1066 in an Hour by Kaye Jones

Author:Kaye Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

A Conquered People

Thus the hand of the Lord brought to pass the change which a remarkable comet had foreshadowed in the beginning of the same year.

Henry of Huntingdon

Initially King William adopted a conciliatory policy towards the English; he intended to rule with their cooperation. Within a year, however, William had abandoned this policy in the face of growing native resistance. The first rebellion occurred in the south-east where a group of Englishmen allied with the Norman, Eustace of Boulogne, and tried to seize the town of Dover. The rebellion was easily put down, along with a further skirmish in the south-west a year later.

The rebellion of 1069 posed a much more serious threat to the king and had to be stamped out with sheer brutality. Spurred on by hatred of the Normans, the northern earls – Edwin, Morcar and Waltheof – joined forces with the Danes and Scots to replace William with Edgar the Aetheling. They laid waste to the Durham garrison and moved south to take the city of York. William was so furious that he personally led the march north to put down the rebellion.

With the element of surprise on his side, William easily defeated the rebels in Mercia and Yorkshire, and the Danes quickly withdrew. To ensure that an uprising of this scale never occurred again, William ordered the systematic destruction and ruin of Yorkshire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Shropshire in an attack known as the Harrying of the North. The English had never witnessed such brutality.

Despite such chaos and bloodshed, the last stand was yet to come. In 1071, the troublesome earls, Edwin and Morcar, rebelled once again. This time, Edwin was killed but Morcar was able to escape to the Fens of East Anglia and allied himself with the infamous rebel, Hereward the Wake. It was only with the help of the local monks in locating the rebels that William was able to crush the uprising and restore royal authority. Hereward was able to escape but Earl Morcar spent the rest of William’s reign in prison. During the 1070s there were further outbreaks of rebellion but they posed no serious threat to William’s security.

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