February 2003

Parish History Episode 22

The Harrowing of the North

As mentioned last month, the Battle of Hastings did not lead to the immediate subjugation of all England to Duke William and the Norman invaders. The Duke, crowned as King of England on Christmas Day, 1066, amongst the burnt ruins of London town, waited for declarations of fealty to be sent to him by the English lords, before deciding to march against those who were slow to declare allegiance to hint or who neglected altogether to do so. The situation was, for the Normans, particularly unsatisfactory in the North, and in 1068 a major expedition, of seven hundred fighting was dispatched thither, under the command of a warrior called Sir Robert de Comines.

Durham had successfully defied the Scots under Malcolm II, and thecae were many who expected that the Normans could similarly be repelled Ethelwin, the Bishop of Durham, hail at first proposed to resist the invaders, but then, when he heard of the size of de Commas' army, he resolved to leave Durham and to travel South to meet the Normans. Al York, he swore allegiance to King William, and Sir Robert accepted his pledge of loyalty, and took the Bishop with him as he marched on towards Durham. On arriving there, he ordered Ethelwin to command the citizens to surrender and to admit his men, and they obeyed their bishop, and the Normans entered Durham without bloodshed.

De Comines disorderly troops were soon scouring the countryside around Durham, searching for buried treasures, supposed to have been hidden from the Vikings or from earlier invaders, and seizing whatever they wanted from the country people and killing anyone who resisted- As Winter drew on, they tended to prefer to stay by their firesides in Durham ton. Many townsmen, antagonised by the behaviour of the occupying troops, decided that this was their opportunity, and resolved to free themselves In February, 1069, a group of resolute citizens, equipped with sharp knives, started going round the houses where the Norman soldiers were billeted, cutting their throats Sentries posted outside the house where Sir Robert de Commas was lodging raised the alarm, but the rebels set the building on fire, and Sir Robert and many of his men were burned to death.

It is said that all but one of the seven hundred Normans in Durham were ki1Hd in the uprising, and that the lone survivor, badly wounded, managed to make his way through the snows all the way to York. King William came North to take charge in person of the reprisals which he attended to inflict upon the Northcountrynren He arrived in York with a strong force, and then, m the Summer of 1069, marched slowly towards Dunham, along the Greet North Road, destroying every village on or close to the road as he went. This "Harrowing of the North", as it was known, was something like a repeat of Haldane s march, two hundred years before, but if anything the Normans drove a wider swathe of devastation than that left by the Viking chief in an earlier age. Halfdane, travelling in the opposite direction, had destroyed much, but primarily he was gathering sieves, livestock and seeds with which to begin farming operations in the Vale of York when he reached it. William was destroying simply in order to spread terror around. His men, firming out on each safe of the Great North Road, killed the peasants, destroyed houses and barns, slaughtered livestock, and burned the crops in the fields, with the express purpose of causing famine to follow in the Winter and Summer of 1069 and 1070.

By the time that they reached Durham, the English had lost all stomach for resistance, and, instead of preparing to defend their city, most of the citizens fled into the Deerness Valley and upper Weardale, hoping to hide in the wilderness until the worst was over. Bishop Ethelwin, together with the monks of the Family of Saint Cuthbert, fled in the opposite direction. Taking the Incorrupt Body of Cuthbert with them, they made for Lindisfarne, from whence their forebears had fled over two centuries before. They appeared to know nothing about the saint's original resting place, except for the direction in which to travel in order to reach it, for, on arriving at the village of Beal, in sight of their destination, they were horrified to learn that Lindisfarne was an island, and that there was no boat to take them there. They knelt down on the sand and prayed for deliverance. When the opened their eyes, they were overjoyed to see that the waters of the sea had parted, and a causeway had opened up by which they could reach the island. They scuttled across, and the miracle seemed to be completed when the waters returned and flowed over the causeway shortly after they had arrived safely on Lindisfarne. They were so out of touch with their roots, that they were unaware that Lindisfarne was a tidal island!

Having reached Durham, King William seems to have called off the campaign of terror, and the Harrowing of the North came to an end. The city itself with its cathedral less than a century old, was spared, and messengers were despatched to Lindisfarne inviting Ethelwin and his monks to return, and to bring the Incorrupt Body back with them. The messengers were heavily armed, and reluctantly Durham's bishop returned to his cathedral.

Was Houghton destroyed during this Harrowing? Being well off the direct road from York to Durham, it is possible that it was spared: and if the Ie Springs were already in residence, it almost certainly would not have been harmed. But if they were not yet established here, then is quite possible that Houghton was laid waste by King William's men, and that only after that were its ruins given to Sir John Ie Spring, to build anew on what his King had destroyed. This might well explain Sir John's failure to construct either a fortified keep at Houghton; or, until many years afterwards, a church - there were just too few men surviving in Houghton to be able to do anything more than to grow enough food to sustain themselves and their new master. Building projects would just have to wait.

Ethelwin and his monks returned to Durham, bringing the Incorrupt Body with them, which William saw before it was re-interred, but the Bishop was aware that he was not trusted, and he tried to flee abroad, but was arrested, imprisoned, and died in prison, probably deliberately starved to death by the King's orders.

The following year, 1072, Walcher, the first Norman bishop of Durham, was consecrated. During the following four years Durham Castle was built and provided with a strong Norman garrison. In 1076 Walcher was named as Earl of Northumbria, while remaining in office as Bishop, and was given command of both Durham Castle and Cathedral. He now had "Palatine powers" over a large area of the North of England (roughly the later counties of Durham and Northumberland), that is he ruled them as a sort of sub-king, owing allegiance to the King of England, but otherwise exercising within the Palatinate the same powers as the King exercised in other parts of his Realm. He was the first Prince-Bishop.

Walcher took his duties both as Bishop and as Earl seriously, and began the "reform" and modernisation of the old Anglian monasteries at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, and also began the construction of additional castles, in order to fortify the Palatinate against Scottish invasion.

In 1080 he ordered the building of a "new castle", on the opposite bank of the Tyne to Gateshead, where the Romans had once built a bridge across the Tyne (but that bridge was probably in ruins in Watcher's time). The following year he was in Gateshead, to see how much progress had been made, and to enforce the conscription of labourers for the building of the New Castle, but the Gateshead men, worn down with compulsory labour on the project, rebelled, and murdered him and most of his soldiers.

(The New Castle was eventually completed, and is now the centre of a town which has in many ways grown to be greater than Gateshead).

As might be expected, the Normans wreaked a terrible vengeance on the people of Gateshead. Bishop Odo of Bayeux (the town famous for its tapestry depicting the conquest of England) commanded the punitive expedition which slaughtered thousands of men, women and children to avenge the murder of Bishop Watcher. Odo then returned to London, while Carileph, another Norman priest, was consecrated as Bishop of Durham. His palatine powers were, however, restricted chiefly to the lands South of the Tyne, though he was also responsible for the Norham area, on the South bank of the Tweed, directly opposite Scotland. The New Castle and the rest of Northumberland were first held directly by Prince Robert, a son of King William, and then by Robert Mowbray, who held the title of Earl of Northumberland. Thus responsibility for the defence of the Border against the Scots was divided between the Bishop of Durham and the Earl of Northumberland, and this was to continue to be the arrangement for the best part of the next five centuries.

Carileph was less involved in fighting and in oppression than his predecessor. He did however fundamentally change the ecclesiastical situation at Durham. He brought in "reformed" Benedictine monks from Normandy, who replaced the married men of the Family of Saint Cuthbert as custodians of the Shrine with its Incorrupt Body. (The Anglian monks were offered the chance to belong to the new community at Durham. Only one man - perhaps a widower - did accept the offer, and stayed at Durham. Most of his colleagues seem to have found employment as parish priests in various parts of the Diocese).

More drastically, Carileph deliberately demolished his own cathedral, the "White Church", built at the beginning of the century, in order to make space for the construction of a wonderful new building, the present Durham Cathedral, which would not be completed until over thirty years after Carileph's death in 1099.
By these changes, the people of Durham gained a splendid new cathedral, which still stands, over nine hundred years later, as one of the glories of Christendom. But they probably thought that but scant compensation for the thousands of murders committed by King William’s men, or for the destruction of the old religion with its married clergy and Anglo-Saxon traditions to which they and their forebears had long been accustomed.

Dick Toy

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