William the Conqueror apologises for 'desolate' North East

In the winter of 1069-70 William the Conqueror famously ordered the 'Harrying of the North', during which his troops deliberately burned all the crops and livestock of northern England, condemning the region's population to a slow death by starvation. Seventeen years later, William himself was dying a slow and painful death in a monastery outside of Rouen. According to the chronicler Orderic Vitalis (half-English, and writing several decades after the event), the king apologised for his earlier actions:

'I treated the native inhabitants of the kingdom with unreasonable severity, cruelly oppressed high and low, unjustly disinherited many, and caused the death of thousands by starvation and war, especially in Yorkshire. This was because the men of Deira and Northumbria welcomed the army of King Swein of Denmark when he attacked me, and slew Robert de Comines and many men-at-arms in Durham, together with my other magnates and experienced knights. In mad fury I descended on the English of the North like a raging lion, and ordered that their homes and crops with all their equipment and furnishings should be burnt at once and their great flocks and herds of sheep and cattle slaughtered everywhere. So I chastised a great multitude of men and women with the lash of starvation and - alas! - was the cruel murderer of many thousands, both young and old, of this fair people.'

The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall, vol. iv, 94-5.