Malcolm advancing drives the Northumbrians before him, some into the woods and hills, others into the city of Durham; for there have they always a sure refuge. Thither they drive their whole flocks and herds and carry their furniture, so that there is hardly room within the town for so great a crowd. Malcolm arrives and invests the city. It was not easy for one to go outside, and the sheep and cattle could not be driven to pasture: the churchyard was filled with them, and the church itself was scarcely kept clear of them. Mixed with the cattle, a crowd of women and children surrounded the church, so that the voices of the choristers were drowned by the clamour. The heat of summer adds to the miseries of famine. Every-where throughout the town were the sounds of grief, ‘et plurima mortis imago,’ as in the sack of Troy. The siege is raised by the miraculous intervention of St Cuthbert[46]. The wasting of Yorkshire by William and the five incursions of the Scots into Northumberland and Durham in the reign of Malcolm Canmore had the effect of reducing a large part of the soil of England to a comparatively unproductive state. The effacement of farms (and churches) in Hampshire, for the planting of the New Forest, had the same effect in a minor degree. The rigorous enforcement of the forest laws in the interests of the Norman nobles must have served also to remove one considerable source of the means of subsistence from the people. Whether these things, together with the general oppression of the poor, contributed much or little to what followed, it is the fact that the long period from the last two years of William to the welcomed advent of Henry II. to the throne in 1154, is filled with a record of famines, pestilences, and other national misfortunes such as no other period of English history shows.