13

Insurrection

We have encountered the chronicler Orderic Vitalis on several earlier occasions. A monk at the Norman abbey of St Evroult, not far from the town of L’Aigle, Orderic began writing in the early twelfth century, but is a valuable source for events well before his own day. He is, for example, one of our best informants for the troubled years of William the Conqueror’s boyhood, because he possessed a keen ear for the stories told to him by local aristocrats about the deeds of their ancestors.¹ Similarly, his monumental Ecclesiastical History, despite its title, is one of our principal sources for the Norman Conquest of England – but for rather different reasons.

Although he had lived at St Evroult since his childhood, Orderic had not been born in Normandy. ‘I came here from the remote parts of Mercia as a ten-year-old English boy’, he explains at the start of his fifth book. More specifically, he came from Shropshire: as he goes on to tell us, he was born on 16 February 1075, baptized at St Eata’s Church in Atcham, and named after the local priest. At the age of five he was sent to learn his letters in Shrewsbury, before being packed off by his father to St Evroult five years later, ‘an ignorant stranger of another race’. This might seem a strange fate for a Shropshire lad so soon after the Conquest, but it is explained by the fact that his father was a Norman – a priest who had come to England in the wake of William’s victory. We infer that Orderic’s mother (whom he never mentions) must have been English, and it was from her that he derived his identity as an Englishman.²

The fact that he was the product of a mixed, Anglo-Norman marriage makes Orderic’s thoughts on the Norman Conquest doubly interesting. Like a lot of medieval writers, he copied freely from earlier sources, and his account of the Conquest draws heavily on that of William of Poitiers (it is, indeed, precisely because Orderic acknowledges this debt that we know anything about Poitiers’ own career).³ Sometimes he is content to copy more or less verbatim, losing a word here, inserting a sentence there. At other times he makes more substantial changes, and occasionally he makes it very clear that he has departed from his source material because he disapproves of its anti-English sentiment. On the eve of the Battle of Hastings, for example, Poitiers describes King Harold as ‘a man soiled with lasciviousness, a cruel murderer, resplendent with plundered riches, and an enemy of God and the just’. In Orderic’s version Harold becomes ‘a brave and valiant man, strong and handsome, pleasant in speech, and a good friend to his own followers’.⁴

Orderic is also uniquely valuable for the years immediately following the Conquest because, sadly, the end of William of Poitiers’ history is lost. We know, thanks to Orderic, that it originally covered the period up to the start of the year 1071, but the only copy that has come down to us breaks off mid-sentence in 1067. Part of the fun of reading Orderic, therefore, is trying to guess where he is copying Poitiers, where he might be adding new information gleaned from other sources, and where his sensibilities as an Englishman have been sufficiently affronted that he has been prompted to offer his own alternative version.

Consider, for instance, the different accounts offered by the two writers of events in England during William’s absence. As we have seen, before his return to Normandy, the newly crowned king had committed the government of England to Odo of Bayeux and William fitz Osbern, respectively based at Dover and Winchester. Shortly before his manuscript breaks off, William of Poitiers ceases his description of his master’s triumphal homecoming and resumes the story in England:

Meanwhile Odo, bishop of Bayeux, and William fitz Osbern were administering their prefectures in the kingdom … They burned with a common desire to keep the Christian people in peace, and deferred readily to each other’s advice. They paid the greatest respect to justice, as the king had admonished, so that fierce men and enemies might be corrected and brought into friendship. The lesser officials were equally zealous in the castles where each had been placed.

Orderic, confronted by this passage, replaced it with his own:

Meanwhile, the English were groaning under the Norman yoke, and suffering oppressions from the proud lords who ignored the king’s injunctions. The petty lords who were guarding the castles oppressed all the native inhabitants of high and low degree, and heaped shameful burdens on them. For Bishop Odo and William fitz Osbern, the king’s vicegerents, were so swollen with pride that they would not deign to hear the reasonable plea of the English or give them impartial judgement. When their men at arms were guilty of plunder and rape they protected them by force, and wreaked their wrath all the more violently upon those who complained of the cruel wrongs they suffered.⁵

Clearly, not much common ground. The only point on which Poitiers and Orderic seem to agree is that the newcomers were based in castles. The Normans, as we’ve seen, had started digging in from the moment of their arrival. We hear of new fortifications being established at Pevensey, Hastings, Dover, London and Winchester, and we can make a strong circumstantial case for supposing they were also begun at other places, such as Canterbury, Wallingford and Berkhamsted. What form these castles took is a matter of debate. As every schoolchild knows, the common-or-garden model in Norman England was the so-called ‘motte and bailey’ – a giant mound of earth to support a wooden tower, paired with a shallower but more extensive enclosure to house and protect the castle’s other buildings; around three-quarters of all known sites conform to this type. It could be that the Normans were establishing such castles from the first – the Bayeux Tapestry shows men erecting a motte at Hastings, and a motte can still be seen on the site today. But, then again, the Tapestry depicts every castle in this way, so it could be that drawing a motte was simply a convenient artistic shorthand. While there are surviving mottes at Canterbury, Wallingford and Berkhamsted, excavation has shown that the one at Winchester was added a few years after the Conquest, and at Pevensey, Dover and London there were evidently never any mottes at all. Construction on this scale would have required weeks running into months, so it may be that the very earliest Norman castles were simply enclosures (or ‘ringworks’ as they are often termed): the one on Castle Hill near Folkestone is a good example.⁶

Whatever form they took, the important point – quite obvious from the fact that the Normans felt obliged to build so many from the moment of their arrival – is that castles in England were a new phenomenon. England, for all the woes that it had suffered in the eleventh century, remained a strong, united kingdom. It had not experienced anything like the political fragmentation that had engulfed the principalities of western Europe. Its coinage, its courts and its laws were all part of a long-established royal monopoly, and so too were its fortifications – the burhs established by the conquering kings of Wessex in the tenth century. The private dwellings known as burhgeats, associated with thegnly status and claimed by some historians to be castles in all but name, were clearly nowhere near as strong and defensible as the true castles we find on the Continent.⁷ In England we do not read of rebellions based on fortresses, or find the king besieging his greater subjects in their own homes. When English magnates fall from grace they flee into foreign exile, and resist if they can by raising fleets.

The exception that proves the rule is a tiny handful of castles constructed in the years immediately prior to 1051 by some of the French friends of Edward the Confessor. One was apparently built at Clavering in Essex, and three others were built in Herefordshire as part of an attempt (quite unsuccessful) to keep the Welsh at bay. Their novelty is suitably underlined by the fact the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, describing the situation in Herefordshire in 1051, employs the earliest recorded example of the word ‘castle’ in English. The word, like the thing itself, was a foreign import. Beyond this there was nothing in England that could be meaningfully regarded as a castle. As Orderic Vitalis later put it in a justly famous passage, ‘the fortifications that the Normans called castles were scarcely known in the English provinces, and so the English – in spite of their courage and love of fighting – could put up only a weak resistance to their enemies’.⁸

Consequently, we sense the shock in the English sources when castles suddenly start appearing in large numbers. As in France, so too in England, their introduction went hand in hand with oppression. The foreigners who built the castle in Hereford, says the Chronicle, ‘inflicted all the injuries and insults they possibly could upon the king’s men in that region’. This may have been because the local population were forced to build them, or because their homes were demolished to make way for them, or simply because they served as bases for soldiers and knights who would ride out each day to cow the surrounding countryside into submission, indulging in the acts of plunder, rape and violence that Orderic Vitalis describes. Orderic’s account of the activities of the Conqueror’s regents during his absence in 1067 accords far better with our English sources than the panegyric of William of Poitiers. ‘Bishop Odo and Earl William were left behind here,’ groans the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and they built castles far and wide throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people, and things went ever from bad to worse. When God wills may the end be good!’⁹

Small wonder, then, that the English, as Orderic puts it, ‘plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed’.¹⁰ During the year 1067 we hear of several local risings by the English against their new castle-building overlords. In Herefordshire, one of the most powerful English thegns, the aptly named Eadric the Wild, fought back with some success against the new Norman garrisons installed in those original pre-Conquest castles. According to John of Worcester, they frequently devastated his lands, but whenever they attacked him they lost many of their knights and soldiers. At length, in mid-August, Eadric joined forces with two Welsh kings, Bleddyn and Rhiwallon, with whom he ravaged Herefordshire ‘up to the bridge of the River Lugg’, and ‘brought back great spoil.’¹¹

Around the same time, or perhaps a little later, a potentially more serious rebellion took place in the south-east. The men of Kent, either ‘because they hated the Normans’ (William of Poitiers) or ‘goaded by Norman oppression’ (Orderic Vitalis), sent emissaries across the Channel in an effort to persuade Eustace, count of Boulogne, to help them seize Dover Castle. This might seem a surprising appeal, given their relations in the not too distant past – it was Eustace’s attack on Dover in 1051 that had sparked the great crisis of that year, and the count had also fought for the Normans at Hastings: he is, indeed, one of the four individuals credited by the Carmen with the killing of King Harold. Yet his relations with Normandy were not as close or cordial as this might suggest: in 1053 Eustace had joined the rebellion that had tried to topple William and, when it failed, had been forced to surrender his son as a hostage. At some point in the first half of 1067 the two men had fallen out again, for reasons unknown; Orderic refers simply to jealousy between them, while Poitiers says only that, were he to go into details, he would easily convince us that William was in the right. Modern historians tend to assume, in lieu of any better explanation, that the count had been disappointed by the amount of land he had received as reward.

Whatever the reason for the rift, it predisposed Eustace to accept the Kentish offer: he assembled an invasion force and sailed across the Channel at night, intending to take Dover by surprise at dawn. His intelligence was seemingly good, because both Odo of Bayeux and the castle’s commander, Hugh de Montfort, were far away at the time, on the other side of the Thames, and had taken with them most of their troops. The men of Kent were already up in arms, says Poitiers, and would have been joined by rebels from other regions, had the siege lasted as long as two days; but Eustace and his English allies found Dover’s defenders to be more doughty than expected. Rather than wait for more attackers to assemble, the Norman garrison sallied out of the gates and put their foes to flight. Eustace himself, familiar with the terrain, managed to find his way back to a boat and the safety of Boulogne, but many of his men were pursued to the cliffs and plunged to their deaths. The English, meanwhile, scattered in all directions, their plan of replacing one foreign lord with another having come to nothing.¹²

Lastly there had been trouble in Northumbria. Notionally the north of England remained under the command of Earl Morcar, elected by the northerners themselves in the wake of the successful rebellion against Tostig Godwineson in 1065 (the new earl was at least still in possession of his title in the period immediately after the Conquest). From the very first, however, Morcar had been obliged to share power with others. As we have seen, the 1065 rebellion had been triggered by the murder of Gospatric, head of the house of Bamburgh, and Morcar, mindful of this, had immediately ceded authority above the Tyne to Gospatric’s nephew, Oswulf.

But at the start of 1067, just before his return to Normandy, William had upset this arrangement by granting the earldom of Northumbria, or at the very least its northern half, to a Yorkshire thegn called Copsig. It was an astonishing appointment, for Copsig had previously been Tostig’s lieutenant, and was no less hated in the north than his former master. He had, however, submitted to the Conqueror in a way that Oswulf evidently had not, and by some unknown magic had convinced the king that, when it came to controlling the north, he was the best man for the job. (‘He was’, says William of Poitiers, ‘entirely favourable to the king and supported his cause.’) As it was, the confidence of both parties turned out to be seriously misplaced: within just a few weeks of his arrival in Northumbria, Copsig was ambushed and killed by Oswulf, who personally hacked off his rival’s head. Oswulf might therefore have expected some future day of reckoning with the Conqueror or his regents, but at some point in the autumn of 1067 he too came to an untimely end, run through by the lance of a robber.¹³

It was none of these risings or rebellions, however, that caused William to return to England, but reports of some wider conspiracy. The details are sketchy, and have to be reconstructed forensically from the often allusive comments of the chroniclers. The general conclusion, however, seems clear: in the last weeks of 1067, the Conqueror learned of a conspiracy against him, organized by the surviving members of the Godwine family.¹⁴

Orderic Vitalis gives us the general context. During his stay in Normandy, he says, the king was disquieted by intelligence which intimated that the troops he had left behind in England were about to be massacred as part of an English plot. William of Jumièges provides the more specific but uncorroborated information that the plotters’ intention was to attack the Normans on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, when they would be walking barefoot to church. In 1068 this day fell on 6 February.

William, therefore, hurried to cross the Channel before the end of 1067, sailing from Dieppe on 6 December despite the rough sea and wintry weather, and arriving safely at Winchelsea the following morning. From there he made straight for London, where he celebrated Christmas and tried to sniff out the conspirators. According to Orderic, he was very gracious to the English lords and bishops who attended him, granting them favours and offering them the kiss of peace. Such behaviour, explains the chronicler, often brings back to the fold persons whose loyalty is doubtful, but at the same time William warned his Norman followers, behind the backs of the English, not to relax their guard for a moment.

Early in the new year, William received the certain intelligence he had been seeking: the conspiracy was based in the south-west of England, in the city of Exeter. The king’s suspicions must already have lain in that direction. Before leaving Normandy he had apparently sent some of his knights across the Channel to investigate the rumours, and those who had gone to Exeter had been ‘ill-treated’. Confirmation came in 1068 when Exeter sent messages to other cities, urging them to join the rebellion – messages which William intercepted. The plot uncovered, the king sent a message of his own, demanding that Exeter’s citizens swear fealty to him.

Orderic Vitalis, presumably following William of Poitiers, says nothing about the identity of the plotters. It is only from the terse accounts of this episode in our English sources that we can see that the ringleaders were the surviving members of the Godwine family, and, in particular, Harold’s mother, Gytha. Last reported bargaining with the Conqueror over Harold’s body, Gytha had evidently gone west after the battle to lick her wounds and plan her revenge. We can well imagine the intensity of her hatred: besides Harold, she had lost three other sons in 1066 (Tostig, Leofwine and Gyrth), and her sole surviving son, Wulfnoth, still languished in a Norman prison.

Gytha evidently had her hopes pinned on a new generation of Godwine men. Harold, of course, had been married to his queen, Ealdgyth, for only a short time before his death; had this match produced any children – one later chronicler claims it produced a son – then they would still have been babies at this point. But the dead king had been married earlier, according to Danish custom, to Edith Swan-Neck, by whom he had multiple offspring – no fewer than five children, at least three of whom were boys.¹⁵ These young men, probably in their late teens or early twenties in 1066, had also fled west in the wake of their father’s death, crossing the sea to Ireland. Their plan, along with Gytha, was evidently to restage the successful Godwine comeback of 1052: a mercenary fleet from Ireland, a fifth column in England – and perhaps also an invasion from Scandinavia. William of Poitiers says that the plotters had ‘repeatedly sent envoys to the Danes or some other people from whom they might hope for help’, while Orderic says the plot was ‘supported by the Danes and other barbarous peoples’.¹⁶

William was evidently determined to stop this plan before it started. When Exeter refused his demand for fealty, he raised an army and began to march westwards. Orderic notes that in doing so the king for the first time demanded military service from his English subjects. Naturally William still had many Norman troops by his side and stationed elsewhere around the country. But summoning Englishmen to fight by his side had wider implications. It made the rebellion in the West Country a litmus test for loyalty: those who did not aid the king in crushing it would themselves be counted as rebels.

At first it seemed that there would be no struggle at all. As the royal army drew near to Exeter, a delegation of leading citizens rode out to sue for peace, much as other urban leaders had done in 1066. They promised to open their gates to William and to obey his commands, guaranteeing their good faith by handing over hostages. Yet on their return to the city, says Orderic, these men ‘continued their hostile preparations, encouraging each other to fight for many reasons’.¹⁷

What were the reasons for this eccentric behaviour? One possibility is that the delegates were simply playing for time, and hoping to hold out until the arrival of their overseas allies. The other scenario, perhaps more likely, is that differences of opinion existed within the rebel ranks. Gytha and the other ringleaders had evidently been able to attract widespread popular support during William’s absence, and perhaps also for a time thereafter. One of the king’s first actions on his return, says John of Worcester, had been the imposition of ‘an unbearable tax’, and this was clearly a key factor for many in Exeter. According to Orderic, even as they defied William, the citizens indicated that they would be willing to pay tax at the customary rate. Some rebels, in short, were merely hoping for better treatment from the Conqueror; others remained determined to see him toppled. For the time being, it seems, the will of the diehards had carried the day.¹⁸

Inevitably, therefore, the matter was decided by violence. Exeter was a walled city and on his arrival William found the rebels manning the whole circuit of its ramparts. In a final attempt to induce a surrender he ordered one of the hostages to be blinded in view of the walls, but, says Orderic, this merely strengthened the determination of the defenders. Indeed, according to William of Malmesbury, one of them staged something of a counter-demonstration by dropping his trousers and farting loudly in the king’s general direction. The siege that followed was evidently hard-fought. Orderic says that for many days William attempted to storm the city and undermine its walls; ‘a large part of his army perished’, adds the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

At length, after eighteen days, the citizens agreed to surrender. Orderic, no doubt toeing the line established by William of Poitiers, says that they were compelled to do so because of the Normans’ relentless assault. William of Malmesbury claims that the king’s forces gained entry after a section of wall collapsed – a break which he attributes to divine intervention after the fashion of Jericho rather than any Norman mining operations. The English chroniclers, by contrast, suggest that the surrender came about because of the desertion of the Godwine faction. Gytha, says John of Worcester, ‘escaped with many in flight from the city’, while the D Chronicle, apparently describing the same incident, says that the citizens surrendered ‘because the thegns had betrayed them’. Accompanied by ‘many other distinguished men’s wives’, Gytha sailed into the Bristol Channel and took refuge on the tiny island of Flat Holm. Presumably these pro-Godwine women remained hopeful that their husbands and grandsons would soon be crossing from Ireland.¹⁹

With the Godwine party gone, there was nothing to stop the more moderate of Exeter’s citizens from seeking terms of surrender. According to Orderic and Poitiers, these were very favourable: William refrained from seizing their goods and guarded the gates in order to prevent any post-siege plunder. The Chronicle, predictably, offers a more acid assessment: the king ‘made fair promises to them, and fulfilled them badly’. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but that the surrender was negotiated rather than dictated seems clear. On one point, at least, the citizens seem to have got their way: the Domesday Book shows that in 1086 Exeter paid the same tax as it had done ‘in the time of King Edward’.

After the surrender William spent more time in the south-west attending to security. A castle was established in Exeter itself and very likely others were erected elsewhere. Orderic tells us that the king led his army on into Cornwall, ‘putting down every disturbance that came to his attention’, and it was probably at this time he handed command of the region to a Breton follower called Brian. At length William disbanded his Anglo-Norman army and returned to Winchester, in time to celebrate Easter.²⁰

With the defeat of the conspiracy and the flight of the Godwine faction, William no doubt felt more secure. He also had more rewards to distribute, for the property of Gytha and her followers, like the lands of those who had fought at Hastings, was now deemed forfeit. The chronicler at Abingdon Abbey, writing in the twelfth century, remembered how ‘the mother of the slain king … had with her in her company the priest Blæcmann, together with many others … and whatever had been his was taken back into the king’s hand, as that of a fugitive’.²¹

One of the principal beneficiaries of this fresh round of redistribution was the king’s long-term friend, Roger of Montgomery. Having remained in Normandy in 1066 to assist the regency government headed by Matilda, Roger had accompanied William on his return to England the following year, and had immediately been rewarded with lands in Sussex. It must have been at this time that the county was sliced up into new Norman lordships – the so-called ‘rapes’ which endured as administrative units into modern times. Stretching from the county’s northern border southwards to the sea, these long, narrow lordships were in each case named after the castles their new owners created just a few miles inland. Roger of Montgomery, for example, held the castles and rapes of Chichester and Arundel, while another of the Conqueror’s closest companions, William de Warenne, was responsible for the rape and castle of Lewes. Their purpose was clearly military: to protect the quickest routes to Normandy, and to tighten the Norman grip on what had been the Godwine heartland.²²

At the same time, the Normans did not enjoy a total monopoly of royal favour. ‘Very many Englishmen received through his generous gifts what they had not received from their kinsmen or previous lords’, says William of Poitiers – speaking, admittedly, of the period immediately after the coronation, and no doubt exaggerating his case. Nonetheless, we find some evidence of Englishmen, or at least non-Normans, being rewarded for their loyalty in the eighteen months that followed. In 1067, for example, Regenbald, a Lotharingian priest formerly in the service of Edward the Confessor, had been granted lands that had previously belonged to King Harold, while the following year another Lotharingian, Bishop Giso of Wells, was similarly granted estates that the late king had confiscated. Perhaps the most striking example, however, of William’s continued willingness to work with the natives was his settlement of affairs in the north. At some point after his return to England the king received a visit from Gospatric, a scion of the house of Bamburgh, who came in the hope of obtaining the earldom of Northumbria lately vacated by his kinsman, Oswulf. Given that Oswulf, as we have seen, had been personally responsible for murdering the king’s preferred candidate, Earl Copsig, Gospatric must have proceeded with some caution. Yet his mission was a success, and William agreed to sell him the earldom for what Simeon of Durham calls ‘a great sum’. Such were the pragmatic deals that the Conqueror was still willing to strike in the hope of a peaceful settlement.²³

William’s increasing sense of security by Easter 1068 is revealed by his decision at that point to send messengers across the Channel to fetch his wife. Matilda, says Orderic, came at once, accompanied by a great company of vassals, noblewomen and clergy, and a few weeks later, on the feast of Whitsun, she was crowned at Westminster. This coronation, so far as we can tell, passed with none of the unplanned excitement that had marred the king’s own ceremony. Chronicle accounts of the occasion are perfunctory, but we possess a valuable snapshot of proceedings thanks to a royal charter drawn up on the day itself (‘when my wife Matilda was consecrated in the church of St Peter at Westminster’, to quote its dating clause). The content of the grant is unimportant, but its witness-list allows us to see the composition of William’s court at this particularly crucial juncture. Besides the king himself and his newly crowned queen stand the two English archbishops, Ealdred (once again officiating) and Stigand. The other bishops come next, a fairly even mix of English and Normans, with Leofric of Exeter, for example, lining up alongside the likes of Odo of Bayeux. When we reach the secular magnates, too, we see a similar degree of balance being maintained, with Roger of Montgomery and William fitz Osbern rubbing shoulders with Eadwine and Morcar. Significantly, the charter is a bilingual document, drawn up in both English and Latin. We seem, in short, to be looking at the kind of Anglo-Norman modus vivendi that the Conqueror had been hoping to achieve.²⁴

Behind this facade of unity, however, a new and more dangerous tension was building. Among the English at court and across the country there was great and mounting anger, the principal reason for which was the redistribution of land that had occurred since 1066. Dispossessing the dead of Hastings was all very well, but what of their sons, brothers, uncles, nephews and cousins – those who lived on but whose expectations had thereby been dashed? It is easy to imagine a figure like Gytha, perhaps, being motivated purely by thoughts of revenge, but most of her supporters, and perhaps even her grandsons, were probably fighting in the hope of regaining their lost inheritances. And, of course, it was not just the dead and their heirs who had been dispossessed. All those who had fought against the Conqueror at Hastings, including the survivors, were deemed to have forfeited, and the same applied to those who had recently fled from Exeter. There was even a growing group of Englishmen whose lands had been confiscated because they were unable to pay the two heavy gelds that had been levied in the short time since William’s accession. That disinheritance was the principal English grievance is suggested by all our chronicle sources. The E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for instance, woefully brief for the years immediately after the Conquest, sums up the six-month period after William’s return from Normandy in a single sentence: ‘When he came back he gave away every man’s land.’ Describing events that occurred a little later, Orderic attributed English anger against the Normans to ‘the killing of their kinsmen and compatriots’ and ‘the loss of their patrimonies’. William of Poitiers, meanwhile, merely confirms the criticism of his master’s actions with a typically clunky rebuttal. ‘Nothing was given to any Frenchman which had been taken unjustly from any Englishman’, he says, a line that Orderic Vitalis found so ridiculous he deliberately left it out.²⁵

Even those Englishmen whom William had apparently tried to appease were becoming dangerously disaffected. The brothers Eadwine and Morcar may have harboured resentment over their compulsory trip to Normandy as the king’s honoured guests, but what must have rankled more was the steady erosion of their authority in England. In Morcar’s case, the north of his earldom, thanks to William’s grant to Gospatric, remained outside his control; but in Yorkshire, too, the young earl may have exercised very little power. A late but local source tells us that, after the brothers’ defeat at Stamford Bridge, Harold had handed control of the region to Maerleswein, the sheriff of Lincolnshire, and it seems quite likely that the same man was still in charge there two years on.²⁶

As for Eadwine, he may have felt even more disillusioned, given the gulf between what he had been promised and what he had actually received. According to Orderic (here showing his Mercian roots), when William had made his peace with Eadwine he had granted him ‘authority over his brother and almost a third of England, and had promised to give him his daughter in marriage’. But none of this had come to pass. Far from being enlarged, Eadwine’s existing authority in Mercia had been undermined. Along the border between England and Wales, for example, the king had established a buffer zone, with new earldoms based on Hereford and Shrewsbury. The first, which had gone to William fitz Osbern, seems also to have included Worcester, which had previously been Eadwine’s concern. As for the second, lately given to Roger of Montgomery, there was no question: Shropshire was a constituent part of Mercia, now taken away from its English governor. The king’s desire was doubtless to create a cordon sanitaire between the western counties of England and kingdoms of Wales – this was, after all, the very area where Eadric the Wild and his Welsh allies remained active – but in doing so he had driven a wedge between himself and the greatest surviving English earl. As for William’s promise of his daughter’s hand in marriage, this too had been denied. ‘Listening to the dishonest counsels of his envious and greedy Norman followers’, says Orderic, ‘he withheld the maiden from the noble youth, who greatly desired her and had long waited for her.’²⁷

And so, says Orderic, Eadwine and Morcar rose in rebellion, and many others with them. ‘A general outcry arose against the injustice and tyranny inflicted on the English … All were ready to conspire together to recover their former liberty, and bind themselves by weighty oaths against the Normans.’ Orderic mentions only a few by name: King Bleddyn of Wales, for example, the erstwhile supporter of Eadric the Wild, now came out to support the two Mercian brothers. But from other sources we can piece together a longer list of rebels, and it is impressive. The fact that Morcar exercised little true power in Northumbria, for instance, hardly mattered, because the true leaders of northern society rallied to the cause. Maerleswein, the actual governor of Yorkshire, threw his lot in with rebels, as did Gospatric, the new earl beyond the Tyne, despite the fact that he had submitted to William only a few months earlier. Archbishop Ealdred, who had crowned the Conqueror in 1066 and his queen just a few weeks before the rebellion’s outbreak, reportedly tried to quell the discontent in his city of York, but entirely without success. The bishop of Durham, by contrast, appears to have supported the rebellion.²⁸

The most significant name of all, however, was that of Edgar Æheling. Despite the fact that (according to William of Poitiers at least) the Conqueror counted him amongst his dearest friends on account of his kinship to Edward the Confessor, and had ‘endowed him with ample lands’ as a compensation prize, Edgar joined the rebels and thereby gave them a legitimate cause. They prepared to defend themselves, says Orderic, in woods, marshes and cities. ‘The king was informed’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘that the people in the North had gathered together, and meant to make a stand against him if he came.’²⁹

William wasted no time in coming. Orderic goes on to explain how the king responded by marching northwards, building new castles as he went (this is the precise context of his famous quote about the English not having castles and therefore being unable to resist). To read his account (based, remember, on that of William of Poitiers), one would almost think that the campaign that followed was a purely defensive measure. ‘The king rode to all the remote parts of the kingdom and fortified strategic sites against enemy attacks’, we are told. We can reasonably assume, however, that as the Norman war machine advanced it blazed its typical trail of destruction; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for this year says at one point ‘he allowed his men to harry wherever they came’.³⁰

The scale of the violence can also be inferred from the speed of the rebels’ submissions. As soon as William had planted his first new castle at Warwick, Eadwine and Morcar – ostensibly the leaders of the revolt – surrendered. When Nottingham fell, and another new castle arose, the citizens of York were sent into a terrified panic, and hurriedly dispatched hostages along with the keys to the city. William arrived there soon afterwards, planting a third new castle (the site now known as Clifford’s Tower), at which point the remaining rebels in Northumbria also gave up the fight. Some, like the bishop of Durham, approached the king and sought his pardon. Others, including the leaders Mærleswein, Gospatric, and Edgar Ætheling, fled northwards, and sought refuge in Scotland. According to Orderic, King Malcolm had been backing the rebels from the start and was preparing to send forces in their aid. But, seeing how quickly the rising had collapsed, he now decided, to paraphrase Orderic, that he preferred peace to war. When envoys arrived from William demanding his submission, the Scottish king sent back representatives to swear fealty and obedience on his behalf. Satisfied, William departed from York, leaving a large garrison to guard the new castle there. As he marched his army back south, more new castles were established at Lincoln, Huntingdon and Cambridge.³¹

While William had been campaigning in the north, the sons of King Harold had decided to launch the invasion that had been frustrated at the start of the year by the pre-emptive strike on Exeter. Seizing what seemed to be a second chance, the three young men (John of Worcester names them as Godwine, Edmund and Magnus) landed in Somerset, and began ravaging around the mouth of the River Avon. (Their point of landing suggests that they may have travelled via Flat Holm, where their grandmother still lurked.) Having failed to take Bristol, they returned to their ships with such booty as they could grab (which would almost certainly have included slaves) and began raiding further south along the Somerset coast, but there they were confronted by local levies in a battle that saw heavy casualties on both sides. According to John of Worcester, the Godwine boys had the victory, and for an encore went on to raid in Devon and Cornwall, before returning to Ireland with their spoils. But if this was intended to be an attack to re-establish the Godwine family in England, it was a dismal failure.³²

The summer months of 1068 had clearly been terrible ones – and not just for the English. ‘Ill fortune held victors and vanquished alike in its snare’, says Orderic, ‘bringing down on them war, famine and pestilence.’ In a particularly revealing passage, normally quoted only for its amusement value, the historian goes on to explain how at this moment many Normans were thinking of quitting England altogether:

Certain Norman women, consumed by fierce lust, sent message after message to their husbands, urging them to return at once, and adding that unless they did so with all speed, they would take other husbands. For they dared not join their men themselves, being unaccustomed to the sea-crossing and afraid of seeking them out in England, where they were engaging in armed forays every day and blood flowed freely on both sides.

What we see here, of course, apart from the casual misogyny of the medieval celibate, is a crude attempt to excuse faint-heartedness on the part of male Normans (one suspects that this passage originated with William of Poitiers). The desperate circumstances in England were clearly leading to widespread desertion: Orderic tells us that at this point the keepers of the castles at Winchester and Hastings, and many others besides, decided to abandon their posts and return home. Given the ongoing level of violence, one might suppose that even unmarried men (or men with less wanton wives) were having second thoughts about the whole enterprise, and concluding that the rewards were simply not worth the risk.

Such desertions, of course, put the Conqueror himself in a difficult bind. ‘The king,’ says Orderic, ‘with so much fighting on his hands, was most anxious to keep all his knights about him, and made them a friendly offer of lands and revenues and great authority, promising them more when he had completely rid the kingdom of all his enemies.’ This was an understandable reaction, but promising ever greater rewards to those Normans who stayed the course meant depriving ever greater numbers of Englishmen of their estates, and causing more of the disinheritance that seems to have inspired the rebellion in the first place. Both sides, in short, were being drawn into an increasingly vicious circle.³³

Nevertheless, by the autumn of 1068, William may well have thought that the circle had been squared. In the course of the year he had defeated major rebellions in the south-west, the Midlands and the north, and in each case his enemies had submitted to his mercy or fled in the face of his wrath. A string of new castles had been established in strategic towns and cities, securing his grip on the country as far as York. Moreover, he could draw hope for the future from the fact that many Englishmen were evidently willing to fight, even to die, defending his authority: the sons of King Harold had been beaten off in the first instance by the citizens of Bristol, and the forces that had subsequently met them in battle had been captained by Eadnoth the Staller, a sometime servant of Edward the Confessor. Once the campaign against the rebels was over, says Orderic, the king assembled his mercenary soldiers and, having rewarded them royally, allowed them to go home. It was a further mark of his confidence that, as the end of the year approached, William himself crossed the Channel and returned to Normandy.³⁴

The peace did not last long. William evidently remained anxious about the security of northern England, and with good reason. The concessions he had wrung from the king of Scots during the campaign of 1068 had clearly been limited. Malcolm may have offered his personal submission, but there is no suggestion that he had surrendered any of the English rebels who had taken refuge at his court. Mærleswein, Gospatric and Edgar. Ætheling, to name just the three most important, remained at large, either in Scotland or in the far north of England.³⁵

At the start of the new year 1069, therefore, the English king decided to tighten his grip on the north by appointing yet another new earl. His experiment with Gospatric having failed, William reverted to his original strategy and appointed an outsider. Robert Cumin, as this new appointee was named, is a man about whom we know next to nothing. A later writer says he came to England at the head of a band of Flemings, so it may well be that Robert himself hailed from the Flemish town of Comines. The Flemish connection also implies his men were probably mercenaries. No doubt conscious of the fate of his predecessor, Earl Copsig, Cumin came north in considerable force: the chroniclers give estimates of between 500 and 900 armed men.³⁶

The fullest account of what followed is provided by the local chronicler, Simeon of Durham. According to Simeon, the new earl advanced leaving a trail of destruction, allowing his men to ravage the countryside by pillaging and killing. His remit was apparently to govern the territory beyond the River Tyne, and when they heard of his coming, the people of this region left their homes and prepared to flee. But, says Simeon, ‘suddenly there came such a heavy fall of snow and such harsh winter weather that all possibility of flight was denied’. With their backs against the wall, the Northumbrians decided they had no choice, and resolved that they would either kill the earl or die trying. At this point the bishop of Durham – only recently reconciled after his dalliance with rebellion the previous year – hurried to meet Cumin and urged him to halt his advance. The earl, predictably, spurned this advice, and proceeded to enter Durham itself, where he planned to spend the night. Inside the city, his men continued their killing and looting in their quest for quarters.

The outcome was equally predictable. ‘At first light’, says Simeon, ‘the Northumbrians who had banded together burst in through all the gates, and rushed through the whole town killing the earl’s companions.’ The streets, we are told, were choked with bodies and awash with blood. Cumin himself was staying in the house of the bishop, where the Flemings were able to put up some effective resistance. But, driven back by the defenders’ javelins, the attackers simply set the building on fire. ‘Some of those inside burned to death,’ says Simeon, ‘others rushed out through the doors and were cut down. Thus the earl was killed on 31 January.’³⁷

The massacre of Cumin and his men acted as a trigger for a new general rising. A short time later the governor of the new castle at York was slaughtered along with many of his men. (From what follows it seems clear that he must have been away from the castle at the time.) ‘The English now gained confidence in resisting the Normans, whom they saw as oppressors of their friends and allies’, says Orderic Vitalis. Seeing that a new and spontaneous uprising was underway, the leaders of northern England returned from their Scottish exile. As Orderic explains, Mærleswein, Gospatric and Edgar Ætheling, along with many others, joined forces with the insurgents and led them in an attack on York, where the Norman sheriff and his men were still holding out. Somehow he managed to get a message to the king, explaining that unless York was relieved quickly he would be forced to surrender.³⁸

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.³⁹

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.⁴⁰

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.⁴¹

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.⁴²

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.⁴³

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.⁴⁴

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.⁴⁵

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.⁴⁶

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.’⁴⁷

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.⁴⁸

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’.⁴⁹

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.⁵⁰

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.⁵¹

Having bought off his main opponent, William embarked on the second part of his plan. As Orderic explains, the king left York and divided his army into smaller contingents that could comb the mountains and forests where the rebels were hiding. They spread out, we are told, over more than a hundred miles of territory, slaying many men and destroying the lairs of others. This, however, was only the beginning of William’s strategy. ‘In his anger’, continues Orderic, ‘he commanded that all crops and herds, chattels and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes with consuming fire, so that the whole region north of the Humber might be stripped of all means of sustenance.’ The Conqueror’s aim was to ensure that no future army, English or Danish, would be able to support itself against him and, as Orderic makes clear, this scorched-earth policy was brutally effective. ‘As a consequence, so serious a scarcity was felt in England, and so terrible a famine fell upon the humble and defenceless people, that more than 100,000 Christian folk of both sexes, young and old alike, perished of hunger.’⁵²

This terrible episode – the so-called ‘Harrying of the North’ – has established itself as one of the most notorious incidents not only of William’s reign but of English history as a whole, and used to damn the king and the Normans down the ages. In recent years there have been attempts to downplay its severity. In particular, attempts have been made to show that the devastation described by the chroniclers is not supported by the economic information recorded in the Domesday Book. As we shall see, these arguments can easily be set aside.⁵³ Moreover, even if we dismiss the most lurid chronicle evidence, what remains is both credible and compelling. John of Worcester, for example, tells us that the famine was so severe that people ate human flesh as well as horses, cats and dogs. Others, adds Simeon of Durham, sold themselves into perpetual slavery to preserve their own existence. At Evesham Abbey in distant Worcestershire, the monks long remembered how large numbers of starving refugees arrived in search of food, but (like concentration-camp survivors in modern times) died from eating too ravenously. Every day, says the abbey’s chronicler, they buried five or six more bodies.⁵⁴

The last word on the subject, therefore, must still go to Orderic. As we noted at the outset, when Orderic wrote his account of these events he had in front of him the relentlessly pro-Norman words of William of Poitiers, and we have seen that for much of the time he was content to repeat them without demur. When he reached Poitiers’ account of the Harrying, however, Orderic stopped copying. Because the end of the original is lost, we can never know what arguments the Conqueror’s chaplain devised to justify his master’s actions that winter, but they elicited this reaction from the man who had been born in Mercia just five years later:

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. For when I think of helpless children, young men in the prime of life, and hoary greybeards perishing alike of hunger, I am so moved to pity that I would rather lament the grief and sufferings of the wretched people than make a vain attempt to flatter the perpetrator of such infamy.

Moreover, I declare that assuredly such brutal slaughter cannot remain unpunished. For the almighty Judge watches over high and low alike; he will weigh the deeds of all in an even balance, and as a just avenger will punish wrongdoing, as the eternal law makes clear to all men.⁵⁵