The pacification of England was quite a long, drawn-out process in some regards, and yet quite quick in others. We primarily think of resistance in terms of armed actions, but it did also take other forms as well. A lot of this resistance is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but also appears in other contemporary histories. It's important at this juncture to note the tone of the ASC as a passive voice of English intellectual criticism of the Normans - a form of cultural resistance if you will. The Chronicle often talks of the 'wretchedness' of the people, and the bravery of those who resisted the Normans.

As you might imagine, there was heavy resistance immediately in the wake of the Conquest of 1066, and the Normans face a fierce fight and substantial losses taking the rest of the country. Fortunately for them, this resistance is never effectively coordinated into one unified campaign. Some of this resistance was nonetheless militarily quite successful: in 1067, Eadric 'the Wild', the son of a thegn of Herefordshire, unites with a Welsh force to overwhelm the Norman garrison at Hereford. He then raids across Herefordshire quite successfully, and seemingly holds out for some three years, according to Florence of Worcester reaching a peaceful settlement with William I as late as 1070. In the same year, William also has to campaign in Devon and lay siege to the city of Exeter where 'a large part of his army perished'. Exeter holds out for almost three weeks, before surrendering on the condition that the new king reaffirm the preexisting rights and privileges of the city and its people.

Other resistance is perhaps less overt: when William returns to England in December 1067, Christ Church in Canterbury was set alight and burned down. At the same time, Eadgar Ætheling, the rightful heir to the throne in 1066 went into exile in Scotland, where his sister married King Malcolm III. Murmurings of discontent were felt throughout the country, and William was forced to build several castles in Nottingham, York and across Lincolnshire to try and police the area. Meanwhile, Harold Godwinson's sons raided the South-West with a Hiberno-Norse fleet. They were, however, defeated by the people of Bristol, who presumably saw them as another attempted Irish raiding force attempting to capitalise on the chaos rather than as potential liberators.

English resistance maybe reaches its peak in 1069: on the 28th of January, the new Earl Robert of Northumbria and some 900 of his men were ambushed in the streets of Durham and killed by the Northumbrian people. In response, Eadgar Ætheling marched south to York with an army and was hailed by the Northumbrians as a liberator, but was ultimately forced to withdraw after a defeat to William's 'overwhelming' response which ravaged the city of York in response. Eadgar returned again a few months later with Earl Waltheof and a Danish fleet, seizing York, razing the castle and killing 'many hundreds of Frenchmen'. William's response is the infamous Harrying of the North. With the Danish fleet unassailable, William 'utterly ravaged and laid waste that shire', killing many and causing a devastating famine. At the same time as this, however, Hereward 'the Wake' leads a serious of increasingly bold raids in the East Anglian fens, focusing in particular on Norman monasteries in the area. By 1071, Hereward had assembled a significant army, including Bishop Æthelwine of Ely. William was forced to lead a joint naval and land force to the fens to surround Hereward. Many of the raiders surrendered, but Hereward led his remnants out 'valiantly'. We must assume this was some kind of heroic last stand, as Hereward disappears from the record at this time, although an actual death is not recorded.

By the mid-1070s, some reconcilliation is clearly underway, as William I leads a joint Anglo-Norman force against Maine, with the English component noted for the severity of their raiding and the extent of the damage they inflicted on the countryside. Further progress was made in 1074 when William seems to have reconciled with Eadgar Ætheling.

The resistance doesn't vanish overnight, however. In 1075, Earl Waltheof of Northumbria was implicated in a plot which aimed to support a Northumbrian rising with another in Brittany, and backed by a Danish fleet. Furthermore, in 1080, the Lotharingian Bishop Walcher of Durham was killed with over a hundred Flemish and Frenchmen by the people of Northumbria.

By the late 1080s, the situation appears to be stabilising. William II eases his transition of power by distributing vast sums of money to minster chuches across the country, to the extent that every church in England supposedly received at minimum 60d. He also spent vast sums on poor relief, and freed prisoners, as well as pledging to relax the laws and restore access to woodlands and hunting rights, although his reneging on this.promise did foster his unpopularity.