The Domesday Book, the great survey of English landholding commissioned by William in 1086, is in large part a record of this redistribution.

Anglo-Saxon landholders who appear in documents before the Conquest largely disappear from those roles after it, replaced by Norman names.

The harshest moment of this period was the Harrying of the North, the devastating military campaign that William conducted in 1069-1070 against rebellion in the north of England.

The campaign involved systematic destruction: fields burned, livestock killed, settlements destroyed, local populations killed or driven into famine.

Contemporary accounts describe a landscape left barren for years, with the bones of the dead left unburied.