True North(umberland) - A House of Hwicce AAR

Prologue: Heirs of Kings

If you look on a map of the British Isles at the start of the eleventh century, you will find no mention on the kingdom of Hwicce. It had, after all, ceased to be some four hundred years earlier. Yet the influence of its offspring could still be felt: the heirs of kings ruled still.

The lands of the House of Hwicce had expanded greatly since its incorporation into the, then, Kingdom of Mercia. By 1066, Duke Morcar I of Northumberland and his older brother, Duke Eadwin I of Lancaster, held land stretching from Bristol to the Borders and from the Irish Sea to the Wash.


Northumberland formed the northern half of Hwiccian domain, together with the Duchy of York. Its ruler, the aforementioned Morcar I, was by all accounts a fairly useless leader; he was a shy, cowardly, arbitrary, disorganised, unmarried and without issue. (His brother, incidentally, was little better.) It was only through sheer ambition that he had retained any semblance of order in his lands.


The interest in his story, therefore, lies not in his greatness, for he was by no means great, but the implications of wider political and social issues on his lands, because the upheaval of the coming years was to shape the futures of so many, the fates of kingdoms and the destinies of the heirs of kings.

1066-1069: Confessions’ Succession

With the death of King Edward the Confessor, the England fell into a bitter three way war. In the North, the Norwegian King, Harald Hardrada, was leading his troops across the Yorkshire dales. In the South, the Duke of Normandy, Willam the Bastard, was preparing to cross the Channel and invade. Sandwiched awkwardly in between was the Saxon king, Harold Godwinson (crowned Harold II of England on 6th January 1066).

It was indeed in the lands of the Duke of Northumberland in the autumn and early winter of 1066 that the war was begun, and ultimately decided. The victory of the outnumbered Norwegians at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire was against all the odds, but was in essence a pyrrhic one. Although they managed to push the English forces back west into Lancaster and capture the strategically important castle at York in early October, their losses were such that no Norwegian general would ever be able to field a force of more than the roughly 2000 men who survived. English loses by contrast were less significant to the war as a whole, losing maybe 6000 men to the Norwegians’ 8000, but the loss of the bridge to the Norwegians caused a rout that King Harold failed to stem.

With the apparent superiority of the Norwegian forces proved in the field, Morcar hedged his bets by wedding the eldest daughter of Harald Hardrada, Princess Ingegerd (who, incidentally, was some 20 years younger than her new spouse), in November 1066, though it was noted at the time, particularly by scholars in the Saxon south, as coercion by the victorious Scandinavian for whom the cooperation of the local leaders was supposed invaluable to the supply of his (severely depleted) army. It must be noted that, with the levies available to Duke Morcar totalling only some 900 men, he had little choice but to accept the status quo.



The defeat of the Norwegians at the hands of the Normans in December 1066 was really just a footnote to Stamford Bridge, but the overwhelming of Hardrada’s forces at Whitmere Wood (which now sits in the suburbs of Leeds) ended any hopes the Norse King had of taking England as his own. Reduced to some 1000 men, his forces were defeated by Duke Morcar I at Aldborough the following spring and York was recaptured in September 1067. Aside from the short lived Norwegian siege of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire in the winter of 1068 and small raiding parties along the North Sea coast, any chance of a serious Norwegian effort to capture England were dashed, though a formal peace treaty would not be made for another decade.

The Normans, however, bounced off this triumph with victory over the Saxons outside the walls of Warwick in January 1067. Norman forces secured several more victories so that within two years, they had pacified the entirety of the Thames valley and looked sure to beat an ever retreating Harold into submission.

Unfortunately for Duke William, this was not to be. On 22nd March 1069, William died in his camp during the siege of Northampton, ostensibly of natural causes, though there is little hard evidence to support such a view as the body was quickly and unceremoniously ditched. A likelier version of events is that he was killed whilst pretending to be one of his men, enabling him to join some of their raucous (and often dangerous) games but his embarrassed staff executed one of the first true cover-ups in recorded history.


His son, Duke Robert II, was only 15 when he ascended to the dukedom, and his regent refused to press his claims, removing any threat the Normans posed to Saxon rule in England and cementing Harold’s position as King.

Indeed! I'm not sure of Harold's nickname is in game, but he should really be King Harold 'the ridiculously lucky'...

1069-1077: Harold’s Peace

For many years after the death of Duke William, King Harold maintained an uneasy ‘peace’. In reality, it was nothing of the sort, but in comparison with the years that had just passed, and the years that were to come over the next three decades, “Harold’s Peace” was a safe haven; during the period, small Norwegian forces continued to terrorise the inhabitants of the east coast but were easily repulsed and heretics caused the first serious religious unrest in Britain since Roman times but had virtually disappeared again within a couple of years. However, more notably, for the 8 years that constituted “Harold’s Peace”, there were no major wars south of the Scottish border. The Kingdom of England even managed to expand, with the annexation, through marriage, of the county of Gwent is southern Wales into the lands of Morcar’s brother, the Duchy of Lancaster.

It was in this period that Morcar fathered four sons and a daughter. The eldest, the future Morcar II, was born in 1070. His three younger brothers, however, died in suspicious circumstances; the youngest, named Eardwulf, is only recorded as being born before immediately disappearing from all records of the time. It has been hypothesised, though never proved, that Morcar, guided by the complicated succession laws that governed his lands, had his children murdered so as to keep the realm intact. If this is so, he failed, for within 20 years of his death, Northumberland would be torn into three.

1077: Harold’s War

In 1077, this naïve peace was torn asunder by the outbreak of what is known to most historians as “Harold’s War”. This term is a colloquialism that no more describes the causes of the war than a doughnut can explain why the Earth goes around the Sun, yet the name caught on for more superficial reasons; put simply, just as “The War of Captain Jenkins’ Ear” is a more appealing name than “That War about some Slave Ships in the Atlantic Ocean”, “Harold’s War” makes for a better name than “That War where some Nobles wanted to Depose the King”.

The real reasons behind the uprising can be attributed almost entirely to a policy to cope with the after effects of the Norman invasion. Harold’s attempts at “Redistribution” following the destruction of much of the Thames valley and southern ports by the departing (even more so than the attacking) Norman troops led to discontent in the North. Money, that had formerly been spent to protect the border against the Scots or subsidise the upkeep of levies in the Northern counties, went instead directly to towns and cities in the south. Though there was initial support for the policy all over the realm, rumours quickly spread in both Northumberland and Lancashire, the two dukedoms of the north, that this policy was due to escalate into a full scale vendetta by the south against the north. Of course, nothing of the sort would ever have happened, for, despite pockets of great wealth in places like Oxford and London, the north’s rich agriculture and distinct lack of recent rampaging pseudo-Frenchmen made Lancashire and Northumberland the two most valuable assets the King possessed.

Even so, Duke Eadwin I of Lancashire was convinced that, under Harold’s rule, neither of the two Hwiccians would prosper. It is for this reason that, when Harold denied Eadwin the right to enact tariffs between Lancashire and neighbouring Oxfordshire on the 16th of December 1077, Eadwin declared Harold a usurper to the very throne he sat on, citing Harold’s brother Tostig as the rightful King. His motives were clear; a man put on the throne by a Northerner could not fail to repeal the “injustices” done against the north. The 2000 men Eadwin had at his disposal marched into Oxfordshire within a week. The armies of Duke Morcar crossed into Northamptonshire on Boxing Day, having reportedly spent Christmas itself in Lincolnshire’s southernmost chapel.

Thus it was that, by the break of the New Year, England had once more been thrown into turmoil. In many ways, the name attributed to the war is rather apt, despite being rather scant on detail: to those in the Northern counties, Harold had caused this war, through those policies seen as oppressive; to those in the South, this war would decide fate of good King Harold.