Harrying of the North

1069

Faced with a massive Anglo-Danish rebellion in Yorkshire, William the Conqueror ordered his army to burn villages, kill livestock, and salt fields across the region. For a generation Yorkshire lay empty. Chroniclers estimated a hundred thousand dead from starvation. It was the Conqueror's most ruthless single act. The Domesday Book, compiled seventeen years later, still recorded vast swaths of the north as waste.