Except in Yorkshire, the Norman Conquest had no immediate effects upon the people of England in the way of famine and pestilence. From the last great mortality of 1049, a period of nearly forty years elapses until we come to the great pestilence and sharp famine in the last year of the Conqueror’s reign (1086-7). The harrying of Yorkshire, however, is too important a local incident to be passed over in this history. Of these ruthless horrors in the autumn of 1069 we have some particulars from the pen of Simeon of Durham, who has contemporary authority. There was such hunger, he says, that men ate the flesh of their own kind, of horses, of dogs, and of cats. Others sold themselves into perpetual slavery in order that they might be able to sustain their miserable lives on any terms (like the Chinese in later times). Others setting out in exile from their country perished before their journey was ended. It was horrible to look into the houses and farmyards, or by the wayside, and see the human corpses dissolved in corruption and crawling with worms. There was no one to bury them, for all were gone, either in flight or dead by the sword and famine. The country was one wide solitude, and remained so for nine years. Between York and Durham no one dwelt, and travellers went in great fear of wild beasts and of robbers[44]. William of Malmesbury says that the city of York was so wasted by fire that an old inhabitant would not have recognized it; and that the country was still waste for sixty miles at the time of his writing (1125)[45]. In the Domesday survey we find that there were 540 houses so waste that they paid nothing, 400 houses “not inhabited,” of which the better sort pay one penny and others less, and only 50 inhabited houses paying full dues. The same local chronicler who has left particulars of the devastation of 1069-70, has given also a picture of the siege of Durham by Malcolm Canmore in 1091, which may serve to realize for us what a medieval siege was, and what the Scots marches had to endure for intervals during several centuries:--