THE DYING YEARS of the Viking Age are marked by the lives of three men who epitomised its values and whose intersecting destinies collided in a violent clash over the throne of England – the territory in which the Viking raids had begun almost three centuries before: Harald Sigurdsson, the Norwegian king (better known in the English-speaking world as Hardrada – ‘hard counsel’ or ‘ruthless’); Duke William of Normandy (or William ‘the Conqueror’ as he would become); and Harold Godwinson, King of England. All had careers etched in blood and possessed a ruthless sense of ambition, attributes that would have been just as familiar in the far-off days of the Great Heathen Army or the North Atlantic colonisation of the ninth and tenth centuries.
Normandy, over which William ruled, was a Viking creation, although by the time of his embarkation for England in 1066 it was very much a mixed Scandinavian-Frankish hybrid, with the emphasis, culturally and politically, on the latter. The genesis of the Duchy of Normandy lay in the activities of a Viking band led by Rollo (or Hrolf), said to have been one of the sons of Rögnvald, Earl of Møre (and therefore a Norwegian).1 The very name of Normandy derives from the nordmanni (‘North-Men’, or Scandinavians) who came to occupy it.
The story, as penned by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, the earliest chronicler of Normandy (in the late tenth century), is enticingly simple. The Frankish king Charles the Simple was under severe pressure from a series of Viking raiders in the first decade of the tenth century, and one band in particular, led by Rollo, came to his attention. In many ways this group must have been almost indistinguishable from those that had been penetrating the Loire and the Seine since the mid-ninth century, but in autumn 911 Charles summoned Rollo to a meeting at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte (a small settlement in the modern Val d’Oise), where he offered him extensive lands in Normandy in exchange for becoming the king’s vassal and agreeing to defend the realm against his erstwhile Viking kinsmen. The land was granted in full ownership (in alodo et in fundo) to Rollo and was said to cover virtually the entire future duchy of Normandy.2 Rollo was also to accept Christian baptism and was given Charles’s daughter Gisela in marriage.
Despite Dudo’s assertion that Rollo received the whole of Normandy from Charles, it is more probable that, at least initially, he obtained (or occupied) only upper Normandy between the Epte and the Seine. Later land grants increased his territory into the Bessin and Hiémois (in 924), and by 933 the Normandy Vikings seem to have expanded into the Cotentin and Avranchin.3 Other elements of Dudo’s account are even more fanciful. Aping the classical tendency to trace the descent of great empires from one or more heroes of the Trojan War (a much more satisfactory pedigree to a Christian cleric than the Norse predilection for pagan gods, such as Odin or Thor, as ancestors), he described the Normans as having originated in ‘Danmark’ (or Dacia), and claimed that their forefather was the Trojan Antenor, who had become King of Dacia. The reason for the Viking migration from Denmark, Dudo explains, was their custom of polygamy, which led to overpopulation (the latter, if not the former, being a reason also cited by modern historians). Dudo also has Rollo dream of a mountain in which there are birds of many different colours and species, which he interprets as a calling to go to a foreign land, where he will unite people of many races under his rule.4
The description of the meeting at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte is scarcely less colourful. As a proud Viking war-leader, Rollo was unwilling to abase himself to kiss the Frankish king’s foot, as the ceremony of fealty demanded. Instead, one of Rollo’s followers was chosen to enact this humiliating part of the proceedings, but the importunate stand-in seized Charles’s foot, causing the king to topple over backwards. One can imagine that, if true, this outrage would have caused the alliance between Rollo’s Vikings and the Franks to be of very short duration indeed.
The first real evidence of the arrangement between the two sides comes in a charter of Charles the Simple dated 14 March 918, which mentions a portion of his lands that the Frankish monarch had ‘granted to Rollo and his Companions for the safety of the Kingdom’.5 In truth, this territory was probably not under Charles’s control in the first place, but Rollo’s settlement, which concentrated initially on the area around Rouen, acted as a useful block against the depredations of other Viking groups. It was a tried and tested tactic, having been used to good effect with the cession of Frisia to Harald Klak in 826, and the offer of Nantes as a fief to the Vikings by Robert of Neustria in 921.6
At first Rollo kept to his side of the bargain, for in 923 he is seen on campaign with the Frankish king near Beauvais. But the following year the Normandy Vikings (who soon became known as Normans) defected to Charles the Simple’s rival, Ralph of Burgundy. Rollo’s new ally granted him Bayeux and Maine, but this pact did not last long either and the Normans took to raiding along almost the whole length of their border, towards Amiens, Flanders and Arras. The Scandinavians’ predations were halted by a serious defeat that Rollo suffered at the hands of the counts of Flanders and Vermandois at Eu, and thereafter the fledgling duchy (still technically a county until the early eleventh century)7 settled down to become one of a constellation of over-mighty lordships that jostled for power with the feeble later Carolingian kings.
Although contemporary Frankish writers complained that the Normans reverted to pagan practice whenever it suited them, and lamented that Rollo (even though baptised) had hedged his bets on his deathbed in 942 – by ordering the sacrifice of some Christian slaves to appease Odin and Thor, the gods of his ancestors – his son and successor William Longsword was definitely a Christian. William spoke Norse and had a Danish concubine, but this did not shield him from the attempts of other Viking groups to operate in Normandy, most notably the revolt by Riulf, who accused Longsword of adopting too many Frankish ways.8 An independent Viking chief named Harold also seems to have succeeded in taking over Bayeux for a time. In 944, the Scandinavian colony seemed set to collapse when a joint attack by Louis IV and the Duke Hugh the Great9 resulted in the temporary loss of Caen, until the two Franks fell out and William regained control of Normandy.
By around 965 William was secure, married to a daughter of Hugh the Great and largely eschewing the Viking-style raiding of his neighbours. His administration became more sophisticated and adopted Frankish practices, such as the issuing of charters and the adoption of the Frankish titles of marquis and count. This is unsurprising, as the original Scandinavian colonists do not seem to have been a majority; place-name evidence suggests that the largest number settled in the north of the Cotentin peninsula, in the Pays de Caux, and certain other coastal regions.10 Settlement names such as Tocqueville (‘Toki’s ville’) and Auberville (‘Osbern’s ville’) and those containing the suffix ‘–tot’ (‘house site’), such as Hautot, or ‘–bec’ (‘slope’), as in Bricquebec, betray the presence of these incomers, although the vast bulk of place-names remained French in form. The place-names tell us something, too, about the origins of the settlers. The many personal names of Viking type that were incorporated in names ending in ‘–tot’ generally indicated that they came from the Danelaw, and thus had come from England rather than directly from Scandinavia (unlike Rollo, who is definitely said to have been Norwegian). This is reinforced by several Anglo-Saxon names that became part of hybrid place-names in Normandy (such as Dénestanville, or ‘Dunstan’s ville’). In the Cotentin, moreover, there are clusters of names that show possible Irish (or Hiberno-Norse) settlement, such as the name Dicuil in Digulleville.11
The Scandinavian language itself seems to have faded quickly: Dudo recounts how in the 940s William Longsword was forced to send his son Richard to Bayeux to learn the Norse language, as it was no longer a living tongue around the ducal court at Rouen. This is probably an exaggeration, since as late as 1025 one of Olaf Haraldsson of Norway’s skalds was received at Rouen, where presumably there were still those who could appreciate his poetic art.
Certain other Scandinavian customs persisted, however, and there was still a slave market at Rouen in the late tenth century.12 The dukes also had the power to exile miscreants (called ullac), which resembled the custom of outlawry in Scandinavia (and particularly Iceland), while other laws concerning the rights to salvage from shipwrecks and the division of land among heirs were more similar to Norse than Frankish custom.13 Even after the death of Richard I, the Norman rulers retained close contacts with Scandinavia, and Richard II (996–1025) concluded a peace treaty with Svein Forkbeard of Denmark just before the latter invaded England in 1013. It was about this time also that Olaf Haraldsson of Norway arrived in Normandy, bringing with him a host to assist Richard II in a campaign against the Count of Blois. In a sign of the changing times for the Viking homeland in Scandinavia, Olaf accepted baptism once the fighting was done and foreswore further raiding, withdrawing his forces from Svein’s attack on England.
The close ties between the Normans and their Viking cousins had already begun to fray a little earlier. In 991, Duke Richard I and Aethelred II of England had reached an agreement not to harbour each other’s enemies, a pact aimed largely at choking off Viking activity. The marriage in 1002 between Emma, Richard’s sister, and Aethelred was intended to cement this alliance (though the visit by Svein to Normandy in 1003, after he had harried Yorkshire, must have come close to breaching the Anglo-Norman concord). When Svein finally succeeded in deposing Aethelred in 1013, it was to Normandy that Emma and the royal family fled, and three of her children – Edward, Alfred and Godgifu – went there again in 1016 after the death of Edmund Ironside.14
Normandy’s period of relative stability ended in 1026 with the death of Richard II. His successor, Richard III, lasted just a year, his short reign being marred by a rebellion by his own younger brother Robert (who became duke in turn in 1027). Robert faced serious pressure along the borders from Alain III of Brittany, who attacked the Cotentin in early 1030, although this did delay Robert’s planning of an invasion of England in 1033 to restore the sons of Emma to the throne. The expedition was then prevented from setting sail by unfavourable winds and, thus deprived of the chance to become ‘Robert the Conqueror’, the Norman duke (perhaps unwisely, given that his heir William was both of doubtful legitimacy and a minor) departed on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Although Robert did reach Jerusalem, he fell ill and died in 1035 during the return journey at Nicaea, leaving the seven-year-old William to inherit the duchy. The young duke’s survival was only guaranteed by a group of loyal advisers who had served his father, and his position remained extremely tenuous until 1047, when the revolt of his cousin Guy of Brionne was defeated at Val-ès-Dunes near Caen with the help of Henry I of France. Even then William was not secure, as two of his uncles, Count William of Arques and Archbishop Malger of Rouen, rebelled in 1053 – a threat made even more serious by their coalition with Henry I, Geoffrey Martel, Count of Anjou and Count Guy of Ponthieu. The Norman defeat of the main French army at Mortemer in 1054 left William for the first time in a position to project his power outside Normandy. Then the death of Henry I of France in 1060, and the succession of the eight-year-old Philip I, whose guardian just happened to be William’s father-in-law Count Baldwin V of Flanders, meant that the Duke of Normandy was finally free to act without fear of attack by the French king.
It was on one of these campaigns in 1064–5, against Duke Conan of Brittany, that William was accompanied by a noble guest from abroad. The leading English earl, Harold Godwinson, was apparently on a mission from Edward the Confessor, and landed near the mouth of the Somme. He was met by William’s longtime rival, Guy of Ponthieu, who, seeing the opportunity to make mischief, seized the Englishman and imprisoned him in his castle at Beaurain. William put pressure on Guy, and Harold was released into the Norman duke’s custody and taken to Rouen, where, half-guest, half-hostage, he agreed to join the expedition against Conan. Having distinguished himself in actions against Dol and Dinan, Harold was knighted by William. He then took some kind of oath, which Norman sources later represented as an act of homage to the Duke of Normandy and a promise to support his claim to the English throne when the time came.
William of Poitiers, Duke William’s chaplain, who wrote a history of the Norman conquest of England, claims that Edward the Confessor had ‘sent to him Harold, of all his subjects the most distinguished in riches, honour and power, whose brother and nephew had previously been received as hostages for the duke’s succession’.15 One alternative explanation for Harold’s visit to Normandy was to persuade Duke William to release those hostages, who had been held since the 1050s. His landfall in the territory of Guy of Ponthieu might also suggest that he was not initially bound for Normandy at all, but may have been heading for his family’s traditional allies in Flanders.16
William most probably received the news of the death of Edward the Confessor sometime in January 1066 and immediately began mobilising his army and marshalling diplomatic allies to press his claim to the succession. He sent Gilbert, Archdeacon of Lisieux, to plead his case to Pope Alexander II, pointing out that Harold had broken his oath to support William’s candidacy for the English throne, and offering as an additional incentive a wholesale reform of the English Church. The Pope concurred and sent Gilbert back with a papal standard, a battle flag under which the Norman duke could fight for England.17
William despatched a mission to Emperor Henry IV, seeking to invoke a treaty by which each had promised to come to the other’s aid if threatened by an enemy, but no assistance was forthcoming. He sent another embassy to the Danish king Svein Estrithsson who, if he did offer any support to William, did so as a counterweight to the claims of Harald Hardrada, since a Norwegian conquest of England would have been most unwelcome to Denmark. William was also visited by Tostig, the exiled former Earl of Northumbria, who presumably offered to support his claim against his brother Harold in exchange for restoration to his earldom.18
Once his forces were ready, William marshalled them at the mouth of the River Dives and awaited a favourable wind. He languished there for four weeks, before moving his force to Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme for a further wait. The positive effect of this delay (at least for the Normans) was that the army of King Harold, which had been waiting along the south coast to intercept any landing by the Normans, exhausted its supplies and was demobilised on 8 September. Finally, on 27 September, when it seemed as though the season would grow too late for campaigning and the embarkation for England might never take place, a favourable wind began to blow across the Channel. Apart from a minor panic when William’s ship lost touch with all the rest midway, the crossing was uneventful.19 The invasion fleet of Duke William of Normandy landed at Pevensey on the Sussex coast in the early morning of 28 September 1066. It was, though William could not have known it at the time, just two days after Harold Godwinson’s victory over Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge.20 William decided to take a cautious approach, remaining sufficiently close to his landing site to beat a hasty retreat to Normandy should it become necessary. He built a new defensive wall inside the old Roman Saxon shore fort at Anderitum and then proceeded to ravage the neighbouring area. Unless he wished to tolerate the outrage of this foreign interloper laying waste to large sections of southern England, the Anglo-Saxon king would have to come to the Norman duke.
When Harold’s predecessor, Edward the Confessor, came to the throne, he was the most convenient of the few available candidates, being the only surviving son of Aethelred II, and Harthacnut’s recognition of him as co-ruler in 1041 further smoothed the way to his succession. Magnus the Good of Norway also laid claim to the English throne, through his alleged agreement with Harthacnut that whichever of them died first would inherit the lands of the other and, in the case of the Danish crown, this would include England. There was a scare in summer 1044, when Edward mobilised an army in expectation of a Norwegian invasion, but Magnus was, on the whole, too preoccupied with his struggle with Svein Estrithsson over Denmark to mount any expedition to England. Magnus’s death in 1047 and the continued warfare between his successor, Harald Hardrada, and Svein then postponed the issue for nearly twenty years. There were, though, small-scale Scandinavian raids on the south coast in 1048, when Sandwich and the Isle of Wight were attacked, and the following year a contingent of Vikings from Dublin raided the Welsh coast.
On the whole, however, Edward was more preoccupied with reforming the Church and with gradually installing his own supporters in earldoms and other senior positions. Of the Danish retainers of Cnut, Siward remained in place as Earl of Northumbria, whilst among the English notables Godwine, Earl of Wessex – who owed his rise to the service he provided Cnut on an expedition to Denmark in 101921 – became the most prominent. Although Godwine tussled with Earl Leofric for influence in Mercia (where the latter was earl over the western portion), the marriage of his daughter Edith to Edward in 1045, which made him the king’s father-in-law, rendered his power almost unassailable.
Godwine’s family continued to amass positions of influence. His eldest son Svein was elevated to the earldom of Herefordshire in 1043; and his second son Harold became Earl of East Anglia two years later. The acquisition of an earldom in Oxfordshire by Edward’s nephew, Ralph, in the late 1040s22 acted as only a partial counter-balance to the House of Godwin’s growing power.
By around 1050, it was becoming clear that Edward, by then in his forties, was unlikely to produce a male heir (who would have been Earl Godwine’s grandson). Attention turned to an alternative successor, and Godwine widened his circle of allies through the marriage around 1051 of his third son Tostig to Judith, the half-sister of Count Baldwin V of Flanders. The murder in 1049 of Earl Beorn, the brother of Svein Estrithsson of Denmark, removed another contender for the throne, although the circumstances of his death – abducted and killed by Godwine and Svein Godwinson – very nearly provoked a Danish invasion.23
Throughout the 1050s the struggle for influence at Edward’s court continued, with a Norman element coming increasingly to the fore. This is hardly surprising, as Edward’s mother Emma was the sister of Richard II of Normandy, and he (together with his brother Alfred) had spent considerable time in exile there during the period of Cnut’s initial ascendancy and until his own recall to England in 1041. The exile of Earl Godwine in 1051 (for refusing to punish the men of Dover for their part in an attack on Eustace of Boulogne, Edward’s brother-in-law) probably led Edward to rely even more on his Norman connections. There are indications that Archbishop Robert of Canterbury may have visited Duke William in 1051–2 in Normandy as part of negotiations to secure an alliance against Godwine that left Wulfnoth, the earl’s son, and Håkon, his grandson, as hostages at the Norman court.24 What other messages Robert may have passed on to William are unknown, though it may well be that he made promises concerning the English succession.
In June 1052, Godwine attacked the south coast, joining up at Portland with another fleet that Harold had brought over from Ireland. Facing only ineffectual resistance from Edward’s navy led by Earl Ralph, the Godwines ravaged the north Kent coast. Joined by the Londoners, the invading army then marched to meet Edward at Southwark. All the king’s careful diplomacy of the previous two years was undone, and Godwine and Harold were allowed to return to England. Most of the king’s French (in other words, Norman) advisers, including Archbishop Robert of Canterbury, fled from London and took passage from the Naze in Essex on a leaky boat bound for Normandy.
The last thirteen years of Edward’s rule were overshadowed by the renewed supremacy of the Godwines, even after the death of the earl in 1053. Harold succeeded him as earl of Wessex, and the family’s power was cemented by his brother Tostig’s acquisition of the earldom of Northumbria in 1055. Harold’s position was further strengthened by his victory the same year over Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, the ruler of Gwynedd, who had invaded Hereford together with an Irish-Norse band that had joined forces with Aelfgar, the exiled Earl of East Anglia.25 The Godwines acquired a further earldom when Gyrth became Earl of East Anglia in 1058, and the deaths of Earl Leofric of Mercia and Earl Ralph in 1058 also removed senior figures who might, at the very least, have placed obstacles in the way of Harold’s inexorable rise. With the hapless Earl Aelfgar, who had briefly come back into favour, exiled once more in 1058, Harold seemed in a strong position to dictate the course of the succession himself.
Although Harold may at this point have entertained ambitions of the crown for himself, what he certainly sought to avoid was a Norman acquisition of the throne. It was probably as a result of this that the last available native English candidate from among the descendants of Alfred the Great was sought out. Edward the Exile, the son of Edward the Confessor’s half-brother, Edmund Ironside, had been sent to Sweden in 1017 and, after a stint in Russia, had ended up in the 1040s in Hungary, where he married Agatha, the niece of the Emperor Henry II. In 1054, Bishop Ealdred of Worcester was despatched to persuade him back, but it took a further three years for the exiled prince to return. Unfortunately for this neat piece of succession-planning, Edward the Exile died in April 1057, just months after reaching England, and before he even had a chance to meet King Edward. He left behind him a son, Edgar (later known as the Atheling), who at five years old was far too young to be considered a serious claimant to the throne.
Harold Godwinson, meanwhile, went from strength to strength. He had his ally, Stigand, appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1052, although the irregular nature of his translation to the see caused problems with successive popes.26 A successful raid by Tostig into Scotland in 1058 led to King Malcolm visiting England to make peace with Edward. Then in 1063 Harold launched a naval attack against Gruffudd ap Llywelyn in Wales, destroying his main base at Rhuddlan and joining up with a land invasion by Tostig to force a complete Welsh surrender.
Harold seemed destined now to be, if not the next King of England, then at least the king-maker. But the political landscape of Anglo-Saxon England was shaken up one last time when the thegns (the lesser aristocracy) of Yorkshire and Northumberland rose up in revolt in 1065 against Earl Tostig, whom they accused of undue harshness. The rebels chose Morcar, son of Aelfgar, the previous incumbent, to be their new earl. Once they were joined at Northampton by Earl Edwin of Mercia, the coalition was too strong for King Edward to resist and he sent Tostig (and his wife Judith) into exile in Flanders.
Tostig was not universally vilified, and the Life of Edward the Confessor describes him as ‘this distinguished earl, a son and lover of divine peace’, who had governed his earldom so well that he ‘had in his time reduced the number of robbers and cleared the country of them . . . that any man, even with any of his goods, could travel at will even alone without fear of attack’.27 He did not remain quiet for long in Flanders and is said to have visited William of Normandy, perhaps offering his own support for the duke’s claim to the English throne. Sometime in late April, Tostig landed on the Isle of Wight and proceeded to ravage the south coast as far east as Sandwich and Kent. He then moved north with sixty ships and landed at Lindsey in Lincolnshire. He probably hoped to exploit residual loyalty to him in Northumbria, but was defeated by Edwin and Morcar and, with only one-fifth of his original fleet remaining, made his way to Scotland, where he joined forces with Harald Hardrada.28
King Edward had in the meantime suffered a series of strokes, and throughout November and December 1065 lay gravely ill at Westminster. On Christmas Eve, the king had another heart attack, but was well enough to attend church. The following day, however, his health took another turn for the worse and he fell into a coma. At the very end, Edward miraculously recovered enough strength to deliver a prophecy warning of a dire future for England and to bequeath his kingdom to Harold. As he offered his hand to the Wessex earl, he pronounced with his last breath, ‘I commend this woman and the whole kingdom to your protection.’29
Edward the Confessor died on 5 January 1066 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the church that he had commissioned and which had been consecrated just a week before. Harold was crowned the very next day, taking advantage of his consolidated position as the leading English noble and of the late king’s apparent (and most convenient) deathbed designation of him as heir. In a very real sense his claim to the throne was shaky, with his marriage to Edward the Confessor’s sister being as close as he could claim to membership of the House of Wessex. Yet William of Normandy’s own candidacy for the English throne was every bit as tenuous, deriving as it did from the marriage of his great-aunt Emma to Aethelred the Unready. And yet, as there were no available blood-descendants of Alfred the Great to hand (Edgar Atheling being still too young), the acceptance of Harold as king by the witangemot or royal council must have seemed the only sensible way to secure a ruler who would defend native English interests.
The first few months were surely tense, as Harold was well aware that Tostig, Harald Sigurdsson of Norway and William of Normandy would all be happy to see him pushed from his newly won throne. The waiting was punctuated by a series of appointments, possibly including that of Waltheof as earl of a territory in the East Midlands.30 A moment of particularly ill omen occurred on 24 April 1066 when a comet appeared, which was clearly visible in the sky for a whole week. It was the visitation once every seventy-six years of Halley’s Comet, but many of those who saw it interpreted it as portending a terrible doom about to fall upon England. The waiting would soon, however, be over, and the first to strike against England was Harald of Norway.
The half-brother of King Olaf Haraldsson, Harald was the son of Sigurd Halfdansson and, according to the conveniently manufactured genealogy of the sagas, the great-great-grandson of Harald Finehair. He also had royal connections on the maternal line, as his formidable mother, Ásta Guðbrandsdóttir, had previously been the wife of Harald Gudrodsson, a great-grandson of Harald Finehair (the marriage from which Olaf Haraldsson was born). Born around 1012, Harald was about three when Olaf secured the Norwegian throne after his defeat of Jarl Svein in a naval battle at Nesjar in 1016. The Heimskringla relates the story that Ásta held a great feast to celebrate her son’s new status, to which she also invited her three sons by Sigurd. Olaf decided to test the mettle of the Sigurdssons by pretending to fly into a terrible rage. Harald’s brothers, Guthorm and Halfdan, were terrified, but little Harald simply pulled the beard of his furious stepbrother. The next day Harald’s two elder brothers were seen constructing play farmhouses by the side of a pool, while Harald had built wooden boats that he floated on the pond. Observing this, Olaf remarked, ‘You may have command of warships one day, my kinsman.’ Finally, Olaf asked each of the brothers what he most desired: Guthorm chose cornfields, Halfdan wished for cattle, whilst Harald’s choice was housecarls.31
It was an ambition that would be achieved one day. Harald did not encounter his illustrious kinsman again for more than fifteen years, and then it was in inauspicious circumstances. After Olaf’s expulsion by a pro-Danish alliance and an abortive attempt to return,32 the Norwegian king finally obtained succour at the court of Yaroslav of Kiev and, more importantly, fresh equipment for his band of 250 warriors. Early in 1030, Olaf set out, leaving behind his young son Magnus in Yaroslav’s care. Passing through the frozen wastes of Russia in wintertime, Olaf finally crossed to Gotland and then to the court of the Swedish king Onund, who declined to join his expedition, but did send 400 warriors and allowed the Norwegian to recruit as many as would join his standard. By the time he reached Norway, Olaf had also secured the support of Dag Ringsson of Uppland, an inveterate opponent of Danish rule in Norway. Yet the local notables and peasantry instead opposed him, and it was an army largely composed of these ‘bonders’ (from bønder, the Norwegian term for free farmers) that Olaf faced late that summer when he came to Stiklestad, a farm near Vaerdal in the northern Trøndelag.
Harald Sigurdsson had joined his half-brother by this time and, still just sixteen, he begged to be allowed to take his place in the battle-line. Olaf initially refused, but Harald protested, ‘if I am so weak as not to be able to wield a sword, then my hand should be tied to its hilt’. Dag Ringsson, whose force was supposed to make up the right wing, was delayed in reaching the battlefield and so Thore Hund, at the head of the bonder’s army, had already launched his attack by the time Olaf’s army was complete.
The Norwegians and their allies surged forward with the cry ‘Forward Christ-men, forward cross-men, forward king’s men’, a reference to Olaf’s role in bringing Christianity to Norway. Yet by the time Dan Ringsson’s contingent was fully deployed, Olaf’s army had already suffered badly in the ‘storm of steel’ that engulfed Stiklestad. In the melee Olaf was wounded in the thigh by Thorstein Knaresmed. Barely able to support himself, the king dropped his sword and was then despatched by Thore Hund and Kalv Arnesson.
The remnants of Olaf’s army and Dag Ringsson’s late-arriving contingent fled the battlefield. Harald had somehow escaped the carnage and, badly injured, was rescued by the Orkneyman Rögnvald Brusason.33 Rögnvald carried Harald to the shelter of a remote farmhouse, where he stayed until he was strong enough to venture the mountain crossing into Sweden. All the while, according to Snorri Sturluson, the farmer’s family was completely unaware of the identity of their ailing guest. From Sweden, Harald and Rögnvald sailed east to Russia, where they were received as honoured guests by Grand Duke Yaroslav. The Kievan prince appointed Harald joint commander of his army, a move possibly conditioned by his less-than-cordial relations with his brother Mstislav (who ruled the eastern part of the principality from Chernigov), which made reinforcements from Scandinavia all the more welcome.
The Orkneyinga Saga tells that Rögnvald Brusason took part in ten battles in Yaroslav’s service, although it is not known whether he and Harald fought together.34 A line of verse from Harald’s skald, Thjodolf, tells of his fighting against the ‘Laesir’, probably a reference to the Poles and an indication that Harald’s Norwegians took part in the joint invasion of Poland by Yaroslav and Mstislav in 1031. Between then and 1034 (the most probable date of his departure from Russia), Harald’s movements are obscure. The campaigns east of the Baltic, to which Snorri refers, may represent the kind of armed tribute-taking winter expeditions that the Viking Rus rulers customarily undertook as a way of exacting forced contributions from neighbouring Finno-Ugric and Slav tribes.35 Harald and Eilif are also said to have been entrusted with the defence of Gardariki (the Norse name for Russia), although this probably refers to a role in safeguarding the northern part of the realm rather than an outright takeover of the defence of the whole country.36
Harald would have found ample other opportunities for action in Yaroslav’s service. In 1032, there was an expedition to the Iron Gates, probably against Ugrian tribes north-east of the Pechora River near the Urals, while the Rus princes faced a constant challenge from the Pechenegs who roamed the steppelands north of the Black Sea around the Dnieper.37 Perhaps Harald would have remained indefinitely in Yaroslav’s service (at least until the call of the Norwegian throne lured him back to Scandinavia), had it not been for his infatuation with his host’s daughter, Elizaveta (or Ellisif, in the Norse version of her name). Harald referred to her as ‘the bracelet-goddess in Gardar’, and the two were eventually married, but at the most probable date of his departure the princess was still only ten years old. Yaroslav is said to have refused her hand in marriage to Harald until the Norwegian had proved himself in glory and riches. Perhaps Yaroslav did have his eye on a strategic marriage for Ellisif, but wanted to be sure that Harald was not just another ephemeral Scandinavian princeling, before letting go of one of his most precious dynastic assets.
The most obvious path to wealth and glory for an ambitious Norse warrior in Russia lay to the south, to the Byzantine imperial capital of Constantinople (or Miklegard – the ‘great city’, as it was known to the Vikings). Harald probably took the same well-worn route down the Dnieper that the Russian trading fleets used each year.38 Vulnerable to steppe raiders such as the Pechenegs, the merchants with whom Harald travelled must have been grateful for the extra armed escort.
So it was around 1034 that Harald Sigurdsson arrived in Miklegard to join the Varangian Guard, the Emperor’s elite corps of Scandinavian troops. He was not the first of his countrymen to come in search of employment as a mercenary, but he was certainly the most illustrious. Like so many before him, he was clearly awestruck by the imperial capital, and his reaction on reaching the Bosphorus and catching sight of the fabled city has been preserved in a skaldic verse by Bolverk Arnorsson, who later became one of Harald’s court poets: ‘Bleak gales lashed prows, hard along the shoreline. Iron-shielded our ships rode proud to harbour. Of Miklegard, our famous prince first saw the golden gables. Many a sea-ship fine arrayed swept toward the high-walled city.’39
The Byzantine military renaissance in the tenth century owed much to the military prowess of emperors such as Nicephorus Phocas, John Tzimisces and Basil II, but it also benefited a great deal from their use of foreign mercenaries, including Normans and other western Europeans (usually referred to collectively as ‘Franks’), as well as Scandinavians. In 866, a treaty between the Byzantines and the Rus had included a clause that the Russians should provide troops to the emperor, and in the tenth century there are intermittent mentions of Rus in Byzantine military service, such as the 700 Norsemen who are said to have taken part in an expedition against Crete in 961.40
The general name for the foreign troops who guarded the imperial palaces in Constantinople itself was Hetairia (‘friendly troops’). Membership of this elite band was clearly quite a lucrative affair, since entry into these units involved the payment of a fee, which in the case of the Grand Hetairia (the senior division of the household guard) amounted to 16 pounds of gold.41 It was not until the reign of Basil II (976–1025) that a separate regiment of Scandinavians was established, when the emperor – under severe pressure after a defeat by the Bulgarians, and faced with twin revolts by Bardas Scleros and Bardas Phocas – appealed to Vladimir of Kiev for aid. In exchange for the promise of the hand in marriage of Princess Anna (Basil’s sister) the Kievan ruler despatched 6,000 warriors to Constantinople.42
These soldiers were used to form a new elite unit, the Varangian Guard. The Norsemen duly helped Basil defeat Bardas Phocas, finally crushing the rebels at Abydos in April 989. The Varangians took part in many of the subsequent campaigns of Basil, who restored the borders of the empire to their greatest extent since the loss of Africa and Levant to the Islamic expansion of the seventh century. They were present during his expedition to Syria in 999 (which retook Emesa) and also in Armenia in 1000–1. In the field they were noted for their ferocity (participating in the massacre of the entire population of twelve districts of Georgia during a campaign there in 1021). They were also despatched to put down a revolt around Bari in southern Italy in 1009. Ironically, the leader of that rebellion invoked the assistance of the Normans of the region, leading to a situation in which troops of Scandinavian origin (or at least descent) were fighting on both sides.43
When not on active military service, the main duty of the Varangians was to act as a personal bodyguard for the emperor. At imperial coronations they were awarded the honour of walking on either side of the emperor, and whenever he attended church services, two Varangians stood guard behind him, bearing the large axes that were their most characteristic weapon.
Although the regiment was at first almost exclusively Scandinavian, its officers were generally Greeks. There were some exceptions to this, such as the Nabites who commanded the unit under Alexius, who may have been a Norseman,44 and the Ragnvald commemorated by a runestone in Uppland in Sweden, who is described as the ‘leader of the war-troop of the land of the Greeks’. The Varangians’ status as outsiders meant that they were often relied upon to undertake tasks that native Byzantine troops might have baulked at performing. These included the duty of the Manglavites, one of the junior officers, to walk in front of the emperor during processions, beating the crowd with a jewelled whip to keep it at a safe distance from the imperial presence, and the role of the Guard in the deposition and blinding of Emperor Michael V in 1042.
The Varangian barracks seems to have been situated in the Numera, near the Hippodrome, a convenient location close to the imperial palaces. As a distinct foreign community in the vast metropolis of Constantinople, the Varangians developed their own institutions and had their own church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the royal Scandinavian saint Olaf. Hneitir, the sword of the martyred Norwegian king, hung over the church’s high altar. It is said to have been picked up in the aftermath of the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030 by a Swede, one of whose descendants subsequently took service in the guard. The Swede is said to have gone on campaign with the Varangians and each night, as he fell asleep, he kept his hand on the sword’s hilt, and the blade beneath his pillow. Three nights in a row he found, on waking, that it had moved several feet away. The story of the sword’s miraculous movements reached the emperor, who summoned the Varangian to him. The Swedish warrior then explained the provenance of the blade, and the emperor gave him triple its worth in gold and placed Hneitir above the altar of the Varangian church.
The Varangian Guard had, therefore, been established for around forty years by the time Harald Sigurdsson arrived in Constantinople. We are fortunate in having a number of sources for Harald’s time with the Varangians, including the Advice to an Emperor,45 an anonymous tract whose title is self-explanatory, which refers to Harald as ‘Araltes’ and says he brought with him ‘five hundred valiant men’ whom the emperor then sent to Sicily. Other information about Harald’s activities in the Byzantine empire is contained in Scandinavian sources, including the Heimskringla, as well as skaldic verses embedded in various sagas. A number of stories seem to have been carried back to Iceland by Halldor Snorrason, who served with Harald in the Varangian Guard, and were later incorporated into sagas, and these have the benefit of having come from a first-hand source.
As far as any chronology can be constructed from the mixture of incidental references in Greek sources, elliptical verses and heroic exaggerations, it seems that Harald arrived at about the time that Michael IV succeeded Romanus III as emperor in 1034 and was tasked first with suppressing pirates in the Aegean (where he got 100 gold pieces for every vessel he seized). The Varangians were then sent under General Georgios Maniaces (called ‘Gyrgir’ in the Norse sources) on campaign in Asia Minor. Harald is said (in the Heimskringla) to have gone to ‘Serkland’, where he ‘took 80 cities of the Moors’.46 He then seems to have gone to Palestine, where Harald’s Saga rather grandly claims that ‘all cities and castles were opened for him, and surrendered without a struggle into his hand’. There was in fact no campaign in Palestine at the time, and it is likely that instead Harald accompanied the masons who were sent in accordance with a 1036 treaty between Michael IV and the caliph Mustansir-Billah to repair the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Harald was then sent to serve under Maniaces once more, this time in Sicily, where Michael IV’s Arab ally, Akhal-Aboulaphar, was struggling against the rival emir Abu-Hafs47 – an attempt to reinforce him, led by Constantine Ophos, the catepan (governor) of Byzantine Italy, having failed miserably. As well as the Varangians, Maniaces had a force of 300 Normans from Salerno who were led by William Iron Arm and Drogo, the sons of Tancred de Hauteville.48 The expedition was ultimately somewhat inconclusive: the Norsemen won a naval victory off Sicily, where the blood poured ‘to the planks in the bottom of the sea’, but Maniaces’s martinet streak alienated the Normans, who defected, ignited a rebellion in southern Italy and caused the Byzantine general to lose all the territory that the Varangians had gained, with the exception of Messina.
Relations between Harald and his Greek superior are portrayed in the sagas as poisonous, and a number of incidents reveal the tensions between them – bad blood that would ultimately prove almost fatal to the Norwegian prince. On one occasion the Varangians wanted to pitch their tents on the side of a slope rather than the marshy lower area that Maniaces had instructed them to camp in. Harald is said to have arranged the drawing of lots to determine the matter, but he cheated the Byzantines by making false marks on the tokens, and so won the right to spend the night on the ground of his choosing.
Some of the more picaresque tales that became attached to Harald’s name are probably elements borrowed from other tales, to which his larger-than-life figure acted as a convenient hook. He is said to have taken one city by capturing all the birds that normally nested under the eaves of its houses and then coating the unfortunate creatures’ wings with wax and sulphur, which he had his men set alight. The birds then flew back to their nests, started a massive blaze and, in the ensuing confusion, the Varangians stormed the city. Harald is also said to have smuggled his men into another fortress by pretending to be dead. The defenders allowed the Scandinavians to pass through the city gates bearing his lifeless body, but, once inside, drew their swords and the ‘resurrected’ Harald sprang from his coffin, leaving the astonished townspeople powerless to resist.
The story of the birds, however, appears attached to a number of other historical personages, including the Russian queen Olga on her taking of a town called Iskorot, and in the thirteenth century it was a stratagem said to have been used by Genghis Khan. An alleged Viking exponent of the trick was the Danish leader Guthrum who, during Danish attacks on England in 879, is said to have used blazing sparrows to capture Cirencester (which was for a time thereafter known as Sparrowchester).49 The story of the fake funeral is even more widespread, appearing twice in Saxo Grammaticus (being told about the legendary Danish king Frodo’s captures of Polotsk and London), in William of Apulia’s account of Robert Guiscard’s capture of an Italian monastery, and, most famously of all, about Hasteinn’s attack on the Italian city of Luna50.
The Varangians were recalled from Sicily to take part in the suppression of a revolt in Bulgaria by Peter Deleanos that posed a dangerous threat to the Byzantine hold on the Balkans. For his part in that campaign (from 1040–1) Harald received the epithet ‘burner of the Bulgars’ from Norse poets, as well as the more tangible reward of promotion to spatharocandidatus, the highest rank definitely recorded as having been achieved by a Scandinavian in the Varangian Guard, although it did not amount to an independent field command.
At about this time Harald’s fortunes took a dramatic turn for the worse. Michael IV died in December 1041, and his successor Michael V was far less sympathetic to the Varangians. Even worse, he released Harald’s nemesis, Georgios Maniaces, from prison. The irascible general had got himself into trouble for striking Admiral Stephanos – who also happened to be Michael V’s father-in-law – who had accused him of allowing an Arab fleet to escape in Sicily. Once restored to imperial favour, Maniaces seems to have engineered Harald’s arrest, together with that of two of his closest companions, Halldór Snorrason and Ulf Óspaksson, on a charge relating to the embezzling of money due to the emperor. This could either refer to a tax-collecting expedition where the required amount was not handed over or to retaining the bounty of 100 gold pieces that Harald was supposed to give to the imperial authorities for each enemy ship he captured in Sicily.
The Norsemen are said to have been held in a dungeon near the Varangian Church.51 Once more a series of colourful stories became associated with their imprisonment, most notably that of the ‘dragon’ or huge serpent which was said to have shared their quarters, and which Harald managed to stab to death while Halldór and Ulf clung frantically to the monster’s head and tail. Their final release came about through another shift in the almost comic-opera twists and turns of eleventh-century Byzantine imperial politics. Michael V had bungled an attempt to get rid of his adoptive mother, the popular Empress Zoe. This led to a mob storming the imperial palace and releasing a number of prisoners, including Harald and his companions. Zoe’s sister Theodora, who had been living a quiet life in the convent of Petrion (to which she had been despatched in 1030 to remove a possible rival), was then installed as co-empress, much to Zoe’s chagrin. After a siege of the imperial palace, in which 3,000 people are said to have died, the now-friendless Michael V took refuge in the Studion monastery. He failed to find sanctuary there, however, for Harald and the Varangians were sent to arrest the fugitive emperor and his uncle Constantine. They were dragged away from the high altar and blinded – some sources say it was Harald himself who put out the eyes of the noble pair (he is referred to in a poem by his skald Thjodolf as being ‘The destroyer of the wolf’s grid, had out both the eyes of the Great King’).
It may be that Harald sensed his position was still vulnerable to yet another change in the political environment. The situation was indeed volatile, for Theodora was soon sidelined again when Zoe married the prominent bureaucrat Constantine Monomachus, who was thereby elevated to the imperial throne as Constantine IX. More likely, it was the news that his nephew Magnus (son of Olaf II) had been recalled to the Norwegian throne that made Harald decide to return home to Norway. His initial petition to Constantine IX to be allowed to leave was refused – Maniaces had revolted in Sicily and the emperor was understandably reluctant to risk a large number of the Varangians departing alongside their leader. Norse sources confuse the issue with an almost certainly fabricated tale of Harald’s love affair with a Greek noblewoman, Maria, said to be related to Empress Zoe. This Maria is said to have aided Harald’s escape by allowing him to climb through an escape hatch in the building where she was concealing him.52
However they managed to slip away, once safely aboard their two ships, the Varangians were confronted by an iron chain that was strung across the Golden Horn to prevent enemy vessels from entering, and which equally impeded their own escape. As they approached the obstacle, rowing furiously, Harald ordered all those who were not manning the oars to take their bedding and other possessions and go to the stern, thus making the ships ride high up onto the chain. Then he commanded his men to rush down to the bows, in turn causing the vessels to pitch forward and ride over it. The tactic was perhaps a little too ingenious, as one of the galleys broke apart when it was clearing the chain, and many of the Norsemen were drowned. Harald, though, got away, and made his way into the Black Sea and then to Kiev.
Harald is said in the Advice to an Emperor to have remained on friendly terms with Byzantium, and even to have allowed a Greek missionary to come to Norway.53 There is no evidence, however, that he kept in touch with his former Varangian colleagues. The Guard continued to serve successive Byzantine emperors for at least a century more and survived in some form into the fourteenth century. The Varangians also took part in the fight against their Norman cousins in southern Italy in the 1060s (where a memory of their presence was preserved in the name of a church near Taranto, which was dedicated to Santa Maria dei Guaranghi (‘Saint Mary of the Varangians’).54
Under Romanus IV, a contingent of Varangians joined in the fateful campaign in Asia Minor that ended with the disastrous defeat by the Seljuqs at Manzikert on 19 August 1071. Doubtless many of the Norsemen perished, but enough survived to serve in the army of Alexius I Comnenus when he faced the Norman invasion of the Balkans under Robert Guiscard in 1081. At Dyrrachium on 18 October 1081, the Varangians (and a company of pro-Byzantine Norman loyalists under a certain Humbertopoulos) acquitted themselves well, before Guiscard’s wife Sigilgaita rallied the Norman right wing as it was about to be pushed into the city. The panicked Varangians fled into the nearby church of St Michael, where the roof caved in and most of them perished when the building was set on fire by the victorious Normans. A particular edge was added to this encounter by the presence of a number of Anglo-Saxon refugees from the Norman conquest of England, who joined the Varangian Guard in increasing numbers at the end of the eleventh century, and who were, one presumes, itching for the chance of a revenge match against William the Conqueror’s cousins.55
The advent of the Crusades in the late eleventh century injected fresh Viking blood into the Varangian Guard, as several Scandinavian monarchs took the cross and made their way to the Holy Land. King Sigurd I of Norway did so in 1108 and was, after some hesitation, allowed to enter Constantinople. The normal run of tall tales attached to his visit, including one that relates how Sigurd invited Alexius I and Empress Irene to dinner, but the empress, wishing to test the foreigner, bought up all the firewood in Constantinople to make cooking impossible. The resourceful Sigurd had walnuts gathered up as fuel and was still able to present a worthy feast to the imperial couple. When he returned home, a large part of Sigurd’s retinue remained behind, providing as many as 5,000 fresh recruits for the Guard.
The last influx of Scandinavians into the Varangian Guard probably came at the time of Earl Rögnvald-Kali of Orkney’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land (he set out between 1151 and 1153, a little too late to join in the main action of the Second Crusade). He left Orkney in the company of Eindridi the Younger, who had taken part in the main crusade, and whose tales of the action to be had in the Holy Land were probably what persuaded Rögnvald to venture on the journey. Departing with fifteen ships, the flotilla was depleted once past the Straits of Gibraltar, as Eindridi (who had all the while been on a mission to recruit fresh Varangians) abandoned Rögnvald and took six ships to Marseilles, from where he probably made his way straight to Constantinople. Rögnvald, meanwhile, carried on to Crete and Jerusalem. On his return journey he put in at Constantinople, where those Norsemen who were tempted to stay behind and serve in the Varangian Guard were rather dissuaded by the news that they would be under the command of Eindridi, whose earlier disappearance from the fleet had made him unpopular. Rögnvald did leave the Emperor Manuel I his ships (as he returned back to western Europe overland), which may have amounted to six full crews, or around 900 men.56
The Varangian Guard probably suffered terribly in the disastrous defeat at Myriocephalon in 1176 when Alp Arslan’s Seljuq Turks overwhelmed the army of Manuel I in a mountain pass in central Anatolia. It was by now largely an Anglo-Saxon unit rather than a Scandinavian one (a fact underlined by the letters that Alexius III wrote on his ascent to the throne in 1195 to the three Scandinavian monarchs, Sverre of Norway, Knud Karlsson of Sweden and Knud VI of Denmark, pleading for new recruits for the Varangian Guard). The unit itself carried on, although again severely diminished after the taking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders in 1204. In the thirteenth century the Varangians appear largely as ceremonial troops, and they are last referred to in a proclamation of John V in 1341, when they were said to be 500 in number – a mere shadow of the 5,000 Viking warriors who had made up the Guard’s initial number three and a half centuries earlier.
Two curious reminders of the passing of the Varangians’ sojourn in Constantinople survive. The first is a runic inscription on a marble lion that once stood at the harbour entrance to Piraeus, but which was removed by the Venetian general Francesco Morosini when he captured Athens in 1668 and was placed in front of the Arsenale in Venice. The runes are extremely worn and have become progressively more so over time, making them almost impossible to decipher (or even transcribe). Various optimistic attempts to do so have been made, the most notable by the Danish scholar C. C. Rafn in 1856, who interpreted part of the inscription to mean that it had been carved at the request of ‘Harald the Tall’, which Rafn took to mean Harald Sigurdsson himself. In contrast, the Swedish runologist Erik Brate concluded in 1919 that the runes had been carved as a memorial to ‘Horsa, a good farmer’, while in 1930 Erik Moltke could only identify two male names, Ulf and Smid, who performed some unidentified act ‘in this port’.57 In the absence of any scientific advance that may unlock the form (and therefore the meanings of the inscription), the marble lion will act only as a proof that there were Scandinavians in Piraeus, but not who they were or what they were doing.
Briefer still, but in some ways more eloquent, are two fragmentary runic inscriptions found in the southern gallery of the Aya Sofya mosque in Istanbul (the former church of Hagia Sophia). The first, discovered in 1964, consists simply of the single name ‘Halfdan’, while the second, identified nearby in 1975, reads ‘Ári (or Árni) made this’. It is tempting to believe that these represent the bored doodlings of members of the Varangian Guards, hidden high up in the gallery, while their colleagues, axes poised, stood behind the emperor during a church service, poised to strike any would-be assassins.
Harald remained at Yaroslav’s court in Kiev for around three years, finally marrying Princess Ellisif in early 1043.58 The information he could have provided about the Byzantine fleet and its tactics may have influenced the Kievan ruler to launch a naval assault against Constantinople the same year. Unfortunately no amount of descriptions of Greek Fire – the Byzantine naval ‘secret weapon’ that burnt as well on water as it did on wood, and was probably a compound of naphtha – could prepare the Kievan Rus for the extent of the damage it could inflict and this, combined with a huge storm which dispersed their fleet, meant the whole expedition ended in disaster.59
In the autumn of 1045, Harald would have heard of the success of his nephew, Magnus the Good, in defeating his Danish rival Svein Estrithsson at Helganes off Jutland, causing the Danish king to flee to the court of Anund Jakob of Sweden at Sigtuna, and allowing Magnus to take possession of Denmark. Harald must have decided that once Magnus had consolidated his position as king of both Norway and Denmark, then his own chance of claiming the Norwegian throne would vanish. So, late in the year, he set sail for Scandinavia. Instead of going straight to Norway, he went first to Sweden, to Sigtuna, where he made common cause with the exiled Estrithsson. Together, the pair spent the spring of 1046 ravaging the Danish islands, Svein with the more obvious motive of regaining his throne and Harald, presumably, with the intention of making so much trouble for his nephew that Magnus would concede some share of power in Norway to him.
Magnus took the hint and offered Harald the joint kingship of Norway, which he accepted. The scene of reconciliation between nephew and uncle is a typical piece of saga theatre. Snorri Sturluson tells that Harald brought with him treasure-chests laden with gold from the spoils of his Varangian campaigns and challenged Magnus to produce a similar hoard. The embarrassed young Norwegian king could only proffer his gold arm-ring, given to him by his father Olaf Haraldsson. Harald then retorted that by rights this belonged to him anyway, as Olaf had originally given the ring to his own father, Sigurd. Snorri recounts such a number of tales of the ill will that was growing between Harald and Magnus that it is clear full-scale civil war would have broken out, had Magnus not become gravely ill and died while the two were in Denmark to receive the submission of their subjects there (Harald’s alliance with Svein Estrithsson having proved strictly an affair of convenience).
Svein took advantage of Harald’s preoccupation with securing his position in Norway to return to Denmark. Unopposed, he was proclaimed king and the two erstwhile allies spent the next two decades intermittently at war. Among the attacks was a damaging raid on Hedeby in 1049, when Harald burnt the port to the ground, probably sealing its decline. There was another sometime between 1040 and 1050 on Roskilde, which led to the sinking of the five Roskilde ships to block the navigation channel into the port and impede the Danish attack.60 The raiding certainly continued up until an attack on the island of Fyn in 1051, but there may have been a gap of some years before the next attested attack in 1061, when Harald’s ships faced determined resistance off Jutland and were nearly trapped by Svein’s fleet.
His royal pride bruised, Harald responded by ordering the construction of the largest longship ever built, which had thirty-five pairs of rowing benches (one more than Olaf Tryggvason’s fabled Long Serpent). He challenged Svein to meet him in a sea battle and so, in spring 1062, Harald’s 150 ships faced Svein’s rather larger force of 300 vessels.61 The naval engagement that took place at the mouth of the Nissa River was conducted in the customary fashion, in which most of the ships were lashed together in a central formation, making manoeuvring extremely difficult. Initial lengthy bombardments with arrows (a skaldic verse by Thjodolf recounts that ‘All night long, Norway’s lord let arrows fly from yew-bow to shining shields’) were followed by boarding and a bloody clearance of the opponent’s deck.
The fighting went on long into the hours of darkness, until finally Svein’s flagship was captured. The king himself managed to escape in disguise after he took refuge with a local farmer’s wife. In 1064, Harald and Svein met again at the Göta River, but this time to cement a permanent peace. This essentially confirmed the boundaries of each kingdom and agreed that no compensation was to be paid for any deaths or damages caused during the conflict. After fifteen years of bitter and bloody warfare, neither Svein nor Harald had anything to show for it.
Harald may already have had his mind set on further-flung conquests, but first of all he set his own house in order, heading in late summer to Uppland, where Jarl Håkon Ivarsson was assembling an army against him. They met at Vanern, where Håkon’s Gautlanders, forced to advance across marshy ground to attack Harald’s army positioned atop a ridge, fell in huge numbers. Harald then spent a number of months exacting his revenge on the men of Uppland, maiming leading opponents and burning the farms of the particularly recalcitrant.62
That winter, Harald received a visitor at his winter residence near Oslo. Tostig, smarting from his exile in Flanders, is said to have made his way to Norway since, as he told Harald, ‘all men know that no greater warrior than you has come out of the northlands’.63 Harald’s continuous attacks on Denmark demonstrated that he considered himself to have inherited Magnus the Good’s claim to it and, by a tortured piece of logic, to England too, given that Harthacnut (with whom Magnus had made that agreement) had also been the ruler of England.
Although Snorri describes the encounter between deposed earl and Norwegian king in some detail and has Harald agree that there was ‘truth in Tostig’s words’, it is more likely that Tostig sent an envoy in his place. Tostig’s proposal – of a joint invasion of England to which he would be able to bring (he hoped) an uprising in his favour, once the Norwegian army reached his old domain around York – fell on extremely receptive ground. Tostig fulfilled the first part of his bargain with his raids in spring 1066 along the south coast, and then up as far north as Lindsey in Lincolnshire.
When these failed to provoke the hoped-for rebellion, he made his way north to Scotland to rendezvous with Harald, who had arrived there with a fleet that Snorri puts at over 200 warships. As well as intelligence from his abortive raids, Tostig may have brought information about Duke William’s plans, for the two had apparently met in Normandy in April or May. Harald had made landfall first in Shetland and then in Orkney, where he recruited reinforcements including Paul and Erlend, the joint earls, and Godred Crovan, the Viking ruler of Man and the Hebrides, before sailing south towards England.
The exact size of Hardrada’s army is unknown, but assuming around sixty men per fighting vessel, it may have amounted to some 12,000 warriors. The fleet made landfall near the mouth of the Tyne, sacking Cleveland and Scarborough and defeating a force of local levies near Holderness. Tostig and Hardrada then boarded their ships again and made their way up the Humber and the Ouse to Riccall, just 10 miles from York. Here, around 16 September 1066, they disembarked again, left a portion of the army behind and marched on the city. Capturing what was in effect the capital of the North, and the historic centre of the Viking kingdom of York, would represent a significant prize and should have been expected to unleash the torrent of sentimental and opportunistic support for Tostig and his Norwegian patron upon which the allies were counting.
They were met by an army raised by Earls Edwin and Morcar. Word had probably reached them of the raids on the Tyne, but it must have been a scramble to gather together sufficient levies from the nearby counties of Cheshire, Staffordshire and Shropshire to add to their own force of housescarls. The two sides clashed at Fulford, on the north bank of the Ouse, on 20 September and the encounter ended in a defeat for the English, with large numbers of them drowning in the river as they attempted to retreat.
The victorious Harald and Tostig must have thought they had the luxury of regrouping their army, pulling in reinforcements from those who would now flock to their victorious cause and then marching southwards towards London, with momentum firmly on their side. York surrendered to the allies first, and then Harald made his way to Stamford Bridge on the Derwent, probably with the intention of receiving hostages from the neighbouring regions. He reckoned, however, without the extraordinarily quick reaction of Harold Godwinson, who had probably received news of the Norwegian invasion only between 18 and 20 September.
Even though he had dismissed the bulk of his army less than two weeks before, Harold quickly issued a summons to the fyrd to gather again and then set out from London (around 20 September) with a force composed of his housecarls and any troops he had been able to gather up on the line of his march. This scratch army travelled the 200 miles from London to York in just five days, an astonishing rate when it is considered that highly trained Roman legionaries were only expected to advance 20 miles in a day when fully laden.64 The next day, Harold marched through York, which neither resisted him, nor, it seems, warned Harald Hardrada and Tostig of the arrival of the English host. Harold was also probably able to gather reinforcements for his own army from amongst the survivors of the Battle of Fulford.
It is around 16 miles from York to Stamford Bridge, and the English host covered the ground rapidly. The Norwegians were taken completely by surprise as they rested in the summer heat by the river. The first they knew of Harold’s approach was when it crested the ridge of a nearby hill and they could make out the great cloud of dust that the mass of Anglo-Saxon warriors kicked up in their wake. King Harald’s Saga memorably describes their shock as ‘the closer the army grew, the greater it grew, and their glittering weapons sparkled like a field of broken ice’.65
The twelfth-century accounts of the battle by Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury tell that a lone Viking warrior, axe in hand, stood his ground on the bridge and single-handedly prevented the Anglo-Saxon army from crossing to the east side of the Derwent, where Harald and Tostig’s men, many of whom had left their body armour behind with the fleet at Riccall, were scrambling to react.66 There was some disagreement between the two allies, as Tostig advised retiring to the fleet, while Harald spurned cautious counsel and ordered his men to form up into a shield wall, with its wings curved so far back that it was almost circular. At the centre, inside the circle, Harald Hardrada positioned himself next to his great banner, ‘Landwaster’,67 while the archers also sheltered behind the protective barrier of the shields. Eystein Orri, Harald’s marshal, was sent back to Riccall to summon reinforcements from among those who had been left guarding the fleet.
There was a brief lull as Harold Godwinson sent out twenty riders to parlay with his opponents. They were instructed to ask if Tostig was with the Norwegian army and, when the reply came in the affirmative, they passed on Harold’s greetings and offered him the whole of Northumbria in exchange for peace. Tostig enquired in turn what terms would be offered to Harald Hardrada. The response from his brother was curt: the Norwegian king could expect only ‘seven feet of earth, or as much more as he is taller than other men’.68
Harald in turn is said to have asked if anyone knew who the man was who had ‘spoken so well’, and, on learning that it was none other than the English king, retorted rather acidly, ‘What a small man.’ Shortly after this exchange, the battle was joined. The description in the sagas is rather formulaic. King Harald’s Saga tells of an initial English cavalry charge, but for the most part there were a series of volleys of spears and arrows followed by bitter hand-to-hand fighting as Harold Godwinson’s men tried to break through Hardrada’s shield-wall. At a certain point – and accounts vary as to whether this was a deliberate tactic by the Norwegians, a reaction to a feigned flight by the English or simply out of frustration at being on the defensive for so long – a group of Norwegians broke out of the shield-wall and charged the English. Seeing the danger, Harald joined the fray and was consumed by a berserk fury, lashing out uncontrollably, and unconcerned for his own safety.69
Lacking their mail coats, many of the Norwegians were cut down. Even so, the ferocity of Harald’s assault might have turned the day, as ‘Neither helmets nor byrnie could stand against him. All who were nearest turned away.’ But then, as it seemed the battle might still be won, Hardrada was struck in the throat by an arrow and killed.70 As news spread that the Norwegian king had fallen, the battle died down. Harold Godwinson again offered his brother the earldom of Northumbria and free passage to the Norsemen to return home, but Tostig refused and took up position beside ‘Landwaster’. Among the group of notables who stood with him next to the fallen king’s flag was Harald’s favourite skald, Thjodolf, who took time to compose a death-poem – a poetic knack under pressure that many Norse skalds seem to have mastered: ‘needless and for nothing out of northland Harald brought us,’ he lamented, ‘badly bested we are now and ended in the life of he who boldly bade us battle here in England’.71
Thjodolf’s premonition was accurate. The Norwegian shield-wall grew thinner and – although the sagas do not say exactly when or how – at some point Tostig, too, was slain. The battle was not quite done, for it was at this point, with the field littered with his dead and dying countrymen, that Eystein Orri arrived with the men he had mustered from the ships. The heat of the day was said to have been intense and many of these Norwegians, who this time had donned their armour, threw it off. A number even died of heatstroke. In any case, the reinforcements were not enough and this section of the engagement, dubbed ‘Orri’s Battle’ in the saga, ended equally badly for the Norwegians. Most of them were slaughtered – the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle implies that many died by drowning as they retreated to the ships or were burnt (possibly aboard their vessels). A few, however, escaped the carnage, the most notable being Hardrada’s son, Olaf Haraldsson, and the two earls of Orkney, Paul and Erlend, who had remained guarding the ships all the time.
Harold allowed the survivors to leave. Twenty-four ships were all that was needed to take them back, first to the north-east and then to Orkney, where Olaf passed the news of his father’s death to his mother, Ellisif. The party spent the winter in Orkney and then, when sailing conditions permitted, returned to Norway in the summer of 1067. Behind them on the battlefield of Stamford Bridge they left thousands of corpses, so many that Ordericus Vitalis in the twelfth century could record that the bleached bones of the dead could still be seen heaped up.72 Tostig’s body was treated with greater dignity and, on Harold’s orders, was carried back to York for burial, while that of Harald Hardrada was sent back to Norway sometime in late 1067 and was laid to rest in the church of St Mary at Nidaros.
Harald Hardrada’s demise was a bitter end to the career of one of the most famous Vikings of all. For all the glories in between, it was bracketed by two defeats, at Stiklestad in 1030 where he witnessed the death of his brother Olaf Tryggvason, and at Stamford Bridge where he came tantalisingly close to seizing the throne of England and re-creating Cnut’s North Sea empire. Whether he might in turn have garnered enough support from the Anglo-Saxon nobility to defeat William of Normandy is another matter. Although the Norse still occupied substantial parts of northern Scotland and the Isles, and Scandinavian monarchs would still launch raids against England (or dream of doing so), no Viking ever again came as close to the conquest of Britain as Harald Hardrada did in 1066.
Harold Godwinson’s movements in the immediate aftermath of Stamford Bridge are uncertain. What is clear is that he cannot have had very much time to rest his army before heading back southwards. It is likely that he heard of Duke William’s landing at Pevensey on 1 October, just three days after it had occurred, and he was by that time probably already on his way back from York. William, meanwhile, had also been alerted to Harold’s victory at Stamford Bridge by Robert FitzWymark, a Norman who had been resident in England for some years.73
There are indications that Harold may have suffered desertions on his way to London, or that at least he reached the south ahead of a substantial portion of his army.74 He probably arrived in London on 6 or 7 October and, once there, had to make the decision as to whether to attack William or wait for the Norman army to come to him. Harold’s mother, Gytha, is said to have tried to dissuade him from an immediate assault, although the story that his brother Gyrth pointed out that Harold had sworn an oath to uphold William’s claim to the throne and so could not lawfully fight him was probably concocted by Ordericus Vitalis and is symptomatic of the pro-Norman chroniclers’ tendency to stress that William had only come to England to claim what was rightfully his.75
Harold brushed aside all opposition and decided to confront William head-on by marching towards Hastings. Flush from his victory at Stamford Bridge, he was probably confident that he could see off William’s comparatively small force and did not want to see an invading army overwinter on English soil (which would have been an uncomfortable reminder of the activities of the Viking Great Army at the time of his illustrious predecessor, Alfred the Great). It took Harold two days to cover the ground between London and Hastings, around 50–60 miles, much of it through the wooded terrain of the Andredsweald. Late the same evening he reached Caldbec Hill, and the ‘hoary apple-tree’ where he had called for his troops to muster.
The sources for what happened next are fairly plentiful, providing more information about the encounter between Duke William and Harold than almost any other battle since classical times. However, the accounts of English sources such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the (often significantly later) French and Norman chroniclers such as William of Jumièges, William of Poitiers (the author of the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio), William of Malmesbury (in his Gesta Regum Anglorum) and Ordericus Vitalis are hard to reconcile in detail.
The most intriguing, and certainly the most visually appealing, source for the Battle of Hastings is the Bayeux Tapestry. Its 225 feet of linen, made up of nine joined strips, are embroidered with a cartoon-like narrative of the events leading up to Hastings, interspersed with occasional Latin inscriptions, which give a gloss on the events being portrayed. The tapestry became associated early on with the name of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William’s half-brother.76 It cannot be known for sure whether Odo did in fact commission it, but the tapestry’s tendency to magnify his importance in the battle makes this a plausible suggestion. The long-held belief that the work was done by Matilda, the wife of William the Conqueror, and other ladies of the court is less sustainable.77 The Tapestry probably was embroidered somewhere in Normandy, and it has spent most of its recorded history in France, but on certain points it seems to follow a point of view more favourable to Harold than might be expected (such as its depiction of Edward designating Harold as his heir, his fingers stretched out in a gesture of bestowal). This has led to some suggestions that the work was carried out by English nuns, albeit under the general patronage of a Norman, such as Odo, or indeed Matilda. Its inclusion of a very prominent scene where Harold seems to swear fealty to William, however, suggests that the Tapestry’s true purpose was, at least in part, to support William’s claim to the English throne as a just and legal one.
The exact size of the armies at Hastings is unknown. William’s rhetorical flourish that he would still have fought Harold even with 10,000 men, rather than the 60,000 he claimed to have brought across from Normandy, is not to be taken seriously78 and there were probably more like 6,000–8,000 on each side. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts that Harold still did not have his best troops with him, presumably because they were still making their way from York, but this may well be a way of justifying his defeat after the event. The principal difference between the two armies seems to have been the larger number of cavalry and archers among the Normans. The elite warriors on both sides would have worn a chain-mail coat of metal rings sewn onto a leather backing. The helmets were generally simple conical affairs of iron, with a wide nosepiece, while spears, javelins and swords formed the main arms on the Norman side, with the addition of two-handed axes amongst the English, which were a carry-over from their popularity amongst the Danes and Vikings generally.
William had remained close to Pevensey, strengthening both the old Roman fort there and building a new one at the neighbouring town of Hastings, and it was around 7 miles away from the latter that he was now camped. It may have been Harold’s plan to take him by surprise there,79 but Norman scouts alerted William just in time to the unexpected presence of the English host, and the Norman army spent the night in a state of high alert. William ordered his men to set out towards Harold’s position at daybreak the next morning (with sunrise at about 6.45 a.m., this would have been around an hour earlier). It probably took them about an hour to reach Blackhorse Hill (then known as Hecheland) just to the south of the day’s battlefield. Here the Normans paused, some of them donning their armour. By chance, William put on his chain-mail hauberk the wrong way round, but aware of the sensitivity of men on the brink of battle to bad omens, the duke made light of the mishap. As his own shield against fate, he is said to have gone into battle wearing the very saints’ relics on which Harold Godwinson had sworn his oath to uphold William’s claim to the throne.
The English host had reached the vicinity of the ridge of what is now Battle Abbey late on Friday 13 October 1066, and early next morning (probably around 9 a.m.) Harold arrayed his army along the ridge, which is around two-thirds of a mile long, with the ground falling away all around it (save to the north). To the west lay a series of small streams and drainage channels, while to the east was a wooded area, long afterwards called Saxon Wood. With the advantage of high ground secured, Harold planted his royal banner on the crest of the ridge.
Although today the hill has been terraced (to facilitate the construction of Battle Abbey, whose ruins take up much of it) – a development that has made the slope somewhat shallower – at the time it would have presented a formidable obstacle for men wearing chain-mail coats and carrying swords and shields, who had to charge up it in the face of a barrage of spears, arrows and other projectiles. The ground around the hill, moreover, was boggy from the water courses that traversed the battlefield, and was hardly ideal territory for William’s cavalry to operate in. Just as Harald Hardrada’s men had done at Stamford Bridge, the Anglo-Saxons formed themselves up into a shield-wall and waited for the Norman assault.
William himself arrayed his men a short distance away from the base of the hill, with a contingent of Bretons, Angevins and Poitevins under the command of his son-in-law, Alan Fergant. The Normans occupied a position in the centre, and on his right flank William placed a division of men from Picardy and Flanders, led by his seneschal William fitzOsbern. It seems likely that the main action was preceded by volleys from the Norman archers and crossbowmen, intended to thin out the English ranks. A more picturesque account80 relates that the first action of the battle was a display by a minstrel called Taillefer, who had accompanied the Norman army. He rode out to the front of the line, juggling swords while reciting the Chanson de Roland, the epic poem that tells of its eponymous hero’s valiant death at the hands of the Moors at Roncesvalles, and of the vengeance exacted by the Frankish king Charlemagne. One of the Anglo-Saxon standard-bearers came forward to challenge Taillefer, but was struck dead by the troubadour, who then charged into Harold’s line and was overwhelmed by the mass of infuriated English warriors.
The main phase of the battle began with the sounding of trumpets to herald a series of infantry attacks by the Normans against the English positions on the hill. As the Normans cried out ‘Deus Aie’ (‘God help us’), the Anglo-Saxons responded with battle cries of ‘Olicrosse’ (‘Holy Cross’) and ‘Ut, ut’ (‘Out, out’). The steepness of the slope, and the volleys of spears and arrows that the ridge’s defenders rained down on them, meant that the Normans’ attacks had lost momentum by the time they reached the crest, and as a result they failed to make any significant dent in the shield-wall. A cavalry attack similarly made no headway.
At this critical moment the morale of a section of the Bretons holding the Norman left flank cracked and they began to retreat down the slope and away from the hill. Accounts vary as to whether their flight was caused by rumours that Duke William had been killed, whether it was just the pressure of the battle or was indeed a deliberate feint to draw out a section of the shield-wall – a tactic that seems to have been used to some effect by Harold himself at Stamford Bridge. Whatever the cause of the withdrawal, it was a critical moment for the Norman duke. If the panic had taken hold of the other parts of the Norman line, and Harold had then ordered his men forward off the ridge, the battle might have ended in utter catastrophe for William.
Instead, only a section of the Anglo-Saxon shield-wall went in pursuit of the fleeing Bretons. Harold’s hesitancy may be explained by the deaths of his brothers Leofwine and Gyrth, which probably occurred about this time.81 William removed his helmet to show those around him that he was still alive, and shouted out, ‘See, I am here: I am still living, and by God’s help, shall yet have the victory.’ Odo of Bayeux is said to have ridden out to rally groups of retreating Bretons, while William himself – who had three horses killed beneath him during the battle – led a cavalry charge to cut down the now-exposed Anglo-Saxons who had left their ridgetop refuge.
The Normans rallied quickly and those Anglo-Saxons who had charged down the hill had been quickly dealt with. Seeing the success of the retreat (feigned or genuine) at drawing out the English, William ordered a series of further withdrawals. Yet the English shield-wall still remained largely intact. Once more William was faced with a difficult choice: if he could not lure his opponent off the hill, Harold might well receive reinforcements, and then the Normans’ already tenuous position in Sussex might become unsustainable.
William ordered his men forward again and again. It was during one of these attacks that the decisive moment occurred. The Norman archers, who had probably exhausted their supply of arrows, either received fresh supplies or were able, under cover of the infantry attacks, to retrieve those that had fallen short of the ridge. In one of the renewed volleys that accompanied the Norman attacks against the thinning shield-wall, Harold was struck down and died soon afterwards. Exactly how he met his end has been the subject of intense debate. The relevant section of the Bayeux Tapestry is ambiguous. The panel, which is labelled Hic Harold rex interfectus est (‘Here king Harold is killed’), portrays beneath this text a soldier who seems to be trying to pull out an arrow that has pierced the right side of his face. Could this be Harold? An alternative interpretation is that it is another man – carrying an axe and shown being struck down by a cavalryman just to the right of the arrow-scene – who is in fact Harold. Still another possibility is that Harold was struck by an arrow, but that he was not fatally wounded and died later in the battle.82 The picture is muddied still further by a drawing of the Tapestry made in 1730 by Antoine Benoît, which seems to show that the first figure is about to hurl a spear and is not pulling an arrow from his own skull at all.83 A stone slab now marks the spot where Harold is said to have fallen – it is here that William ordered the high altar of Battle Abbey to be placed, as a permanent reminder of the victory God had given him. Now set amid the ruined shell of the buildings of the former Abbey (much of which was demolished in the eighteenth century), it is a little way back from the ridge. It is tempting to suppose that Harold was dragged back here after being struck by the arrow, and that the stricken king was then dealt his death-blow (or simply expired from the wound) on the spot.
It has become fashionable to discount the arrow story, but it is included in many of the early accounts of the battle by Baudri of Bourgeuil and Amatus of Montecassino. It is also relayed by both William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntington, so the story must have arisen very early on. However Harold died – and there is even a story in the Carmen that Duke William burst through the English shield-wall with three knights and personally slew his adversary84 – what is clear is that Harold fell, and that this had a devastating effect on English morale. As William of Poitiers put it: ‘the English army realised that there was no hope of resisting the Normans any longer. They knew that the loss of many troops had weakened them; that the king himself and his brothers and not a few of the kingdom’s nobility had all perished; that all those who remained were at the end of their strength, and there was no hope of relief for them.’85
Most sources concur that the battle ended at nightfall, and it seems to have done so in a rout rather than a last stand. Harold and his brothers Leofwine and Gyrth – who might have rallied the army – were all dead. As the panicked English fled, the mounted Normans were able to cut them down in large numbers: in common with many medieval pitched battles, the majority of casualties probably occurred at this stage. Yet there were still some Anglo-Saxons who fought back, and it seems that a group made a stand at a rampart and series of ditches known as the Malfosse. When Count Eustace of Boulogne came upon them, he ignored advice and charged the position. He received a wound to the head and several Norman nobles were killed. Another account86 states that the Norman cavalry failed to spot the rampart, as it was hidden by undergrowth, and that many of them perished there. The Battle Abbey Chronicle also relates the story of a weed-choked ditch in which large numbers of Normans died.
No organised English resistance survived the night, and the dead were soon stripped of their valuables. The bodies of Leofwine and Gyrth had been located at the top of the hill, but at first Harold’s body could not be found. Finally the royal corpse was identified by his mistress, Edith Swan-Neck, who knew it by certain marks that ‘only she could recognise’. Harold’s body was brought to William, at which point his mother, Gytha, offered the corpse’s weight in gold if the duke would release it for burial. William refused and is said to have had his adversary interred in a grave on the Sussex coast, so that it could continue to be the guardian of the coast that Harold had so resolutely defended in life.87 The rest of the Anglo-Saxon dead were left for the crows to pick clean. It is hard to know exactly how many died, but if the armies on either side are counted at 7,000 each, then the fallen must have numbered at least several thousand – a shocking tally at a time when the population of a large town such as York or Lincoln was only 4,000–5,000. The carnage was so appalling that in 1070 Pope Alexander II ordered William to do penance for all the blood he had caused to be shed. It was as a result of this that William ordered the building of Battle Abbey. Far from being a victory monument, it was more the new English king’s way of avoiding divine (or at least papal) retribution.
William had won by the battle through a mixture of good luck and favourable circumstances. Had Harold not had to face the Norwegian invasion in the north, then his troops would have been fresher and his army more numerous. And had the English king not been killed (by an arrow strike or other means), then he would at least have been able to rally fresh forces, while William had no such possibility of easy reinforcement. Whether Harold acted correctly in marching to meet William or whether the Norman duke was prudent in remaining close to his beach-head is a moot point, but it would not have mattered if Harold had not fallen on the field of Hastings.
Nor was William’s task done. Some of his fleet had landed earlier at Romney by mistake and had been defeated by an English force there, which William now marched to deal with. As he moved eastwards, he received the rapid capitulation of Dover and Canterbury. In the meantime the men of London had proclaimed the young Edgar Atheling, just fourteen at the time, as king. With the prospect of a rapid capitulation by the capital denied him, William circled warily around London to the west, receiving the submission of Winchester and then proceeding via Wallingford, where Archbishop Stigand offered his surrender. He finally reached Berkhamsted around 10 December, where Archbishop Ealdred of York, Edgar the Atheling and Earls Edwin and Morcar submitted to him. William is said to have offered Edwin authority over one-third of England (presumably the north) and it may have been this inducement that tempted the two earls to lay down their arms.88 With their knowledge of the fault-line that had divided northern and southern England across the boundaries of the Danelaw since the ninth century, and of the capacity of York to act as a bulwark against expansion from the south, they may well have thought of ruling at least the north of England independently of William, and possibly of using it as a springboard to push him eventually out of the rest.
If so, they were badly mistaken. William did not stay long in England after his coronation (by none other than Archbishop Ealdred), returning to Normandy early in 1067, but he was forced to return at the end of the year after Eustace of Boulogne’s intemperate attack on Dover Castle almost sparked an uprising. In 1068 he then had to besiege Exeter for eighteen days in order to impose his authority on the West Country.
The greatest challenge to William’s rule over England was yet to come. Svein Estrithsson of Denmark launched an invasion fleet in 1069, joining forces with Edgar the Atheling, who had raised an army north of the Humber. There were also coordinated uprisings in the West Country and along the Welsh marches,89 but Edgar attacked York too soon and failed to take the castle. William reacted swiftly and scattered the Atheling’s force. Although William then built a second castle in York, both fortresses fell when Svein arrived and joined up with the remnants of Edgar’s army. William’s counter-strike was held up for several weeks by stiff opposition at the Aire crossing near Pontefract, but when he finally reached York he found that Edgar and the Danes had fled and the uprising had collapsed.
Determined to stamp his authority on the north of England, William then engaged in a scorched-earth policy that was so devastating that it was known ever after as the ‘Harrying of the North’. Some 100,000 are said to have died from hunger as a result, and as late as 1086, when the Domesday Survey was being carried out, many villages were recorded as lying ‘waste’. Svein, meanwhile, had returned to Denmark early in 1070. The last embers of resistance burnt in the fens of East Anglia, combining a rump of Danes, the remains of Earl Morcar’s forces and a local resistance leader named Hereward the Wake (or the Exile), but they were eventually overcome in 1071, when Earl Morcar surrendered. Far from his ambition of a semi-independent earldom in the north, he then languished a prisoner for the remaining sixteen years of William’s reign, dying sometime in the reign of his successor William Rufus (1087–1100).
By now William’s hold on England was reasonably secure. There were further conspiracies, but none of them really threatened his rule. The most serious, in 1085, involved Waltheof, the last surviving English earl, and a threatened Scandinavian invasion fleet. This combination, together with the prospect of Knut IV of Denmark allying with Count Robert of Flanders, caused considerable alarm to William. He crossed over from Normandy with a mercenary force so large that it had to be dispersed among William’s leading vassals to pay for its upkeep. In the event it was not needed, as the English side of the revolt was easily put down. Waltheof was captured and beheaded, and his Norman confederate, Earl Ralph of East Anglia, fled abroad, while Earl Roger of Hereford suffered imprisonment. Cnut, meanwhile, was preoccupied with a possible invasion of southern Denmark by Emperor Henry IV and early the following year was killed at Odense by rebels and so his fleet never sailed.
The era of the Viking raids of England ended with an invasion that never happened. Over the course of nearly 300 years the threat, and the all-too-frequent reality, of Scandinavian raids, invasions and occupation of parts of England had shaped the destiny of the country, almost leading to the collapse of native rule and in the end contributing to its unification under the overlordship of Wessex. The attempt at creating a Viking kingdom based in York failed in the end, although Scandinavian customs and a fair admixture of Scandinavian genes survived in the population of northern England. Ironically, it was a man of Norwegian Viking descent who finally overthrew the House of Wessex and established an enduring non-native dynasty, succeeding where generations of raiders, chiefs and kings since the very first raid in 793 had all tried and failed.