The famous story of the sinking of the White Ship in 1120 and the death of king Henry I’s heir, prince William, and many members of the royal family and aristocracy was recorded by many contemporary historians. Here excerpts from sixwriters are included, passages that vary in length and style. The writers are Eadmer, William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis, Symeon of Durham, Hugh the Chanter and Henry of Huntingdon. The accounts by William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis are literary masterpieces, providing historical detail and an overall depiction that has elements of epic andtragedy.

Alcuin’s letter no. 16 is addressed to Æthelred, king of Northumbria in 793, the year in which Lindisfarne was destroyed by the Vikings in their first attack on England. In the letter Alcuin blames the king and the people for their immoral lives, and like Gildas before him, sees the foreign invasion as God’s just punishment for such immorality. The excerpt from Symeon of DUrham’s twelfth-century history shows the portents seen shortly before the Viking attack.

William I’s ‘Harrying of the North’ was a military expedition against local rebels and a Danish invasion force in the winter of 1069–70. It has been regarded since the 1870s as a uniquely savage treatment of the English inhabitants of northern England, wantonly destructive of life and the means of sustenance, and tantamount to genocide. Such views derive from the two fullest medieval accounts, by the early twelfth-century historians Symeon of Durham and Orderic Vitalis. However, neither was an eye-witness, both were at work two generations later, and both had their own agenda in describing the destruction of the North and William I’s cruelty. The Harrying should instead be seen as a routine military operation which took place, unusually, in the depths of winter, and so had unusually severe consequences. More strictly contemporary accounts from Evesham and Beverley reveal a regional but probably localized famine and a refugee crisis. Further, the record in Domesday Book (1086) of many Yorkshire villages as ‘waste’ should be read as referring not to physical destruction but to the absence of surplus values accruing to landlords, and not caused by the Harrying alone. The Harrying of the North was no genocide.

This chapter examines three early twelfth-century texts produced at Durham: an ecclesiastical history, a short vernacular poem and a Cuthbertine miracle collection, that propose a new phase in the history of Cuthbert’s cult. These texts applaud the restoration of monastic attendance at the shrine, and interpret Cuthbert’s ceremonial translation into the new cathedral as a replay of his late seventh-century translation on Lindisfarne. Bede’s sanctity is given a prominent role alongside Cuthbert’s as the textual driver behind northern church reform. These Cuthbertine texts emerge as sites of forceful criticism, both towards Anglo-Saxon and Norman secular elites who attempt to coerce the cult, and also, more surprisingly, towards some of the bishops of Durham. Cuthbert’s interest in defining and monitoring jurisdictional spaces is carried over from the Historia, but rendered with greater ambition. On the one hand, the saint devotes much of his power to promoting the diocese as his independent lordship, free from financial and judicial incursion; on the other, he uses retributive miracles to define a distinctively masculine monastic jurisdiction debarred to women.