In the winter of 1069–70, after repeated northern risings and a Danish landing, William I's army moved through Yorkshire and the surrounding shires destroying villages, food stores, farm implements and livestock. Orderic Vitalis, writing two generations later and generally sympathetic to William, condemned the campaign and stated that more than 100,000 people died of the resulting famine. Simeon of Durham and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describe the same devastation. Modern historians accept that a deliberate scorched-earth campaign took place and that famine followed, but reject Orderic's figure as far larger than the region's likely population; they also divide over the Domesday 'waste' entries, which David Palliser and others have argued reflect administrative and fiscal categories as much as physical destruction, while Paul Dalton and others read them as evidence of real and lasting depopulation. The episode is treated in the Cambridge World History of Genocide as a case study in deliberate destruction of a civilian resource base.
William I's Norman army systematically destroyed settlements, crops, livestock and food stores across Yorkshire and the north of England to suppress rebellion and Danish intervention
The estimate is reconstructed from Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, using household multipliers: England as a whole is put at 1.5-2.25 million, with Yorkshire and the northern shires at roughly 150,000. Domesday records around 60 per cent of Yorkshire vills as wholly or partly 'waste' seventeen years after the harrying, though historians dispute how much of that reflects killing, flight, or fiscal exemption. Orderic Vitalis's claim of 100,000 dead is generally treated as rhetorical.
The upper bound is Orderic Vitalis's figure for famine deaths, given around 1125 and rejected by modern historians as exceeding the plausible population of the affected shires. No lower bound is established; that a severe famine with heavy mortality followed the campaign is not disputed, but its scale has never been reconstructed.
The deliberate destruction of crops, food stores, livestock and settlements and the ensuing famine are documented by Orderic Vitalis, Simeon of Durham and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
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