Laid Waste: The Harrying of the North in Domesday Book and Today

In the winter of 1069 to 1070 William the Conqueror laid waste the north of England. Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, records "waste" against many northern holdings, but historians disagree about what the word means. Using the Hull Domesday Project's coding of 20,195 entries, I map the 1,345 entries flagged as waste, read the wording of those with English text, test whether waste in Yorkshire follows the geography of a campaign, and compare places that were waste with similar places today. Waste is a northern and Welsh border phenomenon: 79% of flagged entries lie in six northern and north midland counties, and outside them and Herefordshire only 2.1% of places carry the word. Yorkshire's recorded value in 1086 was 35% of its 1066 value. The word has distinct uses: 95% of waste entries in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire say the land is waste in 1086, but 70% in Cheshire and Shropshire say it was waste when acquired and had since recovered. In Yorkshire, waste is unrelated to distance from York or from Roman roads but rises with height: each 100 m multiplies the odds by 2.1. Against places of similar 1066 value in the same county, places waste in 1086 are no less likely to be built up today, and local household income is 2.5% lower. The waste of 1086 looks less like a trail of destruction than a map of slow recovery, and its mark on the present is faint. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/harrying-of-the-north/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/harrying-of-the-north. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/harrying-of-the-north/.