How The Normans Burnt & Rebuilt The North Of England | Dan Snow's Norman Walks | Chronicle

[Music] walking here through the grounds of york minster i'm in the shadow of the city's most famous landmark and the earliest part of the building the crypt was built by the normans [Music] on my walk today i'm gonna be looking at how the normans transformed york into the political and religious stronghold of the north of england in the course of a fascinating century they brought first terror and violence this part of the country and then long-term economic prosperity and they left behind them a legacy that endured [Music] if you mention the to any true yorkshire men they'll probably get an earful they have a long memory in these parts and what they're remembering in particular is the so-called infamous harrying of the north in the late 1060s there were a series of uprisings against norman rule and these were repressed by the normans with terrible cruelty nearly every settlement between york and durham was destroyed the very fields were sowed with salt to destroy agriculture a hundred thousand people were killed and tens of thousands more died of starvation there were even reports of people resorting to cannibalism [Music] the harrying brought the north under control in the most brutal and effective manner and it meant the normans had achieved what the saxons never quite managed from now on yorkshire and northumberland would be part of a genuinely unified england with the city of york as its regional capital [Music] it's such an incredible layering of history here at york it was the stronghold for the romans in this part of the country and was very important under the saxons vikings and of course the normans and it went on really mattering these extraordinary walls were built in the 14th century and the minster itself wasn't completed until 1472. great walls and minster are a sign of york's prosperity right across the middle ages the city benefited from a boom started by the normans on this walk i'm hoping to see how the invaders not only conquered and controlled this region but inspired faith commerce education and technology the fabric of a new era for the north from york i'm going to be traveling into rural parts devastated by the harrying of the north today it forms the southern edge of the north york moors national park my five mile walk will take me from helmsley to the village of rivo through an area reignited in the late norman period through the enthusiastic sponsorship of religion in particular by the creation of one of our greatest abbeys today the yorkshire countryside is littered with romantic ruins of medieval monasteries but before i head out there i've come here to the edge of the medieval city of york to see where this link between york the normans and the monasteries really began york museum gardens is where i've arranged to meet professor janet burton the country's foremost authority on the monasteries of northern england the gardens lie beside the roman origins of the city the fort of ibarakum but i've come here to see a very different sort of landmark established by our country's next great builders in stone twenty years after the massacre of the harrying william ii son of the conqueror granted this site to the benedictines and started saint mary's abbey so it's unusual to have such a big monastery so close to the middle of town no it isn't really in the 11th century when saint mary's was founded the late 11th century it was really quite a normal thing to do to found a monastery either within a city or on a site like this just outside the walls of the city how are they useful to the king why was it in his interest to have this vast abbey in the middle of york primarily it was the prayers of the monks it was the spiritual services the king looked on monks as spiritual soldiers but um amber stephen himself the founder abbott wrote a short narrative of the foundation of saint mary's and he makes a specific point that william ii was quite aware that york had been a troublesome place so when this stone abbey started to rise up here in the late 11th century within sight of the stone minster you think of the stone castles that william the first had built these were all real symbols of royal authority so what about the link between this abbey and perhaps the more famous abbeys to the north of here where i'm heading next many norman lords this new aristocracy that settled after the conquest they start patronizing saint mary's they grant lands so in one way they're saying you know if this is the king's abbey we want to show our support for the king by supporting his his monastery but then they go and do the same thing by founding their own monasteries so they might build a castle they build a castle but they also found a monastery they get the prayers of the monks but they get a visible reminder of their power and their authority what about the effect of these monasteries on the not the population in these parts are these sort of little nuclei of norman-ness that are slowly making the country more norman i i think they were yes i mean william marmsbury the norman chronicler comments on the coming of the normans and how i think he said in every city and village you could see churches rise up and the style unknown before i mean they were building they were building big sometimes we get mistaken impressions about monasteries such as st mary's they're thought of as being very inward-looking communities oases but for all that monasteries did interact with the societies the communities in which they were located through developing their estates the production of manuscripts through education often benedictine abbeys run schools mary's ran one local people did comment on the importance as they perceived it of monastic houses as providers of education and hospitality and the provision of charity st mary's would play a role in york's development for 450 years and in 1132 it played host to 12 monks traveling from clervaux abbey in northeast france they represented a radical new group called the cistercians determined to live an austere self-sufficient lifestyle in the true manner of saint benedict they were traveling north to the area of my walk today destined to become the focus of a new community that would drive development in one of the remotest parts of the country and they came at the invitation of the new norman lord the town of helmsley gateway to the vast expanse of the north york moors wild country which would have been even more wild back in the 11th century following the harrying of the normans the productivity and the population would have fallen dramatically but now the normans were keen to change all this in particular a man called walter a speck who built helmsley castle 50 years after the harrying walter respect was a rising star he was the justicia of the north effectively the king's chief minister he held lands across yorkshire and northumberland and would go on to lead forces against the scots at the battle of the standard but from 1120 onwards this was a speck's main residence walter respect was responsible for the building of this east tower well in fact the bottom two thirds of it i love the way you can still see the original roof it'd been a wonderful home for him and his family and the chroniclers tell us that he had a large library of books as well so this was a scholar a military man and very wealthy as well it seems that the erudite speck was a man of his time and the late norman period was the golden age for the foundation of monasteries this was a speck's opportunity to seal his passage to heaven enforce his political dominance and leave a positive legacy for this troubled region my real interest today lies out there on the moors and that's where i'll be walking because it was out there that walter a speck gave huge tracks of his lands to that group of cistercian monks that had been staying in saint mary's abbey in york and they would found the first ever cistercian monastery in the north of england and that's where i'm heading [Music] with helmsley castle walter respect had created an awe-inspiring symbol of his power and control his next task was to establish a great institution to drive norman colonisation [Music] but as my walk leaves the town espec's impact was more subtle he was guarding of the massive areas of royal forest land which for the past three centuries has been the grounds of duncan park [Music] i'll be heading west following the rydale valley upstream through walter respects marlin estate and into the territory which he gifted the cistercians my destination is a small village hidden at the bottom of rydale and clustered around the ruins of rivo abbey one of yorkshire's great monastic institutions and a legacy that would far outlast the normans [Music] back at helsley my walk starts in a legacy of a very different kind the back garden of walter respects castle for the past three centuries this cleared area has served as the parkland of duncan park one of the great country estates of yorkshire duncan park was set up by the duncan family in the very early 1700s now they had made all their money in banking they were new money so in that way they're interesting parallel to walter respect who of course in the 11th century was also a new face a man on the make [Music] it's said that the norman lords created their own sporting venue right here a clearing where moreland beasts were driven in and then hunted for the entertainment of guests watching from the castle and to this day you can still make out the faint ridge in the land that once enclosed the hunting area [Music] some of the duncam oaks today could be as old as this medieval arena [Music] this is exactly the kind of pile walter speck would have built for himself if you've been around in the 18th century since 1700 duncan park has sought to celebrate and indulge in the beauty of the local landscape the cistercians too revel in the solitude ensured by the norman forests and the remote rydale valley but the monks couldn't succeed without bringing a degree of civilization to the moors fantastic this is my first view of this steep valley here called rydale and rivo abbey lies at the bottom of that a few miles along here and my walk's going to take me along the top of this escarpment beautiful views all the way i hope but the first thing i'm going to have a look at is actually the first piece of abbey infrastructure that's been left behind it's called on the map in the medieval village of griff and this was all part of the abbey's lands in 1131 walter speck agreed to give away a thousand acres of his yorkshire lands to the arriving cistercians this was but a small donation from the great norman lord but for the twelve pioneering monks it was enough to establish their own abbey and remain true to their ideal of self-sufficiency on the flat plateau above the rye i've come to the land of griff farm to meet the team who've investigated what took place here on the edge of revo's first grant so guys on my ordinate survey map this is not there's a medieval village is that true yes and no i mean doomsday actually has reference to a ville some sort of settlement on this location we haven't produced any evidence of a settlement have we really we spent about six weeks up here a few years back um really getting to grips with the earthworks trying to understand what was going on any surprises um once you look at the layout and start to understand how all the elements of this site relate to each other you realize it's not a village it's a single unit it's a farmstead i suppose the surprise being that we've confirmed that it was a grange not the deserted medieval village that we see mentioned on the maps but uh certainly i think some of the more substantial buildings are really really good find so it's a big prosperous farm then is that what it is that's exactly what it is yes it's a it's a monastic farmstead an outlying monastic farmstead called lagrange that the building we're in is is a barn we think from the plan of it and the size of it uh and in old french grange means barn so this is this is the barn at the heart of the grange how contemporary is this to the founding of revo abbey it was there absolutely at the beginning of the foundation it was part of the original grant from malta spec there was the grant of the abbey site grange land here the initial grant was for about the equivalent of a thousand acres uh it wasn't a contiguous area of thousand day because it would have been split between various parcels of land the parcel of land that would have come with with griff as a bequest to the monastery at the outset would have been about 480 acres about half the total land given over to the monastery this this area is not a blank canvas when when the normans arrive it's been used since prehistory the name griff which is given to this grange is a norse name it's in other words we've got a viking community living here who are farming a substantial area of land arable land up here so that's what the monastic community takes on and they use that as a bridge head for expanding out onto the north york moors there i mean we look at this today and it is a a relatively tame arable landscape that looks as though it's been like that forever but when when the monastic community came here first of all they inherited something that was more akin to an island available in a sea of heather and moorland really uh quite unpromising land and it needed it needed real vision and real entrepreneurial spirit really to actually make something productive out of that okay so are there any quarries the griff was the first of what became a network of grange sites as revo grew it needed more food more support work and inevitably more income [Music] by the 1300s the abbey had 20 granges providing crops fish and vast numbers of sheep they were the engine room of revo's economy and as new benefactors continued to pledge land and resources the reach of the abbey spread far beyond the moors but from the very outset the monks created a demand for wood and here in rydale the steep valley sides have changed remarkably little so how could this woodland here be productive well i mean this is this is a a piece of ground which really isn't much use for anything else so so it's it's making the best of a bad lot in a way putting woodland on it i say putting woodland on it it's been wooded since the last ice age but throughout the medieval period and right up to today as you can see it's been managed woodland intensively managed and for most of the medieval period and quite a lot of the post-medieval period as well it's been coppiced in other words the trees have been cut right down to the base you get that crop of fresh new growth which after 20 years is perfect stuff for charcoal manufacturer so i never know how you know that something's an ancient forest or not well not necessarily by the trees that are here today i mean we're surrounded by very modern larch and pine but very often by the species that are at ground level which rely on this injection of sunlight that they get through the process of coppicing and this is a particularly good patch here we've got these little lovely little violets bluebells primroses just up there we've got wood sorrel and over there wild garlic wood anemones so we've got the full range of species that really characterize what is the best of our woodland flora whilst the demand for wood lasted centuries the first decades of revo's life saw a demand for one special commodity stone between 1132 and 1260 the abbey itself was built rebuilt and regularly extended and right here in what is still called quarry bank wood the scars of the building work are very clear indeed you can see some of the big the blocks of stuff they haven't used yes it's almost left in situ as they as they stopped working these were the some of the the rocks that were left behind that weren't needed just a mile downstream from revo the monks found a fine-grained limestone which became part of the abbey's refectory and we've seen a couple of others on the walk i mean were they were they quarrying all along this face here yeah this this outcrop of limestone comes along the edge of this escarpment and indeed there are numerous other quarries along this area with a keen eye you can spot revo's managed woodlands and quarries all along rydale in 1145 water respect was pleased enough with progress to grant more lands further up the valley and into the moors but my walk now heads downhill into rydale for the first time and towards the quiet hidden focal point of revo's world [Music] it's my first proper view of revo abbey i always think those extraordinary buildings and this setting combine to make it on the most evocative ruins in the whole of europe the grand site owes much to revo's third abbot aylred a theologian of international repute he presided over the abbey for 20 years at the very end of the norman period he was introduced to the area by none other than walter respec and was so impressed that he never returned to his native northumberland by the end of the norman age alert had laid the framework for this site's development and had set revo up as the biggest hub for commerce and community in the region it's an absolutely massive ruin isn't it i mean was this the biggest abbey in the north of england well getting on that way certainly it was the um headquarters of the uh the cistercians in the north of england and was the first cistercian abbey in the north of england so it's uh its size warrants its status shall we say in that way and uh how many monks would there have been here well at its height there were 150 choir monks so this is mid 13th century and um upwards of 450 to 500 labor of those looking after them so they were doing most of the manual work that's a big settlement it is indeed so which parts are normally principally the nave okay that we're in now if you turn around and look at the walls you can see the uh we've got two sets of uh romanesque norman archers uh and then on top where this where the uh stone changes uh colour um that architecture is is more or less a hundred years later so those rounded ones absolutely that's that's the norman part of the the abbey um it's a key gen piece of general absolutely the round ones are norman once you start to get uh more pointed you're into gothic so okay so this this either side of us is normal as well so this is more or less alerts church and then the rest of the architecture they going further building higher and longer it's about 100 years later you're about 12 12 20 finished by about 1260. so as the abbey starts making more money it starts to build absolutely yes you can build higher nearer to god and you can build longer because you can and so what are the monks up to during that golden age i mean some of them are in here studying and praying others are out reclaiming land and farming and things like that yes i mean they it's uh that because they were a self-sufficient community the more land they got and the more the population grew here of course they needed more supplies or whatever to keep that community going but they were very quickly into trading in wool wool was the principal economic measure at that time and they were foremost in the uh certainly in this country and uh formulating the middle ages the the wool industry in this country the farming implements all had to be made so they're very much into iron smelting uh they were mining iron further up the valley bringing it back here and smelting so there were furnaces here um during the monks time and continued well after the dissolution so you think the legacy of the monks here actually continued well into modern history absolutely with the dissolution the um industry the iron industry carried on for another hundred years because it was uh an important economic area and it's as a result of the iron industry that we have the village now so what happens to the great founder walter respect well it's interesting the reason for the founding of the abbey was that he'd lost his son in a riding accident and so declared that god would be the heir to his lands he then ended up in the last 10 years of his life coming back here as a monk so he gave up all the power and prestige really absolutely yes so he entered as a novice and uh and was accepted into the orders and spent the last years of his life here within the uh abbey that he'd helped to found he must have been seriously worried about his soul well is that about it although giving the land of course make sure you get through the pearly gates that's for sure the remarkable actions of walter speck show just what kind of people the norman lee were men of action and ambition [Music] perhaps his motive was no more than to gain his own entry into heaven but the greatness of his institution is undeniable and the ruins still dominate this valley the simple cistercian aims of solitude and self-sufficiency attracted so much support that they would end up controlling the wool and mining industries building lines of communications across the moors and back to the trading hub of york this sturdy georgian bridge may maybe only just over a couple of hundred years old but it's replacing a norman bridge which have been doing exactly the same job and that is connecting the abbey there with all sorts of things like granges and wool houses quarries and ironworks further up the dale the normans imposed an infrastructure here of bridges roads and drainage ditches which ensured that the moors would never be the same again and the true extent of the norman's legacy in the north only becomes clear when you look at the range of other institutions they founded the monks of saint mary's were so impressed with the visiting cistercians that some quickly left to establish their own cistercian abbey at fountains this site and revo would become medieval giants but would sit alongside kirkstall and roche kirkham and byland whitby gervo selby and in the northwest furnace and some bees in medieval england only the king could match the monasteries for wealth and power the fact that henry viii would find intolerable but the dissolution of the monasteries couldn't change the fact that for four centuries a nationwide network of norman institutions had developed everything from faith to farming and here in remote yorkshire the norman abbeys are celebrated more than anywhere quarries mining woodland and ruins are all part of the fabric of a national park and to end my walk i've climbed up here to revo terrace which 150 years after the dissolution became part of duncan park so charles duncan bought both the helmsley estates and the revo estates for the sum of 90 000 pounds the lands that walter respect had divided in 1132 were back together once again oh there we go lovely gap in the trees there you can see revo abbey the grandest fully imaginable for the duncan family estate i find it hard to believe that wall to respect the powerful norman baron who helped found this monastery ended up swapping his castles and his lands to end his days as a monk down there seems hard to imagine with our 21st century sensibilities in yorkshire we can see the normans at their most barbaric but as illustrated by walter respec also at their most devout and forward thinking for me revo really embodies all things norman the love of ambitious building projects and the obsession with power wealth and christianity walter speck died in 1154 which was coincidentally the same year as the last norman king stephen but by that time this abbey and others like it were transforming this landscape totally they were ushering in a new era of prosperity and international trade and commerce and they were helping to cement this part of the country into the new anglo-norman kingdom

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 45,684

Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages, harrying of the north, norman invasion of england, norman invasion 1066, norman invasion documentary, dan snow documentary, dan snow norman walks, dan snow battlefield, dan snow history, william the conqueror, history of the north, history of york, bbc documentary history, norman conquest, the normans, bbc documentary, history of england, 1066 documentary, chronicle

Id: nxrTVfKBKuE

Length: 28min 30sec (1710 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021