Robert Cumin, to the tiny monastic town of Durham with 700 knights. Writing thirty years later a Durham Benedictine monk alleged that Cumin ‘allowed his men to ravage the countryside by pillaging and killing’. Symeon took care to attribute the ensuing revolt not to the Durham townsfolk but to the people north of the Tyne, ‘united in one accord not to submit to a foreign lord’. Early one January morning in 1069, they ‘burst in together through all the gates and rushed through the whole town killing the earl’s companions’. The mob set the bishop’s house ablaze and settled accounts with Cumin as he fled the flames.7
The indigenous rebellion spread to York, the only appreciable urban settlement beyond Chester, as forces under Edgar and Cospatric combined with a newly landed Danish army to overwhelm its garrison and capture the sheriff. The possibility glimmered of a breakaway Anglo-Scandinavian polity in this old Viking heartland.8 To dispel it, the Normans retaliated against the resident population once the Danes had withdrawn to the Humber for the winter. Devastation of the countryside was a standard component of medieval warfare, but William’s scorched-earth programme appears to have been unusually extensive. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the king ‘went northward with all of his army which he could gather, and wholly ravaged and laid waste the shire’. Symeon alleges that William left ‘no village inhabited between York and Durham’. Another Anglo-Norman chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, describes how ‘in his anger 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.’9 Seventeen years after the harrying, half of North Riding vills and a third of vills in the East and West Ridings were recorded as wholly or partly waste in the Domesday Book. Yorkshire as a whole had the highest proportion of waste of any surveyed county. Much land may have gone out of cultivation due either to the physical devastation inflicted by the king’s forces or to subsequent estate reorganisation by his tenants-in-chief, abandoning marginal settlements to concentrate the region’s diminished resources on the most viable lowland sites.10 An unparalleled upset had been met with an infamous and indelible reprisal. William’s son and heir, Rufus, was able to impose shire government on Northumberland and drag Cumbria into the orbit of the English state, establishing a garrison and peasant colony at Carlisle. For the first time, the whole of England sat under one political roof.
Initially this was a flimsy arrangement, vulnerable to the tremors of dynastic strife. Infighting between the Conqueror’s grandchildren during the Anarchy of 1135–54 saw the Border region ceded to the Scottish king David I, consolidating his own realm on Norman lines. David proceeded to hold court and mint coins at Carlisle. A dip in Scottish power after his death, however, tilted the balance of forces back the way of the English monarchy. A Yorkshire chronicler relates how Henry II, with righteous selfinterest, warned ‘that the king of England should not be cheated of so great a part of his kingdom, and that he could not passively endure such an amputation’. The same source adds that the Scots ‘wisely decided that the king of England had the advantage in this matter, on the merits of the case and in the strength of his forces’.11 An agreement struck at Chester in 1157 returned the frontier to the Solway and Tweed. In a later treaty made at York, the Scots quitclaimed Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland to leave only Berwick and a sliver of ‘debatable lands’ in contention.
Viking conquest, regional secession, Scottish annexation – every alternative destiny for the former land of Bede and Alcuin had been closed off. Superior force of arms and feudal settlement had bonded England together at a remarkably early historical juncture compared with other European states, its feudal hierarchy topped by Norman and other French potentates forming part of a cohesive cross-Channel ruling bloc. In France, by contrast, the Capetian dynasty needed several centuries to bolt additional principalities onto its realm, one after the other, while unification of Italy and Germany would have to await the stimulus of modernera nationalist impulses. But just as the Risorgimento, far from uniting the Italian peninsula on an equal footing, subordinated one half of the country to the other, so northern England would languish on the margins of a kingdom which cared little for it. Geoffrey Barrow, a historian of medieval Scotland, writes that
Although the kings from William Rufus to Edward I took very seriously their grip upon Cumbria and Northumbria, they could not spend much time visiting these regions which were remote from the castles, hunting lodges, monasteries and rich trading towns of southern England, Normandy, Maine, the lower Loire valley, Poitou and Gascony whence their power derived and where, one feels, their hearts really lay.12
The character of the territory recovered by Henry II remains to be sketched in. Even by medieval standards it was overwhelmingly rural and underdeveloped, too remote to benefit from either the patronage of the royal court or the commercial stimulant of London, which dominated trade with Continental ports a short hop across the Narrow Sea. Urban life was especially slow out of the blocks west of the Pennines, very much off the beaten track and confined to small-time Irish Sea traffic. Ports on the east coast were better situated to access the prime commercial routes pointing to London and Europe, but they never captured more than a fifth of the available trade. York, Hull and Newcastle, together with Penrith, a market centre in Cumbria’s Eden valley, were the only northern representatives among the fifty richest boroughs of pre-Black Death England. York never recovered its Anglo-Saxon prominence but in a regional context it remained altogether exceptional. Nerve centre of the northern church, an inland port prosperous in the wool trade and a county capital surrounded by good farming country, it vied with Bristol, Lincoln and Norwich for the title of England’s foremost provincial city, yet even York had only one-seventh of London’s taxable wealth in the lay subsidies of 1327 and 1332.13
What about the countryside? Whereas the richer soils and drier climate of southern counties facilitate a judicious mixture of arable and livestock farming, Defoe found north Lancashire ‘all barren and wild, of no use or advantage either to man or beast’. Westmorland was ghastlier still, ‘the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even in Wales itself’.14 The standard depiction of English feudalism is taken from the champion country of central and southern England, where in a landscape of common-field agriculture and clustered settlements there was virtually a manor for every village. Here, the strength of feudal lordship told in the preponderance of customary over free rents and tenures. Further north, in lowland areas of Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland, nucleated villages and customary tenures were also the norm, although taxable wealth was lower. Customary tenures were even more prevalent across the Border counties, where Henry I had established substantial lordships. In boggy and isolated Lancashire, on the other hand, free rents were of higher value than customary ones.15
The distinction ought to matter, since by the end of the thirteenth century customary tenants had been declared legally unfree. But delayed subdivision of feudal holdings and the dispersed settlement patterns associated with pastoral farming meant that seigniorial supervision was more thinly stretched in the North, certainly in upland areas. Combined with the lighter labour requirements of animal husbandry and an abundance of reclaimable land into which peasants might flee, this made for less onerous feudal exactions, and no automatic connection ever obtained between customary tenure, servile status and compulsory labour services.16 E. A. Kosminsky cautioned in a classic work that ‘the division of peasants into “villein” and “free”, characteristic of southern manors, can only with difficulty be applied under northern conditions.’17
Some parts of the North did more closely mirror the intense feudalism of the Midlands and the South. The Boldon Book, a Domesday-like survey conducted on the Bishopric of Durham’s estates in the late twelfth century, provides evidence of wellfunctioning demesnes and villeinage with heavy labour services. But as a rule, whereas profit-minded estate holders in the South East might ramp up demesne production to serve the large London market, labour services were less important to the northern feudal economy than money rents and they decayed earlier, in many cases well
