THE NORMAN CONQUEST
The Viking Age ends the way it began—with bloodshed
January 5–December 25, AD 1066
Now when King Harald Sigurdsson saw this, he went into the fray where the greatest crash of weapons was, and there was a sharp conflict, in which many people fell on both sides. King Harald then was in a rage, and ran out in front of the array, and hewed down with both hands; so that neither helmet nor armor could withstand him, and all who were nearest gave way before him.
—Snori Sturluson, Heimskringla
BY THIS POINT IN HISTORY, IT’S PRETTY safe to say that almost every single important person in France and England could trace his or her ancestry back to Viking ties somewhere. Sure, the kings of Europe weren’t sailing around in longships whacking people in the head with axes, but somewhere in their family tree, they probably had a grandpa or two who enjoyed spending his weekends kicking peasants and plundering the countryside and a grandma who thought that was pretty cool.
But even though Viking culture was now finding itself getting all mixed up with cultures from everywhere else in Europe, the world was still waiting for one big event to finally tie everything together.
That would come in 1066, in the form of a Viking descendant who had fully integrated himself into medieval European Christian rule. And this mighty warlord would bring a stability to the monarchy that can be seen in England to this very day.
On January 5, 1066, the English king Edward the Confessor did a terrible thing: He died without leaving a son to take over. Edward, the seventh son of the now infamous Ethelred the Unready, had ruled England in relative peace for the past twenty-four years, with very few Viking raids and only a couple of wars against the Scots and Welsh. But with his death, the bloodline of Alfred the Great was at an end.
Upon his death, three men laid claim to the throne of England. They were all prepared to fight to the death for it in the most brutal manner imaginable, and the epic war for control of the country would change the course of British history forever.
The first man was Harold Godwinson, the most powerful Anglo-Saxon earl in England. (If earl sounds a lot like jarl, it’s because the English adopted the idea from the Vikings.) Harold’s dad had been a jarl under Knut the Great, and his wife was Edward the Confessor’s sister, plus Harold swears that right before he died, Edward was like, “Hey, Harold, you can totally be king after I die and there’s no take-backs.” The English nobles, who liked Harold because he was an English noble like them, said, “Yep, that works for us,” and gave him the crown, and he put a big smile on his face and flopped down on the throne like he owned the joint.
This didn’t really work for Duke William of Normandy. A direct grandson of Hrolf the Walker, William was Edward the Confessor’s cousin, and he was all, “No way, dude, Edward totally said I could be king way earlier.” (Apparently, being named king is like calling “Shotgun!” so you can sit in the front seat of a car.) William was the illegitimate son of a guy named Robert the Devil, who probably wasn’t the nicest dad ever, so it shouldn’t come as a shock that William ended up becoming the sort of duke who dealt with rebellious armies by chopping the hands off enemy prisoners.
The third man who wanted the crown was the ultra-heroic warrior-king of Norway, Harald Hardrada. Described as “the Thunderbolt of the North” and “the Last of the Vikings,” Harald had the least claim to the throne but the most exciting backstory. A throwback to the old-school Vikings, this Norseman was a lot less interested in describing how he was somehow distantly related to Knut the Great and more interested in just freaking out, planting his axe in everyone he could find, and prying the bloody crown out of a lesser man’s cold, dead hands with a rusty crowbar.
Harald kind of ties together every chapter in this book into one epic life story. A great-great-grandson of Harald Fairhair, Harald Hardrada was the half brother of Saint Olaf the Fat, who had led an attempt to claim the throne of Norway from Knut the Great. At the age of just fifteen, Harald was seriously wounded in the Battle of Stiklestad, where the armies of Saint Olaf were crushed by Knut’s Danes. Harald fled to Russia, studied under King Yaroslav the Wise in Kiev (great-grandson of Olga), and then headed south to Constantinople, where he joined the Byzantine Empire’s Varangian Guard. Rising through the ranks due to his noble birth and his ridiculous dual-axe-wielding battlefield blood-rage antics, Harald became the leader of the guard, charging into enemy formations and unleashing mayhem on anyone in his wheelhouse. Famous for ditching his shield and wading into the middle of battle with an axe in each hand, Harald stormed castles in Sicily, fought pirates in Greece, crossed blades with Muslim warriors in North Africa, and led a campaign that cleared the countryside around Jerusalem of a band of bloodthirsty bandits who had been preying on religious pilgrims. In 1040, he personally put down a Bulgar uprising with such ferocity that the emperor of Byzantium gave him the amazing nickname “the Devastator of Bulgaria.”
After accidentally offending the emperor by making out with the empress (and subsequently escaping from a Constantinople prison by ripping the bars out of the windows, climbing down a sheer rock wall, and stealing a ship) and then marrying the princess of Russia, Harald eventually returned to his native Norway. The second he set foot on Norwegian soil, the Norsemen proclaimed him king of Norway (they’d already heard all about his amazing exploits like he was on a reality-TV show), and their support was so enormous that the guy who was supposed to be the actual king of Norway got scared and ran away.
As King Harald III (the first two were Fairhair and Greycloak), the Varangian-turned-statesman dominated Norway for twenty years, earning the nickname Hardrada, meaning “hard ruler.” Which is awesome. He built churches, founded the city of Oslo (the modern-day capital of Norway), defeated the Danes in a couple of wars, ruled firmly but justly, and still spent his summers loading up longboats and personally going out on Viking raids because he was just hard like that. Now he had his sights set on adding England to his realm.
The stage was set for an epic, history-altering, three-way ultimate death match. In September of 1066, Harald Hardrada set sail from Norway with three hundred huge ships packed with foaming-at-the-mouth Viking warriors. William of Normandy also built a fleet of six hundred transport vessels to ferry his forces across the English Channel from Normandy to England. King Harold Godwinson of England was waiting for them both with an army of about fifteen thousand Anglo-Saxon warriors.
Harald Hardrada landed first, touching down in the northeast part of England near the former Viking stronghold of York. There he linked up with Tostig Godwinson, King Harold Godwinson’s brother, who was willing to betray his own bro for a shot at power and glory and cool Viking helmets. The thunderous host of Norsemen marched to battle, crushing the combined armies of two Anglo-Saxon earls at the Battle of Fulford on September twentieth. Harald’s men killed both enemy leaders in the process and then ravaged the countryside like they did back in the “good old days,” when you had to destroy your enemies by marching twenty miles through the snow uphill both ways.
When Harold Godwinson heard about this, he took his entire army and raced out to face Harald, hoping to destroy the Vikings and get home in time to grab some dinner before fighting William of Normandy’s armada. Harald Hardrada was not expecting to be dive-bombed out of nowhere by fifteen thousand screaming Anglo-Saxon warriors who had walked two hundred miles in less than a week. Godwinson caught Hardrada’s army right around breakfast time, while they were still in camp, not wearing their armor, with most of their weapons and gear stashed on their ships.
As the English army advanced, a lone Norse berserker stripped off his shirt, asked his king for permission to die honorably in battle, grabbed a man-slaughtering two-handed Danish war axe, and stood astride the Stamford Bridge, which separated the Anglo-Saxon army from the scrambling Viking forces. The Anglo-Saxons, desperate to cross the bridge and strike the Norsemen, rushed the berserker, but this lone warrior single-handedly held the narrow bridge against the entire army of Anglo-Saxon warriors, killing over forty of the enemy and wounding dozens more in his bloody defense. He was finally slain when a Saxon soldier drifted down the river in a barrel and thrust his spear up through the planks in the bridge, striking the battle-raging Viking in his lone weak point: his groin. The berserker fell, and the Anglo-Saxons swarmed over his body and plowed into the Vikings, who were still trying to get their act together.