WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
How William took control of England
Winning at Hastings gave William the crown — but it did not give him England. For the next five years, he faced revolts across the country, from the west to the north to the east. His response combined calculated terror with strategic castle-building, and in 1069–1070 he unleashed the Harrying of the North — a campaign of deliberate destruction that left northern England devastated for generations. This page covers how William went from conqueror to king, and how he kept what he had won.
From Hastings to Westminster
Consider: you have just won a battle that killed the king of England. You control the battlefield. But the country has not surrendered — it has simply lost its leader. The northern earls are still alive. The city of London has its walls. What do you do next?
After Hastings, William did not march directly to London. Instead he moved methodically, burning and ravaging the surrounding counties to demonstrate the cost of resistance. He crossed the Thames at Wallingford, cut off London's supply routes, and waited. The remaining English nobles — including the northern earls Edwin and Morcar — had initially put forward Edgar Atheling, the last male member of the royal house of Wessex, as king. But faced with William's approaching army and no prospect of military relief, they submitted.
William was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, 1066 — in the very church that Edward the Confessor had built. The ceremony went almost immediately wrong: when the congregation shouted their acclamation, Norman soldiers outside mistook the noise for a riot and began setting fire to buildings. The new king was crowned in a burning city. It was an ominous beginning.
The strategy: castles everywhere
William's primary tool of control was the castle. Before 1066, England had almost no castles in the Norman sense. The Normans built them immediately and systematically.
The earliest Norman castles were simple motte-and-bailey structures: a raised earth mound (the motte) topped with a wooden tower, connected to an enclosure (the bailey) surrounded by a ditch and wooden palisade. They could be built in days or weeks, required no specialist materials, and gave a small garrison complete dominance over the surrounding area.
William built castles at London (later to become the Tower of London), Winchester, Exeter, York, Lincoln and dozens of other strategic points. Wherever there was a town, a crossing, or a potential centre of resistance, a castle followed. The message was unambiguous: Norman power was here, it was permanent, and it was watching.
Key term
Motte-and-bailey castle
The standard early Norman fortification. The motte was a raised earth mound, sometimes 10–15 metres high, topped with a wooden keep. The bailey was an enclosed courtyard at the base, containing stables, barracks and storage. A wooden bridge connected the two. Later, many motte-and-bailey castles were replaced with stone keeps — including the White Tower at London, begun c1078. The motte-and-bailey was a military innovation that the Normans used as an instrument of political control as much as military defence.
The revolts, 1067–1075
William left England for Normandy in early 1067, and the revolts began almost immediately.
Exeter, 1068: The city of Exeter refused to surrender and held out for 18 days. William besieged it, took it, and built a castle inside the walls. This was his pattern: crush resistance, then make it permanent with stone and garrison.
The northern rebellions, 1069–1070: The most serious threat. The northern earls Edwin and Morcar rose against Norman rule, joined by a Danish fleet under King Sweyn of Denmark. York fell twice to the rebels. William's response was swift and merciless.
Hereward the Wake, 1070–1071: A final centre of resistance in the Fens of East Anglia, based on the Isle of Ely. Hereward (about whom legend grew considerably) led guerrilla resistance in the marshes. William eventually drained approaches to the island and forced a surrender, though Hereward himself apparently escaped.
The revolt of the earls, 1075: The last serious challenge — a conspiracy between three powerful Norman earls. William crushed it, executing one and imprisoning another. After 1075, organised resistance to Norman rule effectively ended.
The Harrying of the North, 1069–1070
William's response to the northern rebellions was not simply to defeat them militarily. He ordered the systematic destruction of northern England between the Humber and the Tees — burning villages, slaughtering livestock, destroying crops and food stores, and killing or driving out the population.
The Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, records dozens of settlements in Yorkshire simply as "waste" — meaning they had no taxable population or value because they had been destroyed. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis, writing a generation later, described corpses rotting in the streets, famine killing hundreds of thousands, and survivors reduced to eating horses, dogs, and cats. He put the death toll at over 100,000, though this figure is probably exaggerated.
The Harrying achieved William's military objective: the north never rose again. But it left the region economically devastated for decades, and contemporaries who recorded it — even those favourable to William — recognised it as an act of extreme brutality.
Source and judgement
Orderic Vitalis on the Harrying
"I have often praised William in this book, but I can say nothing good of this brutal slaughter. God will punish him." Orderic Vitalis was a Norman monk writing c1125 — broadly sympathetic to William — which makes his condemnation of the Harrying especially significant. For exam purposes: he is a near-contemporary source, he has no obvious reason to exaggerate William's cruelty, and his account is broadly consistent with the Domesday evidence. This makes his testimony relatively reliable on this point.
William I and William II
William I died in 1087, having fallen from his horse at the siege of Mantes. His reign had transformed England: a new ruling class, a new language at court (Norman French), a new church hierarchy, and a landscape dotted with castles and cathedrals that had not existed a generation before.
He divided his inheritance between his sons:
- Robert Curthose inherited Normandy
- William Rufus (William II) inherited England, crowned 1087
William II's reign was turbulent. He quarrelled repeatedly with the Church — keeping bishoprics vacant so he could collect their revenues — and clashed with Archbishop Anselm over the Investiture Controversy. He was killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest in 1100, almost certainly murdered, possibly with the knowledge of his younger brother Henry. He left no heirs.
Why this matters for the exam
Castles as control
AQA exam questions frequently ask students to assess how William maintained control of England. The key argument is that castles did three things simultaneously: they gave small Norman garrisons military dominance over large populations; they acted as visible, permanent symbols of Norman power; and they allowed William to reward loyal followers with strategically important strongholds. The castle is not just a military technology — it is a political instrument. Questions about William's "methods of control" should always bring in castles, the feudal system, and the Church as three interlocking systems.
Revision checklist
Before moving on, make sure you can answer:
- Why did William not immediately take London after Hastings? What strategy did he use?
- Describe the main features of a motte-and-bailey castle. Why were they so useful to William?
- What were the main revolts against Norman rule between 1067 and 1075?
- What was the Harrying of the North? What evidence do we have for its scale and impact?
- How does Orderic Vitalis's account of the Harrying help us understand William's methods? What are its limitations as a source?
- What happened to William II and why was his relationship with the Church difficult?
- How did William I's death in 1087 affect the future of Norman England?
- Overall, how successful was William in establishing control of England? What were the limits of that control?
What's New snippet
Article slug: gcse-history-norman-england-how-william-took-control
Title: Castles, harrying, and the Domesday Book — how William turned a conquest into control
Winning at Hastings was the easy part. Keeping England meant building hundreds of castles, replacing the entire ruling class, and — when the north rebelled — laying waste to whole counties in the Harrying of the North. This page explains the methods William used to turn military victory into permanent political control.