Queen of the Conqueror: The Life of Matilda, Wife of William I by Tracy Joanne Borman

Author:Tracy Joanne Borman [Borman, Tracy Joanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Medieval
ISBN: 9780553908251
Google: uS0rehvYeoAC
Amazon: B005OCYQZ4
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2012-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

It seems the royal family overestimated the healing effects of Henry’s birth on the Saxon population. At the end of 1068, they felt their monarchy secure enough to return to Normandy to celebrate Christmas, where they no doubt enjoyed the traditional festivities at court.

But William had misjudged the situation. The imposing fortresses he had erected across the country had become a target for rebellion, and within a few short weeks, fresh trouble had broken out. Edgar the Aetheling, who had been steadily building support from his base in Scotland, headed south to Northumbria and led a huge uprising. His intention was to seize the throne from William and thus reestablish the Anglo-Saxon monarchy. His cause attracted large numbers of men hostile to the Norman regime, and in February 1069 the rebels won a major victory by taking the city of York in William’s absence.

William had no choice but to set sail for his new kingdom once more. He left Matilda behind, presumably as regent—her position being that much higher than that of her son Robert, who had guarded the kingdom in his parents’ absence. By April 1069, he had succeeded in retaking York. Any conciliatory feelings toward the English that this victory, together with the birth of his fourth male heir, might have inspired were soon forgotten. Outraged, the king exacted a terrible revenge. Throughout 1069 and well into the following year, he launched a series of blistering attacks on a vast swath of territory stretching from the Humber to the Tees. During this “Harrying of the North,” his forces showed no mercy as they razed villages, destroyed crops and livestock, and slaughtered thousands of men and women—innocent and guilty alike. Over a period of two years, thousands more—one account estimates as many as a hundred thousand—died of starvation after their food stores had been laid to waste.13 As Malmesbury observed: “the citizens perished by famine or sword.”14 According to Orderic, the severity of the attack was such that William himself later repented of it: “In mad fury I descended on the English of the north 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. So I chastised a great multitude of men and women with the lash of starvation and, alas! was the cruel murderer of many thousands, both young and old, of this fair people.”15

Even by William’s standards, this was ruthlessness on an unprecedented scale. It appalled contemporaries and alienated many who had previously been sympathetic to the Norman cause. The horror of it was still raw when Orderic Vitalis wrote his account forty years later:

He [William] 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 … My narrative has frequently had occasion to praise William, but for this act which condemned the innocent and guilty alike to die by slow starvation I cannot commend him.

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