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William was furious and decided to lay waste the north of England - the so-called "Harrying of the North". Norman soldiers destroyed anything that might have been of use to those who lived in the north. It is thought that as many as 100,000 people died of starvation.

ETHNIC CLEANSING OF THE ENGLISH 'THE HARRYING OF THE NORTH'   The previous article talked of the ethnic cleansing of the English known as the Harrying of the North, and how much of the northern counties of England was laid waste*. The Normans seemed to combine up to date military skill and tactics, with their own violent Scandinavian Viking heritage. They had many vengeful Bretons with them. They were the Romano-Brythons (who some mistakenly call Celts,) who had fled the English / Saxon onslaught in 458 AD to Brittany in northwestern France and sought some weird revenge. French mercenaries accompanied them. Later English retaliation on northern France was furious. In their blood lust the Normans killed 150,000 English. The Harrying of the North was a brutal act that wouldn't have been worthy of an English King, but was certainly worthy of the usurper William Duke of Normandy. His 'harrying' not only affected Northumberland and Cumberland, and Yorkshire, but also large tracts of Cheshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire.

"Why do maps always show the north as up? For those who don't just take it for granted, the common answer is that Europeans made the maps and they wanted to be on top. But there's really no good reason for the north to claim top-notch cartographic real estate over any other bearing, as an examination of old maps from different places and periods can confirm."

"In his anger at the English barons, William commanded that all crops and herds, chattels and foods should be burned to ashes, so that the whole of the North be stripped of all means of survival. So terrible a famine fell upon the people, that more than 100,000 young and old starved to death. My writings have often praised William, but for this act I can only condemn him." Orderic Vitalis

In the Harrying of the North, William the Conqueror's brutal conquest and subjugation of the North of England, William's men burnt whole villages from the Humber to Tees, and slaughtered the inhabitants. Foodstores and livestock were destroyed so that anyone surviving the initial massacre would soon succumb to starvation over the winter. The survivors were reduced to cannibalism,[4] with one report stating that the skulls of the dead were cracked open so that the brains could be eaten. Between 100,000 and 150,000 perished and the area took centuries to recover from the damage.

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The Harrying (or Harrowing) of the North was a series of campaigns waged by William the Conqueror[1] in the winter of 1069-1070 to subjugate Northern England, and is part of the Norman conquest of England. It effectively ended the quasi-independence of the region through large-scale destruction that resulted in the relative "pacification" of the local population and the replacement of local Anglo-Danish lords with Normans. The death toll is believed to be over 100,000, with substantial social, cultural, and economic damage.[2][3] Because of the scorched earth policy, much of the land was laid waste and depopulated, a fact to which Domesday Book, written almost two decades later, readily attests.[4]

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In the time before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a cooler central Pacific Ocean has been connected with drought conditions in Europe and North America that may be responsible for famines and the disappearance of cliff dwelling people in the American West.

The Romance language group (or Gallo-Romance) in the north of France is that of the langue d'oïl, the languages which use oïl (in modern usage, oui) for "yes". These languages, like Picard, Walloon, and Francien, were influenced by the Germanic languages spoken by the Frankish invaders; Norman was later also heavily influenced by the Norse settlers who founded the Norman state of Normandy. From the time period Clovis I on, the Franks extended their rule over northern Gaul. Over time, the French language developed from either the Oïl language found around Paris and Ile-de-France (the Francien theory) or from a standard administrative language based on common characteristics found in all Oïl languages (the lingua franca theory). Oïl derives from the Latin hoc ille ("that is it").

The subject of The Life of King Louis the Fat  was Louis VI, the first important Capetian king of France, who reigned from 1108 to 1137.  Louis's main achievement was to consolidate royal power within the Ile-de-France by suppressing the castellans who dominated the royal domain lands. (The term "castellan" refers to a noble who possessed one or more castles.) Louis's success owed much to an alliance he forged between the French monarch and the great Churchmen (bishops and abbots) and the leading townsmen of northern France.  Suspicious of the power of his barons, Louis used clergy and burghers rather than great nobles as royal administrators. His efforts to establish peace and maintain order facilitated the development of agriculture, trade and intellectual activity in the Ile-de-France. Under his rule, Paris began its expansion which would make it by 1200 the greatest Christian city north of the Alps. The following excerpts describe Louis's military actions against the "robber barons" of the Ile-de-France and the King of England Henry I (r.1100-1135).

In 1347 news reached England of a horrifying and incurable disease that was spreading from Asia through North Africa and Europe. The Black Death struck London in the autumn of 1348. No one knew how to stop the disease. During the next 18 months it killed half of all Londoners - perhaps 40,000 people.

In the English Peasants' Rebellion of 1381, continued enforcement of the Statute of Laborers no doubt rankled and perhaps made the peasantry more open to provocative sermonizing but labor legislation had not halted higher wages or improvement in the standard of living for peasant. It seems likely that discontent may have arisen from an unsatisfying pace of improvement of the peasant's lot. The regressive Poll Taxes of 1380 and 1381 also contributed to the discontent. It is furthermore noteworthy that the rebellion began in relatively affluent eastern England, not in the poorer west or north.