The Norman Conquest (38 page)

William was almost certainly back in England by this date, for once again he arrived on the scene with a suddenness that left the rebels reeling. ‘Swift was the king’s coming’, says Orderic, while the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle confirms that the Conqueror came upon his enemies ‘by surprise, with an overwhelming army’. Many were captured, says Orderic, and more were killed, while the rest were put to flight. The Chronicle speaks of the whole city of York being ravaged, and York Minster being made ‘an object of scorn’.
Mærleswein and Gospatric evidently managed to escape, though where they fled to is unclear. Edgar Ætheling, we are told, returned to Scotland. The king, says Orderic, remained in York for a further eight days, during which time a second castle was constructed. (The surviving earthworks can still be seen on the west bank of the River Ouse.) Finally, as a further mark of his seriousness, he committed the city to the custody of William fitz Osbern, before returning south to Winchester in time to celebrate Easter on 13 April.
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William was clearly under no illusion that the rebellion was over. After his return south the castles at York were subjected to a renewed attack, which fitz Osbern and his men managed to beat off, but which suggests that the rebels had not retreated very far; north of York the Normans can have exercised almost no meaningful authority at all. According to Simeon of Durham, the king at some point sent ‘a certain duke with an army’ into Northumbria to exact revenge for the death of Robert Cumin, but when these men reached Northallerton they found themselves surrounded by a fog so dense that they could hardly see each other. An unnamed individual subsequently appeared and explained to them that Durham was protected by a powerful saint, and no one could harm its citizens with impunity, at which point they decided to return home. The story is obviously suspect (note the total lack of names and dates) and clearly intended to demonstrate nothing apart from the awesome power of St Cuthbert. If it has any basis in truth, however, it also demonstrates that the Normans were learning to approach northern England with greater caution.
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Surrounded by the storms of war on all sides, according to Orderic, William himself was taking no unnecessary risks. At some point after his return south the king sent his wife back to Normandy, ‘away from English tumults’. These included the return of the sons of King Harold, who sailed from Ireland at midsummer 1069 and landed on the north Devon coast near Barnstaple. Their second coming may well have been more serious than their first: even the laconic William of Jumièges, writing in Normandy, devotes several lines to describing it, and his sixty-six-ship fleet accords well with the sixty-four ships reported by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. As before, the Godwine boys were defeated – beaten in battle by Brian, the local Breton count – but not without the shedding of much blood on both sides: Jumièges puts the death toll at 1,700 men,
‘some of whom were magnates of the realm’. The Godwines themselves escaped back to their ships and returned to Ireland, and it may have been at this point that their grandmother, the indomitable Gytha, left her fastness on Flat Holm and sailed to Flanders.
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If in retrospect the Godwine family seem such a spent force, that was not necessarily the way it appeared to the Conqueror in the summer of 1069. William might well have been alarmed to discover that Gytha, after a short stay in Flanders, had sailed on to Denmark. Almost from the minute of his coronation, Englishmen had been sending messages across the sea, attempting to solicit aid from the Danish king, Swein Estrithson. Prior to this point, Swein had shown little enthusiasm for adventures in England; in the early months of 1066 he had apparently turned down similar invitations from Earl Tostig. In the wake of the Norman victory, however, he had started to display a keener interest. According to Orderic, clearly following William of Poitiers, this was partly because the Danish king had sent some troops to help Harold at Hastings, whose deaths he now wished to avenge. Both aspects of this story seem highly unlikely. What is altogether more probable is that, as time wore on, Swein became increasingly convinced that an invasion of England would have a fair chance of success. By 1069, anyone could see that Norman rule, especially in the north of England, was hugely unpopular, and besides, it was a region with strong historical and cultural ties to Scandinavia. The English envoys can have had little difficulty in convincing Swein that if he invaded he would be able to draw upon a huge groundswell of support.
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And so, throughout the summer of 1069, the Danish king started to assemble a great invasion force, just as the duke of Normandy had done three years earlier. ‘He strained all the resources of his kingdom’, says Orderic, ‘as well as amassing numerous troops from neighbouring regions which were friendly towards him: Poland, Frisia and Saxony all helped.’ It was probably also at this point that Swein took another leaf out of William’s book and started putting it about that he had been promised the English throne many years earlier by Edward the Confessor: the historian Adam of Bremen, who visited the Danish king around this time, credulously included the claim in his chronicle, to be followed by other historians down to the present.
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It was late in the summer when the Danish fleet finally sailed:
the E Chronicle says they arrived between the two feasts of St Mary, 15 August and 8 September. Orderic, doubtless following the upbeat assessment of Poitiers, gives the impression that they were successfully driven off from Dover, Sandwich, Ipswich and Norwich. This seems unlikely, since the Danish fleet was reportedly huge (the D and E versions of the Chronicle give figures of 240 and 300 ships). What the Danes were doing was following the route of Viking fleets of old, raiding their way up England’s eastern seaboard as a prelude to invasion. When they reached the estuary of the Humber they were joined by their English allies, led, as ever, by Mærleswein, Gospatric and Edgar Ætheling. Quite how Edgar’s aspirations were going to be reconciled with those of the Danish king is unclear, but the problem may have been shelved in the short term because Swein had elected not to take part in his own conquest, and had given command of the Danish fleet to his brother, Asbjorn. Whatever the plan was, nothing was allowed to dampen the mood in the English camp, which was clearly euphoric. The D Chronicle describes how the rebel leaders set out ‘with all the Northumbrians and all the people, riding and marching with an immense host, rejoicing exceedingly’. The days of Norman rule in England appeared to be numbered.
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William, says Orderic, was hunting in the Forest of Dean when he first heard news of the Danes’ arrival. Their decision to raid the east coast gave him sufficient time to send messengers to York, warning his men to be prepared and instructing them to send for him if necessary. Surprisingly, given the circumstances, the garrisons of York replied confidently that they could hold out without help for a year. Elsewhere the news caused greater dismay. Ealdred, the city’s elderly archbishop, reportedly became so distressed on learning of the Danish invasion that he fell ill, and died on 11 September.
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A week or so later – perhaps having ascertained the size of the approaching army—York’s Norman defenders appear to have become rather more desperate. According to John of Worcester, who provides the fullest account, on Saturday 19 September they began setting fire to the houses that stood adjacent to the castle, fearing that their timbers could be used to bridge its defensive ditch. Inevitably the blaze ran out of control, and soon the whole city (including York Minster) was alight. Two days later, with the fires still burning, the Anglo-Danish army arrived. In desperation the garrison sallied out
of the castle to engage them, but were quickly overwhelmed. More than 3,000 Normans were killed, says John of Worcester, and only a few, such as the sheriff of York and his family, were spared and taken prisoner. Having destroyed the two castles and plundered the rest of the city, the Danes then returned to their ships.
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News would have reached southern England within a matter of days. ‘Rumour exaggerated the fearful numbers of the enemy’, says Orderic, ‘who were said to be confidently awaiting battle with the king himself’. This last report, however, proved to be false. When William, ‘filled with sorrow and anger’, in due course raised an army and set out to confront the Danes, he discovered that they had abandoned York altogether, and had crossed to the other side of the Humber. They were now camped in Lincolnshire, holed up in the marshy and inaccessible region known as the Isle of Axholme. Whatever the Danish strategy was, seeking battle clearly formed no part of it.

According to Orderic, the king set about flushing his enemies out from their hiding places, putting some to the sword and forcing others to flee. Yet no sooner had he embarked on this course of action than news arrived of rebellions in other parts of the kingdom. The castle of Montacute, close to Yeovil on the Dorset—Somerset border, was being attacked by the men of both counties; meanwhile Exeter was similarly being besieged by the men of Devon and Cornwall. More serious than either of these, it seems, was the situation in Shrewsbury, where the town’s new castle was subjected to a combined assault from the Welsh and the men of Chester, as well as the local population – Orderic mentions ‘the powerful and warlike Eadric the Wild and other untameable Englishmen’. All William’s enemies, it seems, were seizing the chance to shake off his lordship.

The seriousness of the rising in the west Midlands is suggested by the royal response, with the king detaching William fitz Osbern and Count Brian from his side and sending them west to suppress it. The western rebels, however, proved as elusive as their northern counterparts: at the approach of the king’s deputies they set fire to Shrewsbury and scattered, only to reassemble once the Normans had moved on to Exeter. In the end the Conqueror was obliged to deal with this insurrection in person, deputing the struggle on the Humber to his half-brother, Robert, and eventually defeating a large
force of rebels at Stafford. ‘In all these battles’, says Orderic, ‘much blood had flowed on both sides, and combatant and non-combatants alike were reduced to great wretchedness by the disturbances … Massacres of wretched people increased, souls were imperilled by the sins of envy and anger, and swept away to Hell in their thousands.’
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On his way back to Lincolnshire, William discovered that the Danes had again disappeared. ‘It was rumoured that these brigands had returned to York’, says Orderic, ‘to celebrate Christmas and prepare for battle.’ If the first reason seems rather unlikely (earlier we are told that the invaders still worshipped Wodin, Thor and Freya), it does at least remind us that many weeks had passed since the start of the invasion in August. Probably it was around mid-November that the king received this intelligence and turned his army northwards. More time was lost when they found that they could not cross the River Aire in Yorkshire, probably because the bridge they were expecting to use had been deliberately broken (this is the earliest reference to the town of ‘Ponte-fract’). Unwilling to build a new bridge lest they were attacked, it was not until three weeks later that the Normans finally found a place further upstream where the river could just about be forded, and even then they had to fight off defenders on the opposite bank. It must have been early December, having struggled through woods and marshes on account of their diversion, that they at last drew near to York – only to discover that the Danes had once again fled.
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By this point it must have been amply clear that, despite the persistent rumours, the Danes had absolutely no intention of meeting William in battle. At the same time, they seemed in no hurry to leave England either. So what were they up to? From subsequent events we can infer that their objective was probably to occupy northern England, creating a bridgehead in anticipation of the coming of King Swein himself the following year. One modern historian has argued that they had planned to remain in York but found that the fire had made the city indefensible; yet it was the Danes themselves, we are told, who had destroyed both the castles. The simplest solution is to look again at our sources. The Danish situation seems desperate in the pages of Orderic Vitalis, but then Orderic is almost certainly parroting the positive comments of William of Poitiers (in which enemies always flee, whereas Normans strategically withdraw).
Our other sources suggest that it was the Normans rather than the invaders who were experiencing the greater difficulty. The D Chronicle, for instance, says that the Danish fleet ‘lay all the winter in the Humber, where the king could not get at them’.
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William had been fighting a desperate campaign, dragged here and there across the country in pursuit of his enemies and still unable to defeat them. Orderic tells us that once the king had entered York he assigned men to begin rebuilding the castles. But would their garrisons hold out once he and his army withdrew? Twice before he had left his men in Yorkshire, only to have them massacred; this was his third visit to the north in less than eighteen months. Experience had taught him that as soon as he headed south, the rebels would simply re-emerge from their hiding places and retake the city. Meanwhile he could not get at the Danish fleet, and the Northumbrians, we are told, had also withdrawn to their homes.
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William’s solution was twofold. In the first place, he sent messengers to the Danes and offered them generous terms. According to John of Worcester, Earl Asbjorn was ‘secretly promised a large sum of money, and permission for his army to forage freely along the coasts, on condition that he would leave without fighting at the end of the winter’. Much to the chronicler’s disgust, the Danish commander, ‘exceedingly greedy for gold and silver’, agreed.
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