says,

"But for this act, which condemned innocent and guilty alike to die

"by slow starvation,

"I cannot commend him.

"Such brutal slaughter

"cannot remain unpunished."

In the 1070s, the concept of war crimes,

as we understand them, obviously didn't exist...

..but there were early codes of conduct

that guided how wars should be fought

and how soldiers should make amends.

This giant book

is from the 17th century,

but it's got in it a record of a much older document

that was drawn up by Norman bishops

just after the Battle of Hastings, around 1067.

It's a list of penances for those

who kill "in bello" -

in war. A penance is

kind of like a punishment.

It's either praying, or giving alms, or fasting.

And this is what you have to do if you've committed different sins.

This is if you kill somebody in the "magno praelio" -

which is the "great battle", the Battle of Hastings -

you have to do one year.

But this is interesting.

If you fought in that battle as an archer,

as a "sagittariis",

then you might be ignorant

of how many people you'd killed

with your arrows, so your penance

was less - just a matter of months.

So there is some kind of a moral code

that exists in Norman heads.

Well, this next one's interesting.

If you killed somebody

for "praedandi" -

so that's "loot" or "for plunder" -

then you got the worst punishment of all.

You had to do three years of penance -

"tres annos".

It's fascinating.

It's like looking inside the minds of the Norman bishops

who drew up this list of penances.

You get an insight into what they thought was acceptable,

what was good, what was bad.

This code of conduct, explaining how to atone for the atrocities of war,

was written before

the Harrying of the North,

so did William violate the expected standards of behaviour?

I want to get the opinion of someone who's studied

the morality of warfare.

Shami, you're looking there at the list of penances.

What do you make of it?

Um, firstly, we see that rape,

as a weapon of war, and something

that's prevalent in military conflicts...

Is there. ..it's there, and it's singled out.

And we see, I think, very importantly,

the idea that those who commit rape -

or, in this case, fornication and adultery -

should be penitent as if according to

the laws of their own country.

What that means for me is that these human lives in England

are to count like the lives you left behind in Normandy.

That distinction is something that we debate

even in the world today.

It's extraordinary to find it that early, to...

I-I did not expect that.

I can see that the Normans are distinguishing between

crimes that they were committing before the official

Conquest of England -

so when they were dealing with enemies, pure and simple -

and when they were carrying out violence against subjects,

the people that they had conquered.

I think it is significant that

in Article Nine of this list, you see something

that is legitimate in war before

the King has asserted his authority

becomes more like murder thereafter.

So, through the lens of human rights,

once you are in control,

even you, as King, and your armies and authorities

have to be subject to harsher tests.

It seems to me that the Harrying of the North is particularly

blameworthy because it falls short of the standards that William

has set himself and his army in his list of punishments here.

This is very important. Um,

the document talks about rape,

it talks about slaying people and so on.

It doesn't talk about things like forced destitution,

displacement, enslavement, starvation.

And pre-1066, to be fair,

the life of a lot of Anglo-Saxons probably involved

starvation and enslavement, and so on.

And I think it really is in the post-World War II world

that we understand that starvation, in particular,

can be a weapon of war.

Today, we certainly think that this kind of collective punishment

and, erm, treatment of civilian populations

is wrong, is a war crime.

Do you think that looking at a list of 11th-century war crimes

can help us to understand the world we live in today?

There are all sorts of contemporary conflicts, erm,

that trigger similar moral, legal,

even religious debates.

There was a period in the 20th century when we thought that

medieval-style war was over

and, yet, that is no longer the case.

And therefore, conflicts like this one, in the 1000s,

seem perhaps more relevant a quarter of the way into the 21st century

than they did even 100 years ago.

Horribly true.

It's become clear to me

that William destroyed the North

because he'd failed politically.

Having utterly alienated the Anglo-Saxons,

he could only rule through violence.

The Harrying of the North didn't completely extinguish resistance.

William would face further invasion threats from the Danes.

But by 1071,

he was the Conqueror of England.

Even today, we still feel the impact

of how the Normans took over England.

We see it in our landscape, our laws,

and even in our names.

This is from the biography of

a Norman celebrity -

a famous hermit, actually -

but he started out in life as a little boy in Yorkshire -

one of the bits of Yorkshire that had a very strong Viking influence,

one of the parts that had been Harried by the Normans, actually -

and the little boy's name was Tostig.

You pronounce it "Tosty", and that's a very Anglo-Saxon,

Scandinavian-sounding name.

So, what happened to Tostig?

My notes from the translation will tell me.

"When his youthful companions

"mocked the name Tostig," Tosty,

his parents decided to change it.

And what did they change it to?

Well, the very Norman name

of William.

It's just a tiny little detail, isn't it, about a little boy?

But I think it speaks volumes.

If the Normans hadn't broken

Yorkshire and Northumbria,

it's possible that the language and culture of Northern England

would be even more distinctive than it still is from the South.

William's Conquest meant

the North would no longer look

instinctively across

the North Sea to Scandinavia.

Now, it would look south,

and be part of a more tightly-controlled England,

bound to Normandy for centuries.

Before I started investigating the Norman Conquest,

I think I'd assumed it was straightforward,

almost inevitable,

but I've come to realise just how difficult it was

for William to do it, and the human cost.

Now, England was invaded before the Normans came along,

but never successfully afterwards.

Perhaps that's William's legacy.

Next time:

Did England's first ruling Queen

really deserve to be remembered

as a bloody tyrant?

I wouldn't describe him as a historian.

I would call him a propagandist.