Retreating into a pure form of regional history would provide few answers to any of these points. Northern questions aren’t resolved on home territory: sovereign power and political accountability lie elsewhere. So we delve into the politics of Westminster and Whitehall, observing these proceedings from a northern perspective, to see what English history looks like when stood upon its head.
The first question of all is how the middle swathe of Britain ended up as the unloved ward of an English state whose centre of operations lay 200 miles to the south, the perambulations of its kings and queens rarely straying beyond Watling Street in all the years until the territory they ruled over had so increased its domestic extent that Victoria and Albert could withdraw to the seclusion of Balmoral in Aberdeenshire.1 England and Scotland are both so long in the tooth, as political structures go, that state formation on this European outcrop dates back to the Early Middle Ages, superimposed on yet older rounds of uneven cultural development usually operating to the advantage of the island’s southern climes. The greatest Iron Age monumental landscapes lie within walking distance of one another in the Wiltshire countryside, while the civic life of Roman Bath, London and St Albans was leagues ahead of the garrison economy of the border country beyond Chester and York.
True, the more or less complete collapse of social organisation following the legions’ withdrawal in the fifth century temporarily upended this regional hierarchy. A meeting-point of the Saxon and Celtic worlds, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria fused together their cultural elements to light up the Dark Ages and make a signal contribution to the revival of art and letters in the Latin West. The monks of Jarrow and Lindisfarne produced the foundational text in the history of the English peoples and some of the finest decorative manuscripts in the Hiberno-Saxon style, while York’s cathedral school furnished the template for the palace school at Aachen, where Alcuin of York marshalled the Carolingian Renaissance. Alcuin’s paean to ‘York’s famed city’ describes how his own tutor, Ælberht, sought out books in foreign lands, building a library of ‘priceless treasures’.2
But a long North Sea flank exposed Northumbria to the Scandinavian invasions of the eighth and ninth centuries which destroyed Ælberht’s celebrated library and swallowed up York into the Viking world. By a process of elimination, it was left to the kingdom of Wessex at Britain’s southern limit, the only Anglo-Saxon polity to withstand the Norsemen’s advance, to act as nucleus for the English state. Æthelstan of Wessex, self-styled ‘king of all Britain’, seized control of the kingdom of York in 927. After a period of confusion, York’s last Norwegian ruler was felled at Stainmore in the Pennines, at a stroke reducing it from a Viking statelet to an English provincial town.3
Æthelstan’s Anglo-Saxons never fully assimilated their Northumbrian annexe, however, entrusting its governance to resident Anglo-Scandinavian earls. Yorkshire was an unwieldy addition to the Wessex shire system, more than twice the size of any other county. There were no royal sheriffs in the country to its north, nor would the Domesday survey be hazarded in these parts. In Cumbria, an obscure Celtic polity lingered under Scottish lordship for a quarter of a century after the Norman Conquest. Circumstances dictated, therefore, that the prospects for Norman rule in the North wouldn’t be decided by a distant battle at Hastings.
Bending with the wind, the last Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of York crowned William of Normandy at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that Ealdred prised an oath from the Conqueror to ‘hold this nation as well as the best of any kings before him did’. Ealdred’s stricture was given short shrift by the king’s lieutenants, Odo of Bayeux and William fitz Osbern, who ‘built castles widely throughout this nation, and oppressed the wretched people; and afterwards it always grew very much worse’.4 They brought the ecclesiastical province of York under Canterbury’s sway and initiated a tenurial revolution in the shadows of the fortresses bemoaned by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Domesday survey shows a couple of dozen Continental barons in receipt of more than 90 per cent of Yorkshire manors.5 The land was parcelled out into territorially compact baronies, very unlike the jumbling of fiefs in more securely held southern counties. One of Odo’s retainers, Ilbert de Lacy, administered an enormous cluster of confiscated estates in the West Riding from the Norman castle town of Pontefract, which guarded an entrance into the Vale of York and crossing points over the Aire river.
The biggest of the myriad challenges to the onset of Norman rule arose in the North East, among a people accustomed to running their own affairs. According to the Wiltshire chronicler William of Malmesbury, southern England’s nearest equivalent to Bede, the Northumbrians ‘had been taught by their ancestors either to be free or to die’.6 The Conqueror initially went down the West Saxon route of appointing native strongmen to the earldom of Northumbria, but his original candidate was no sooner in place than murdered by a member of the house of Bamburgh, and his replacement – Cospatric, a kinsmen of the assailant – absconded to join the party of Edgar Ætheling, English claimant to the throne, affronts which brought a change of tack. William despatched one of his own attendants, 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