♪ Lucy Worsley, voice-over: Christmas Day, 1069, Northern England.

♪ A warrior king makes his way through the ruins of York Cathedral.

The king's name is William I of England, but you might know him better by his later name-- William the Conqueror.

[Men shouting] Worsley, voice-over: Most of us think the Norman Conquest of England happened in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings-- one battle won, and the defeated nation bent the knee-- but actually, that was just the beginning, so how do you go about taking over, conquering an entire country?

In this series, I'm reinvestigating some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters in British history.

Oh, yes.

Here we go, Man: And now you're face to face with William the Conqueror.

Woman, voice-over: They know that sex sells and that violence sells.

Worsley, voice-over: These stories form part of our national mythology.

They harbor mysteries that have intrigued us for centuries... Worsley: It turns very dark here.

Clearly showing us-- Refugees.

There's such graphic images of religious violence.

Worsley, voice-over: but with the passage of time, we have new ways to unlock their secrets using scientific advances and a modern perspective.

He was what we would now call a foreign fighter.

Worsley, voice-over: I'm going to uncover forgotten witnesses.

I'm going to reexamine old evidence and follow new clues...

The human hand.

Worsley, voice-over: to get closer to the truth.

It's like fake news.

Worsley: You're questioning whether we can actually take that seriously as a piece of evidence.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: 1066 is one of the best-known years in British history.

We know this date because of the Battle of Hastings, but very few of us know the whole story.

♪ The Norman Conquest was the biggest land grab in Western medieval history.

This prosperous, stable country called England was just taken by William, Duke of Normandy, seemingly overnight, and stone castles like this one sprang up all over the land.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: This is Pevensey Castle, the first Norman castle on English soil, but it's actually a repurposed Roman fort.

Of course, England had been invaded before.

There were the Romans, but they eventually left; then the Vikings, but they never gained complete control.

But when the Normans invaded in 1066, they created a regime that lasted.

They transformed the country, and they left traces that we can still see to this day.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: In fact, we can trace a line from William the Conqueror to our current monarch King Charles III, but this belies the truth of how difficult the conquest really was.

It took two decades for William to cement Norman rule, so how did he do it, and was William a conqueror or a war criminal?

♪ I think I'll begin my investigation in the place where William's master plan for conquest was originally formed-- Normandy in Northwest France.

[Bells tolling] Worsley: Duke William built his castle here at Caen in 1060.

He did it to consolidate his control over all of this part of France here.

He was a Norman, the word coming from "Northman" or even "Norseman" because William's ancestors were warlike Vikings from Scandinavia.

They came down here, and they settled, and once they'd made this their home, they renamed it as Normandy.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: At this point, William wasn't known as William the Conqueror, but William the Bastard.

He'd risen a long way as the illegitimate son of Robert I of Normandy.

Now he wanted to expand his territory and conquer the lands across the English Channel.

If William ever came up here himself, I think he'd have spent his time looking in that direction because a hundred miles over there is the English coast, and on the 5th of January 1066, the English king Edward the Confessor died without leaving an obvious successor, and William believed that he was the rightful heir to the English crown.

Worsley, voice-over: There's one astonishing historical artifact just a few miles away in the town of Bayeux which might explain exactly why William believed this.

It's not a book or a manuscript.

It's nearly 230 feet long, and it's over 900 years old.

It's kept in the dark, quite literally, for its own protection.

Oh, there it is-- the Bayeux Tapestry.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: This tapestry shows the invasion of England and the Battle of Hastings in 1066 as a heroic enterprise.

♪ Worsley: It's basically a medieval movie.

It tells the story scene by scene from beginning to end, and did you know it's not actually a tapestry at all?

The pictures are stitched on, which is embroidery.

This is women's work, and I suspect that the men who give names to things like this don't necessarily know what they're looking at, but the first thing that strikes me is the sheer scale of it.

Look how long it is, and it goes off right round the corner.

It's just a stunning piece of work.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: And here's the scene I'm looking for.

It depicts a pact which allegedly took place between two of the main contenders for the English throne: the hero of the tapestry-- that's William-- and Harold, King Edward the Confessor's brother-in-law.

Worsley: This is Harold, and you can tell because of his ginger mustache-- the Anglo-Saxons have mustaches; Normans are all clean-shaven-- and what's happening here, it says in the caption, this is the bit where Harold, he fecit a sacramentum.

He makes an oath to Duke William of Normandy, who's that chap there, and Harold is touching a casket full of holy relics to make the oath even more powerful, and in his oath, he swears he will support William's claim to be king.

Let's see what happens next.

Well--ah, here we go-- Edward the Confessor dies.

There's his dead body.

He's defunctus.

He's defunct, and in this scene, ah, Harold has made himself king-- "Rex: Anglorum," "King of the English," it says.

Huh, so--in this version of the story, at least, the Norman version of the story-- Harold has betrayed William.

This is why William is justified in invading England.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: But, like all historical sources, the tapestry has an agenda.

It was commissioned by William's half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, and it was basically propaganda justifying William's invasion of England.

On the 28th of September 1066, William's fleet of hundreds of ships carrying thousands of men landed here at Pevensey on the south coast of England.

♪ This is the very beach where the Normans landed, but the battle took place a few miles away in that direction at Hastings.

It was a brutal fight.

It lasted for more than 9 hours.

[Men shouting] [Swords clanging] Worsley, voice-over: You could be forgiven for thinking that, although William's victory was hard won, it was basically inevitable.

The tapestry suggests that the Normans had enormous military superiority.

[Shouting continues] [Horse neighs] Worsley: Here are the Norman knights, and what's brilliant is the way that you see them moving off.

They're starting to gallop.

They're off.

It's really exciting, and here are the Norman archers.

It's really striking that the Normans have got better weapons.

They've got these horses.

They've got bows and arrows.

The poor Anglo-Saxons have only got things like axes and clubs.

You do get the impression of this indomitable Norman war machine.

The stormtroopers are coming.

♪ [Men shouting] Worsley, voice-over: The Bayeux Tapestry famously ends with the death of Harold.

An arrow from a Norman archer hits him in the eye.

♪ It's a heroic end to the story.

Harold is dead, and William, the rightful king, is triumphant, but is this what really happened?

There's another source that historians now believe to be one of the earliest depictions of the Battle of Hastings.

This Latin poem, probably dating from 1068, has a very different story to tell about Harold's last moments.

It's called the "Carmen," or the "Song of the Battle of Hastings," written two years after the battle, we think, and, according to this version, it took 4 Norman soldiers to finish him off.

It's quite hard to read, but I've got some notes here from the translation.

It says the first of them did the job of shattering his breast through his shield.

The second, by his sword, severed the head.

The third of them, by his spear, ooh, poured forth the body's entrails, oof, and then the fourth of them hewed off a leg-- some other translations say it was a different body part than that-- and then, being removed, he drove it afar.

He threw the body part away, so that makes it sound like Harold was really difficult to kill, and there's no mention at all of the arrow going into his eye.

Worsley, voice-over: Unlike the tapestry, the poem is an unsanitized, hyperviolent account of the battle.

[Men shouting] [Swords clanging] Harold's body was so mutilated, it could only be identified by some marks on his skin.

One of those 4 Normans who killed Harold was William himself.

I wonder if this poem is the more accurate predictor of the violence still to come after the battle.

Worsley: When it was over and William had won, he wasn't automatically King of England.

He was kind of in limbo.

He waited for the English to formally surrender to him, but nobody came.

Worsley, voice-over: Somebody was coming, but they weren't coming to offer William the throne.

They were coming for a fight.

♪ Hundreds of miles from Hastings in the North of England, two brothers would play a significant part in this resistance.

Edwin, Earl of Mercia, and Morcar, Earl of Northumbria, saw William as a foreign aggressor who was trying to take over their country.

Their rightful king was the teenager Edgar AEtheling, and they were gearing up to lead the counteroffensive in his name.

Rrgh!

♪ Worsley, voice-over: I'm meeting a medieval specialist to find out what happened next.

♪ It's just after the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

What does William the Conqueror now need to do to consolidate his win?

There's a lot of unrest still within the kingdom.

People have fled the battlefield, so there's still warriors around, fled the battlefield.

political elite gathering in London.

He's killed one king on the battlefield, but there is a contender still for the throne.

It's the teenage boy Edgar AEtheling, and he is in London with Edwin and Morcar, and they come with the crucial thing-- military force, so William needs to get himself to London, and he needs to get the support of a bishop so that he can get himself crowned, ideally an archbishop.

Hmm.

How is William going to hold the land in Kent and Sussex that he's he's already gained control over once he sets off to London?

So part of that is through the castles that he builds, so quick, wooden castles put up really just to secure the area as a place of fortification and defense for his men, and they are a way of holding power over the local area because you have your garrison, your troops, positioned there in order to perhaps fight off any disturbances that arise.

What was in store for the local people living in Kent and Sussex?

Yeah.

I think it must have been a really terrifying time for them.

They must have seen William's troops committing atrocities around them-- burning houses, taking crops, livestock.

There's also the reinforcements that William calls from Normandy who come to another part of the south coast, possibly around Chichester.

Those communities en route are clearly having houses burnt.

There's pillaging of supplies and livestock in order to feed the army as they go.

There's a picture on the Bayeux Tapestry that actually we can have a little look at-- a mother and child fleeing from a burning building.

Oh.

It says, "Hic domus incenditur," "Here this building is being burnt," so this is probably depicting the scenes at Pevensey or Hastings.

The torch is setting alight to the roof, where you can see the flames rising.

And this poor, little boy, I think he's got his mouth open because he's crying his eyes out.

He's being led away by his-- Do you think that's his mother?

She's saying, "Come on.

Get out of here."

Yeah... "It's really dangerous."

and I think it's a really moving scene.

It's clearly showing us...

Refugees.

yeah, refugees, the women and children who lost their homes as part of this conquest.

I can understand why the Normans took the food, but I can't understand why they burnt the houses.

Was there also just an element of pure intimidation in doing that and destroying the homes of people, do you think?

I think there must have been, and I think William needs to use this kind of intimidating factor in order to remove pockets of resistance and also as a warning to other communities and a clear statement that William means business, that William is not going to go lightly.

If there is opposition, he's going to go in all guns blazing.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: What was meant to be a quick operation was becoming a brutal campaign of intimidation, and these castles were key.

They were a way of crushing local resistance and securing a strong supply line from Normandy.

So this is a map of Southeast England.

It's not a brilliant map, but you get the idea.

You'll recognize it a bit better when I put in France and Normandy, and this is the Channel, and William landed pretty close to here and quickly built a castle at Pevensey, where I am right now.

It was just over there.

Quite quickly, another castle sprang up at Hastings and then one at Dover, just along the coast there, but where he really wanted to be was over here at London.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: London was the political heart of Anglo-Saxon England, but getting there wasn't as simple as it looked.

With Edwin and Morcar in London, William realized a direct assault from the south was too difficult, so he marched west, devastating the land as he went.

He secured the strategic crossing of the Thames at Wallingford and advanced to Berkhamsted.

This was where he waited for the Anglo-Saxon earls, Edgar, and other leaders.

♪ At this point, Edwin and Morcar realized they'd been outmaneuvered.

♪ William promised leniency and protection to those who submitted immediately, so they surrendered and bent the knee... ♪ for now.

♪ William finally marched on London in December 1066.

♪ He was crowned William, King of the English, on Christmas Day.

♪ He then set about building his most notorious castle-- the Tower of London... ♪ but William only controlled the southeast.

♪ None of this made the whole of England his.

♪ I want to examine William's next move, and it wasn't a military one.

There's something that's nearly a thousand years old, and I'm so eager to see it.

It's a world-famous treasure, and it lives in a super secure vault.

It's the Domesday Book.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: The Domesday Book was compiled later in William's reign, but I think it might reveal his political strategy after 1066.

♪ Worsley: I'm about to see the most precious document in the National Archives that I think means it's the most precious document in British history, and it's just in here.

♪ Ah.

Oh, yes.

Ha ha ha!

There it is.

It's amazing to see it... ♪ not in a case.

If it ever comes out of this strongroom, it would be displayed with high security, the real thing.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: This is the volume of what's called Great Domesday.

It's made up of more than 800 pages, handwritten by just one scribe.

I think a lot of people will have heard of the Domesday Book without being aware of what's actually in it, and seeing it laid out like this in the columns is making me realize that it's basically a spreadsheet detailing who owns all the land.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: It's a survey of nearly every town and manor in England down to the last peasant, plow, and goat, and the reason for doing this--money.

William wanted to know how much tax he could get out of his new country, but the book also reveals something more sinister.

I asked if I could see the entry for Grimsby, the town my dad's from.

Now, at this point, my medieval Latin is letting me down, so I'm going to get a bit of help from the translation copy I've got here.

There is land for 4 1/2 plows.

There is a church and a priest.

There's a mill that produces 4 shillings, and a ferry that renders 5 shillings, and before the conquest, it was owned by an Anglo-Saxon lady called Eadgifu.

After the conquest, it's owned by a man called Richard.

That's a Norman name, so it's gone from an Anglo-Saxon lady to a Norman man, and this incredible detail is replicated throughout the whole book.

There are 13,000 settlements, from little villages to towns, and in each case, the story is the same-- the transfer of ownership from the Anglo-Saxons to the Normans.

Worsley, voice-over: So it looks like William's confiscating people's land for at least a decade after 1066.

At first, some of the English had been able to keep their property by acknowledging William as king, but by 1086, the majority of Anglo-Saxons were disinherited.

Domesday means the Day of Judgment.

There's no arguing with this book.

This is the last word in Norman power.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: William's brutal tactics are now becoming clearer to me.

♪ Firstly, there was the military victory at Hastings.

Then there was the building of castles to keep people under control, and now, by seizing Anglo-Saxon property and assets, William was further reducing their ability to resist.

The Domesday Book is more evidence of a conquest taking shape.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: But you can't conquer a country with hard power alone.

As well as subjugating people, you also have to win hearts and minds... ♪ what's known as soft power.

I'm meeting a specialist in medieval women's history.

She's unearthed a source that reveals how the Normans used this power in ordinary daily life.

Do you think it's possible that when William was looking at the future management of the country of England, he saw marriage, intermarriage, as something that would be a tool at his disposal?

I think he certainly at the start of the conquest had that plan, but from the first, say, 10, 15 years after the conquest, we don't have that many, and the reason for that is, we think, that the women were obviously very reluctant to be used as pawns in this game of the Conquest.

From an Englishwoman's perspective, if your parents had to arrange a marriage for you, you much rather be married, presumably, to an Englishman, than to one of these bullies who came from the other side of the Channel because, you know, you couldn't be sure that you would be safe.

What did the Anglo-Saxon women who were in that position feel about it?

What did they do?

They obviously were very anxious about this, and some of them took matters in their own hands, and... Oh.

I have here this absolutely fascinating piece of evidence, which is a 12th-century manuscript, and interestingly, the text refers to women taking refuge in monasteries.

It refers to those women who, not out of love for the religion-- "non amore religioni, sed timore francigenaro," but out of fear from the French, have taken refuge in these institutions.

So these poor women going to the nunneries, they were feeling vulnerable sexually, you know, in the immediate physical sense and also perhaps vulnerable if they own land to being sucked into marriages so that the Normans would be taking their land off them.

Absolutely.

It's really hard to hear the voices of women in the whole story of the Norman Conquest, but here we've got a little echo, and it's a chilling echo.

You're absolutely right.

That is what this very important document shows us, and it's not generally known.

The Norman Conquest is not only a story about soldiers and battles, but it is about mothers and sisters and wives.

♪ Worsley: It's so distressing to think of these Anglo-Saxon women hiding themselves away out of fear of being forced to marry these Norman men.

They would have understood that marriage was part and parcel of a wider strategy of conquest.

Anglo-Norman marriages would lead to Anglo-Norman children, which would mean that the Normans' claims to the lands they'd taken would be legitimized forever.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: William tried this soft-power approach in his own court.

In 1067, he brought Edwin and Morcar home with him to Normandy and promised Edwin a marriage to his daughter.

It was a strategy of "keep your friends close but your enemies closer."

♪ Outwardly, they were guests, but in truth, they were hostages.

William wanted a trouble-free takeover of England, but the Anglo-Saxons were still mobilizing.

♪ That same year, a revolt began in the Welsh borders... ♪ and Exeter in the southwest rose up, forcing William to besiege the city for 18 days.

In the end, Exeter surrendered, allowing William to build a castle in the city and consolidate his hold over the West Country.

♪ The farther you ventured from the center of William's power in London, the more the insurrection intensified.

♪ In 1068, sensing it was now or never, Edwin and Morcar escaped William's court and raised rebellion in the Midlands.

Williams suppressed this, but by now, the flames of revolt were spreading northward.

Morcar and a growing gang of other English nobles started plotting another rebellion against William.

One of the English chronicles tells us that they were motivated by hatred of William for the injustice and the tyranny he inflicted upon the English.

♪ I know that the northerners mounted a much tougher and more prolonged resistance against William, but what was it about their rebellion that made it so difficult to extinguish?

Hello.

Hi, Lucy.

You'll be Katherine.

Yes.

Worsley, voice-over: I'm meeting a cultural historian in a village that Morcar used to own--Middleton, which in the 1060s was in his earldom of Northumbria.

♪ There's an ancient sculpture here that she wants to show me.

♪ Gosh, look at these.

They're amazing.

The shape of the cross is such a potent... symbol of kind of mystic power.

So this is a grave marker or some sort of commemorative monument for the person depicted on the front.

Who is this little person with the pointed hat?

Look at that.

It might look cute, but he's meant to look quite terrifying, I think, because if you look closely, you can see that he is dressed in military gear.

He's surrounded by weaponry, so I think that this is somebody who might have been a Viking.

Is that his sword I can see there?

That's his sword and shield here.

And he's got a kind of a chopper here?

So that's his ax.

We can see he's got a knife, as well, that's slung up to his belt.

We can see somebody who comes from a military background, power and strength are shown through military imagery.

He has settled here, and he is now the lord of the local area.

♪ Katherine, what was our Viking warrior doing here in this part of England?

Well, we often think of Vikings as raiders, but from the middle of the ninth century, they came to England in much larger armies.

And did they settle down?

Yes.

They conquered and settled the lands, so if we think about it, in 1066, there had been 200 years of Scandinavian influence in the North of England, and so we can see from lots of different kinds of evidence that they grew together and became one community, so some of the words that we still use today come from Old Norse.

A nice example is "window."

"Window"?

It means wind eye.

"Husband" is another one that comes from the Old Norse "husbondi," which is sort of the master of the household, and one that is quite well-known and really frequent, is place names that end in -by, which means, really, a farmstead, so we can think of Whitby, for example, or Selby near York, Grimsby.

So Grimsby is the farm of Mr.

Grim from Scandinavia.

Yeah, and we even see this in, like, small landscape features, as well, like a beck or a fell or a dale.

These all come from Old Norse.

So is it fair to say, then, that when the Normans arrived in England, this area of the North, Yorkshire and so on, it had its own quite distinctive culture?

Yeah.

I think that's definitely fair to say.

I'm getting the impression, Katherine, then, that these people would have been particularly not keen on the Normans coming in and taking over.

Is that fair to say?

Yeah.

I think that's true.

I wonder if William the Conqueror knew what he was getting into when he tried to subdue these folk up here.

♪ Hmm, so I've learned that the people who lived in Northumbria had a different center of gravity.

It wasn't London down south.

It was Scandinavia.

The region had its own separate identity, and the English rulers before 1066 kind of went along with that.

They were happy to have a hands-off relationship with the North, but when William, Duke of Normandy, came along, he intended to change all that.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the king was informed that the people in the North had gathered together and planned to make a stand against him if he came near.

♪ In 1068, William marched first to Mercia, where he suppressed all revolts, and then on to York, where he built a castle.

Then he installed one of his Norman enforcers as Earl of Northumbria, but his control was illusory.

♪ In January 1069, the Northumbrians killed William's Norman earl in Durham and marched to York.

Then they brought in Danish reinforcements.

In September, these combined forces stormed York... [Men shouting] and torched William's two Norman castles were.

♪ Almost all of the Norman garrison was slaughtered.

♪ They then proclaimed Edgar AEtheling as the true King of the English.

William now faced a serious challenge to his conquest of England.

He was on the back foot.

Was this the moment to go hard or go home?

I want to know how William is going to respond, so I'm going to turn to one of the key key sources for the period.

This is the work of a monk called Orderic Vitalis.

He was one of these Anglo-Normans-- he had an English mum and a French dad-- and these pages are from his most famous book-- the Historia Ecclesiastica.

The bit I want is about York, so I'm looking in the Latin text for "Eboracum," which is here.

That's what I want to read, but for ease of reading, let's go over to the translation.

They approached York looking for rebels.

The king-- that's William himself-- "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," so this is William's vengeance, his punishment upon the North for having rebelled, and this word "harried" is very significant.

It means to lay waste, to devastate, and in this context, it forms part of one of the most resonant phrases in British history-- the Harrying of the North.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: But these are just words on a page.

I wonder what it was like to experience harrying as a weapon of war.

♪ I've come to York Castle to meet a senior curator at Yorkshire Museum... Hi.

Nice to meet you, Lucy.

Worsley, voice-over: who has some unusual archeological evidence.

Worsley: Why did you suggest that we meet here at the top of the tower?

Well, the tower is perhaps the best example of William the Conqueror's attempt to pacify York and across the region, really.

This building, the motte underneath it was built in 1068 for William to try and control this unruly part of the country, so this is perhaps the best symbol of the Harrying of the North still standing.

Rebellious people in Yorkshire, right?

I mean, hard to believe, right, but, yes, Yorkshire and most of the North is in open rebellion against William for most of the late 1060s.

And what have you brought here?

They look very precious.

I have brought you 3 coins, which are the protagonists of 1066.

On the left here, you have Edward the Confessor, so his death in early 1066 sparks all of the events that happen later.

I do that.

Hopefully, you get a good chance-- Ooh, I can see his little face, yes, and is he wearing a crown, Andy?

He is wearing a crown, so he's looking off to the right with a sort of pointy nose, and he's wearing this rather elaborate crown and holding the scepter, so the symbols of state.

OK, so that's the ruler before the Battle of Hastings.

It is.

What's the other ones that you've got?

Sure.

This is Harold Godwinson, now, slightly less clear portrait, but hopefully, you can see he's looking the other way.

He's looking the other way, isn't he?

He's got quite chubby cheeks, has Harold.

He has.

Is that really rare?

Yeah.

We only have two of Harold Godwinson.

We don't often bring this one out, so I'm pleased to be able to share it with you today, actually.

Oh, what a treat, so who's this one?

Now you're face to face with the man himself-- William, Duke of Normandy.

I have to say, I feel intimidated by being face to face with William, Duke of Normandy.

I think he's made a very clever choice there to be looking right at me.

I find him more scary than Harold for that reason alone, maybe because I know about the Harrying of the North and what he did-- I'm extrapolating here-- but I just don't like the look in his eyes.

♪ So did all of these 3 coins belong to the same person?

No, so these are from different hoards, so we get groups of coins buried in the ground, and we call them a hoard.

And why would they be burying their coins in the ground?

In a world before banks, you buried your money in times of challenge, times of crisis, and you come back and dig it up when the crisis blows over, but the crucial question in some ways is, why didn't they come and dig them back up again?

And I guess if you're in York in the 1068 or '69, you know, there's an army coming towards you.

You bury your wealth.

You might escape town, and you might not ever be able to come and dig it back up again.

Gosh, that's horrifying to think of-- people in fear and panic thinking the Normans are coming, and the people who buried these little coins never came back to get them.

Yeah.

In some ways, the evidence of the coins, particularly the hoards from York, is some of the best archeological evidence we actually have for the Harrying of the North and its effect upon the people.

There are more coin hoards buried within the city walls of York than there are across the whole of Southern England at the same time.

The reason these were buried in the ground, the reason that we're looking at them today, is all because the person who had them was probably terrified of the arrival of the Norman army, and may have lost their life to it.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: In times of conflict, international alliances are forged and broken.

In late 1069, William bought off the Danish allies who'd come to the aid of the northerners.

He then took back the city of York.

On Christmas Day, exactly 3 years after his coronation, he paraded through the ruins of York Cathedral... ♪ but William didn't want the northerners to be able to use any of their lands to raise another army against him.

♪ He ordered the systematic destruction of villagers' homes, livestock, and crops in all the land north of the Humber River.

[People shouting] ♪ I'm going to one of the places that experienced William's wrath, Levisham in the Yorkshire Moors, to see if I can glimpse the human impact of this.

♪ I'd like to see what these different chronicles have to say.

Here's my friend Orderic Vitalis, oh, but he says that in his anger he--that's William-- commanded that all the crops and food be burnt to ashes so that there was no food left in the whole of the region, "regione," beyond, "trans," the River Humber, "Umbrana," my goodness, and he says that 100,000 people died in a famine.

♪ This chronicle's by another monk, Simeon of Durham, and he says people were so desperate for food that they ate the flesh of horses and dogs and humans... ♪ and this chronicle is from the Abbey of Evesham, which is in Worcestershire, so that's not in the North at all, but they were getting refugees from up here, from Yorkshire, and some of these refugees were so famished that when the monks gave them food, "cibum," they ate it so ravenously that their bodies couldn't handle it, and they died.

I really feel that William has got blood on his hands for this.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: William had obliterated the rebellion in the North, but he'd also engineered a famine.

♪ Inflicting violence like this on people leaves a legacy, as I think the Domesday Book might be able to show us.

♪ This page covers Eurvicsciure, or Yorkshire, the biggest county in the North, one that was right in the firing line, and I'm going to pick out this little place here within Yorkshire called Asulvesby.

Before the conquest, it was worth 10 shillings and 8 pence, but now, after the conquest, it's worth nothing, nothing at all, and that's because it's in waste.

It's been laid waste to, and now I've spotted that tiny word "waste," it's catching my eye.

I can see it's coming up again and again-- this place and this place and this one, too.

It's like Yorkshire's been wiped off the face of the earth.

At first sight, you think that this book is about accountancy and taxation, but actually, there's also a story here about a huge amount of destruction and human suffering.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: The Harrying of the North marks the end of Edwin and Morcar's power.

Morcar and other die-hard rebels joined the last desperate resistance to the Normans at Ely in Cambridgeshire, but it was quashed.

As far as we know, it was in a Norman prison that he died.

♪ As for his brother Edwin, he was ultimately betrayed by fellow Englishmen.

They took his head to William himself as a tribute to the Conqueror's power.

♪ For some, the Harrying of the North was a step too far, even by medieval standards, and many of William's supporters now turned on him.

Here's the monk Orderic Vitalis once again.

Now, Orderic's generally on William's side, but not when it comes to the Harrying of the North.

Where are my notes from the translation?

Here we are.

He says, "But for this act, which condemned innocent "and guilty alike to die by slow starvation, "I cannot commend him.

Such brutal slaughter cannot remain unpunished."

♪ Worsley, voice-over: In the 1070s, the concept of war crimes as we understand them obviously didn't exist, but there were early codes of conduct that guided how wars should be fought and how soldiers should make amends.

♪ This giant book is from the 17th century, but it's got in it a record of a much older document that was drawn up by Norman bishops just after the Battle of Hastings, around 1067.

It's a list of penances for those who kill in bello, in war.

A penance is kind of like a punishment.

It's either praying or giving alms or fasting, and this is what you have to do if you've committed different sins.

This is if you kill somebody in the magno praelio, which is the great battle, the Battle of Hastings.

You have to do one year, but--this is interesting-- if you fought in that battle as an archer, as a Sagittariis, then you might be ignorant of how many people you'd killed with your arrows, so your penance was less, just a matter of months, so there is some kind of a moral code that exists in Norman heads, oh, and this next one's interesting.

If you killed somebody for praedandi-- so that's loot or for plunder-- then you got the worst punishment of all.

You had to do 3 years of penance, tres annos.

It's fascinating.

It's like looking inside the minds of the Norman bishops who drew up this list of penances.

You get an insight into what they thought was acceptable, what was good, what was bad.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: This code of conduct was written before the Harrying of the North, and William violated its accepted standards.

♪ It's become clear to me that William destroyed the North because he failed politically.

♪ Having utterly alienated the Anglo-Saxons, he could only rule through violence.

♪ The Harrying of the North didn't completely extinguish resistance.

William would face further invasion threats from the Danes, but by 1071, he was the Conqueror of England.

♪ Even today, we still feel the impact of how the Normans took over England.

We see it in our landscape, our laws, and even in our names.

This is from the biography of a Norman celebrity-- a famous hermit, actually-- but he started out in life as a little boy in Yorkshire, one of the bits of Yorkshire that had a very strong Viking influence, one of the parts that had been harried by the Normans, actually, and the little boy's name was Tostig.

You pronounce it "Tostee," and that's a very Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian-sounding name, so what happened to Tostig?

My notes from the translation will tell me, when his youthful companions mocked the name Tostig, "Tostee," his parents decided to change it, and what did they change it to?

Well, the very Norman name of William.

It's just a tiny, little detail, isn't it, about a little boy, but I think it speaks volumes.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: If the Normans hadn't broken Yorkshire and Northumbria, it's possible that the language and culture of Northern England would be even more distinctive than it still is from the South.

♪ William's conquest meant the North would no longer look instinctively across the North Sea to Scandinavia.

Now it would look south and be part of a more tightly controlled England bound to Normandy for centuries.

♪ Before I started investigating the Norman Conquest, I think I'd assumed it was straightforward, almost inevitable, but I come to realize just how difficult it was for William to do it, and the human cost.

Now, England was invaded before the Normans came along but never successfully afterwards.

Perhaps that's William's legacy.

♪