Assignment Details

source reading

2024-2025

7L - History - Miss Sloan

Date Due

Nov. 14, 2024

Additional Info

Read the source below. Make sure you check up any terms you don't understand. You will be answering questions on in in Thursday's lesson.

The royal forces approached York, only to learn that the Danes had fled. The King ordered his men to repair the castles in the city. He himself continued to comb forests and remote mountainous places, stopping at nothing to hunt out the enemy hidden there. He 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. He made no effort to control his fury and punished the innocent with the guilty. In his anger he ordered that all crops, herds and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes, so that the whole region north of the Humber River might be stripped of all means of sustenance. As a result of this such a terrible famine fell upon the humble and defenseless people that more than 100,000 Christian folk of both sexes, young and old alike, perished of hunger.

Written by Orderic Vitalis in the 1120s. Orderic was half-English, half-Norman. He spent his childhood in England before training as a monk in Normandy, where he spent most of his adult life. The monastery Orderic lived in would frequently host visitors from across Europe and owned a lot of land in England.