by Ed West
Not only was William’s claim tenuous, but his plan to invade England was also extremely risky. The Normans were not great seafarers, and William had to build a fleet from scratch, with the sound of metal on wood being heard over the spring and summer of 1066 as forests were cleared to build his fleet. The Norman aristocracy were extremely reluctant to go ahead with the invasion, which they regarded as suicidal. Even if they successfully crossed the sea, which is extremely hazardous, they would be hugely outnumbered in England. Even if they won one battle, victory was still not assured, as another English leader could raise another army. Eventually William tricked the Norman leaders into pledging their support, installing a negotiator who pretended to arbitrate but then presented their agreement as a fait accompli. The price was offering them big chunks of England, which meant already William came not just to claim a crown but to take English land away. It was obviously not going to be popular.
The Church
The Duke of Normandy also had one huge advantage: the support of the Church. This was partly due to military reality, for the Normans now controlled southern Italy and the Roman establishment was therefore keen not to antagonize them. On top of this William had been helped by events in Rome, which was racked by conflict in 1059 between two rival claimants; the duke gave military support to new pope Nicholas II against his rival Benedict X and afterwards Nicholas recognized his marriage.
William was also better at playing politics with a changing Church. Popes, no longer chosen by the German emperor but by cardinals, were getting more powerful and the future Pope Gregory VII, who was plain Cardinal Hildebrand in 1066, wanted kings chosen by popes rather than the other way around. One of the most influential churchmen of the medieval period, Hildebrand to his enemies represented all that was worst in the medieval Church, including the torture of opponents, assassinations and even black magic. But he was also making it less corrupt; up to seven popes in the previous two centuries had been murdered and Roman politics was fantastically violent and Machiavellian, and in 1046 there were three rival popes at the same time.16 The last one, Benedict IX, had been made pontiff at just twenty and then went on to sell the position, meanwhile being accused of ‘many vile adulteries and murders’. All that was changing, and as a sweetener to Hildebrand, the duke now promised he would submit to the rule of the pope after he conquered England, even though this was obviously a lie, and he had absolutely no intention of doing so.
The Church was also becoming stricter about corruption and sexual shenanigans, and was more streamlined, so any signs of deviance in beliefs or habits was clamped down on. William was a skilled diplomat, and his envoy convinced the Pope that the English Church was a hotbed of debauchery and corruption (which, to be fair, it probably was). The English case was not helped by the fact that Stigand, the archbishop of Canterbury, had been excommunicated a number of times and was, in the words of a Flemish biographer, ‘irreparably attracted to the devil by riches and worldly glory’.
Likewise Ealdred, the bishop who had previously led an army into Wales, was now both archbishop of York and bishop of Worcester, which ‘amusing the simplicity of King Edward’ he had acquired ‘more by bribery than by reason’.17
The Godwins were not so good at diplomacy. Five years earlier Harold had made the mistake of sending his uncouth brother Tostig to Rome to defend the English Church against charges of corruption and general deviancy. Tostig, a half-Viking lout, would not have made a good impression in the refined atmosphere of the Holy See. At Pope Nicholas’s Easter get-together Tostig sat next to the pope, but when the Holy Father told Ealdred he’d lose both his bishoprics, Tostig lost his temper and threatened him with nonpayment of the tribute England sent to Rome, called Peter’s Pence.
Tostig was only saved on that occasion because on the way home, outside Rome, they were attacked by an outlaw called Gerard, Count of Galeria, and the pontiff was so embarrassed by the lawlessness in his neighborhood he changed his mind.
William was now able to present the invasion as a crusade against the ungodly, even though the Norman church was hardly a paragon of virtue. The king’s brother Odo of Bayeux had been made bishop when he was just thirteen and had at least one mistress and a son. Then there was Ivo of Bellême, bishop of Séez, who burned down his own church, he says to get rid of some rough aristocrats who had turned it into a brothel, although this excuse was rejected by Pope Leo.18 In fact Bishop Bellême’s wrongdoings make Stigand look like a comedy antihero in comparison; he murdered his first wife in order to marry the wealthy daughter of a viscount, and during the wedding he attacked his vassal William Giroie, blinding, castrating and mutilating him.
The Bellêmes were even by Norman standards a bad lot. Ivor’s niece Mabel, heiress of Bellême, poisoned her brother-in-law and killed many others before she was murdered in her bath by a man she’d taken land from. Her epitaph by a supporter puts it gently: ‘a shield of her inheritance, a tower guarding the frontier; to some neighbors dear, to others terrible’.
So badly behaved were the Norman bishops that five of them were forced to attend a conference at Rheims in 1049 to answer charges of corruption. Among them was Geoffrey of Montbray, who was accused of having bought his bishopric; at the council he argued that his brother had bought it without his knowledge, which he swore under oath was true, and was let off. Another bishop present, Malger, was also known to be selling positions in the Church and to have concubines.
But the Normans were much better at playing Church politics, and were more in touch with the growing seriousness of Catholicism, including in areas like priestly celibacy. So with the Pope’s blessing, volunteers from across western Europe joined William’s crusade, promised either a place in Heaven if they lost or a country estate in England if they won. To further the support of the Church, William now put one of his daughters into a convent.
Having heard the news, William sent Harold a message demanding he hand over the kingdom, and reminding him of their agreement in which one of his cronies would marry Harold’s sister and in return Harold marry William’s daughter. The king replied that unfortunately he was now married, and that his sister was dead, but if William wanted he could send over her body.19
In April 1066 an English spy was captured in Normandy and William sent him back with the words: ‘Take this message from me to Harold: he will have nothing to fear from me and can live the rest of his life secure if, within the space of one year, he has not seen me in the place where he thinks his feet are safest.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Last Viking
To make things worse, a third ruler now vied for the throne, the Norwegian madman Harald Siguardsson. The six-foot-six-inch Thunderbolt of the North, as he was known, was famed for showing no mercy to his enemies. One of his party tricks was to break a siege by attaching burning wood to the wings of birds, which would then fly back to their nests within the city, starting a fire, a method originally thought up by the Vikings in Russia.1 At a time when few heads of state fell into the liberal-democratic bracket, Harald’s nickname Hardraada—hard ruler—suggests he was not a man to be reasoned with.
Hardraada was the half brother of King Olaf II, the same Olaf who had torn down London Bridge, and might have appeared like something of a monster to his enemies (imagine the Mountain from Game of Thrones). Enormously tall and strong, he had blond hair, a long moustache and gigantic hands and feet, and one eyebrow higher than the other. He wore a distinctive mailcoat that went all the way down to his legs to protect his ankles, which his men all called Emma because it looked like a skirt.
Hardraada had inherited the throne from his nephew Magnus, and with it the idea that he should be king of England, a claim that went back to the agreement between Magnus and Hardicnut. It was all a bit tenuous, but after Hardicnut’s unlamented passing Magnus continued to make various threats about invading England without ever bothering to do it; until eventually his death put pay to the idea.
Despite his horrific attachment to viol
ence, Harald was also obsessed with poetry, and saw everything in his life in terms of how it would sound in epic verse. Comparing Viking scald poetry to rap battles might sound like the sort of cringe-worthy analogy a teacher makes to desperately try to impress a class of scary teenagers, but that’s basically what it was, a celebration of masculine prowess setting the subject above his peers. What mattered most to Vikings were the songs people would sing about them celebrating their heroic deeds and all-round toughness. Indeed Harald himself wrote a poem, which went like this:
‘Now I have caused the deaths
Of thirteen of my enemies
I kill without compunction
And remember all my killings
Treason must be scotched
By fair means or foul
Before it overwhelms me
Oak trees grow from acorns.’
Admittedly it’s not Wordsworth, but he did have a sensitive side.
Olaf and Harald’s mother Åsta Gudbrandsdatter was a formidable figure. She once told her eldest: ‘If I had the choice, I would rather you became king of all Norway, though you lived no longer than Olaf Tryggvason [Olaf I], than that you should remain at the level of Sigurd Syr and die of old age’. Sigurd was Harald’s father, who had only remained a petty king; as it is her eldest son did become ruler and reached the ripe old age of forty-two before dying violently in battle.
As a small boy Harald had shown his precocious side. When he and his two brothers were asked what they wanted most in the world, the two older boys replied ‘Corn and cattle’. Harald stared intensely and said ‘Warriors’.
Harald had grown up during his brother’s reign, during which Olaf was mostly in conflict with Norway’s aristocrats, who weren’t so keen on some of the king’s crazy new schemes; in particular Olaf outraged his jarls by his idea of equality before the law. Olaf was overthrown by Canute in 1028 and so reinvaded Norway in 1030 with 2,500 men, among them his fifteen-year-old half brother Harald, twenty-two years younger than him. The battle took place on July 29; the night before, Olaf had had a dream in which a ladder came down from heaven and Jesus beckoned him, which can’t have been very encouraging. The next day that particular dream did come true and Olaf was killed in battle.
Afterwards Canute put his mistress/wife Elfgifu in charge of Norway, and so unpopular did she prove that a cult soon grew around the former king, and it is for that reason that the obese warrior became a saint. It didn’t help that a famine hit the country and eventually there was a demand to dig up Olaf’s remains which turned out to be incorruptible, a sign of sanctity; although Elfgifu tried to explain it away as the result of unusual soil content, her husband’s former rival proved more powerful in death than in life.
Harald meanwhile was badly wounded in the battle that had killed his brother and had to hide out in the woods while he tended to his injuries, helped by some local peasants. Afterwards he did what many unemployed Vikings did and took the traditional route up the rivers of Russia towards Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, then the capital of the eastern Roman Empire.
The Eastern, or ‘Byzantine Empire’, didn’t collapse in the fifth century like the western half and went on to last another thousand years. Far more advanced than anywhere in the West, its capital was home to perhaps 500,000 people during Harald’s time, about half of what it had been a couple of centuries earlier, but still absolutely enormous compared to anywhere in western Europe; Paris had less than 50,000 and London perhaps 15,000 people. Constantinople had street lighting, sewers, drainage, hospitals, ‘orphanages, public baths, aqueducts, huge water cisterns, libraries and luxury shops’,2 which to a Viking (or any northern European) would have been mind-blowing. The city had seven palaces, including the Triconchus of Theophilus, which was roofed in gold, and the Sigma, which had fountains flowing with wine. Here the throne of the emperor was guarded by two lions of bronze, in front of which was a metal tree with mechanical birds.
Vikings would sail down the rivers of Russia towards the imperial city, where the north men were employed in the emperor’s Varangian guard as mercenaries (their graffiti can still be seen on the upper levels of the Hagia Sophia cathedral, now a museum). Harald became a noted warrior in Byzantium and there are many stories attached to his time there, and some of them may even be true. According to one, he was forced to do battle with a lion in an arena after seducing a noblewoman, but heroically beat the animal. In another story Harald, along with his friends Haldor and Ulf, had to combat a giant snake, and also killed it (there’s obviously a bit of a theme here).
One of Harald’s other memorable moments came when he gouged out the eyes of the ex-emperor Michael and his uncle Constantine, the losers in one of the empire’s internecine squabbles. (Byzantine court coups often ended up with the loser being blinded, or something else awful, although they considered actually killing them a bit excessive.)
Another story involving Harald and his band of Vikings has them besieging an Italian town where they decide to trick some monks into allowing Harald into the city by pretending that he died during the siege, and telling the monks they want to give him a Christian burial, which seems a strikingly unconvincing line (considering a similar story features in Homer, it is literally the oldest trick in the book). Once inside Harald jumped out and he and his men attacked, the saga’s recording of the slaughter with the glee of old World War Two comics: ‘The monks and other priests who had striven to be the first to receive the corpse now struggled to get away from the Norsemen, who slew everyone round them, clerk or layman, ravaged the town, slaughtered the men, robbed all the churches and loaded themselves with booty’. Awesome!
Harald had eventually returned to Norway loaded with gold, after falling out with the authorities in Constantinople, and bringing back with him a Russian wife. By the time he arrived home his nephew Magnus was on the throne, which Harald now wanted for himself; and Harald was not someone you could reason with. Nephew and uncle had tried ruling jointly for a while, but it had not worked out too well. Tensions got worse when a famous bard, Arnorr Hordarson, was commissioned to recite two songs for the kings in their presence, and it was generally agreed that the one about Magnus was better. Harald was deeply upset.
This was a big deal, for Hardraada had once given Hordarson a spear inlaid with gold, in return for which the skald promised that if he outlived Harald he’d compose a great poem in his honor—which he did, an epic which had as the running refrain ‘May the soul of mighty Harald Abide eternally with Christ’. Which seems pretty optimistic.
After Magnus died Harald became sole ruler, acquiring his nickname for his uncomplicated manner of dealing with problems. His main opponent was one Einar Tambarskjelver, ‘Wobbly Belly’, who led the aristocrats and farmers in opposition to the new king’s rule; he once arrived at Harald’s court with five hundred warriors and nine warships, as he didn’t trust Harald, and rightly so. When eventually some farmers were so unhappy they sent Einar as their representative to take their demands to the king, Harald had Einar hacked to death and then burned all the farmers’ houses down. As a poet recalled, ‘flames cured the peasants/Of disloyalty to Harold’. Which was true, essentially.
Harald was a great warrior and a flamboyant character, but by the sounds of things quite unhinged, and his total absence of caution would help to bring to an end the great Viking age. And by 1065 he had finally resolved a long-running dispute with Denmark which meant he was free to embark on what would be a totally reckless invasion of England.
Fulford and Stamford Bridge
In the meantime King Harold of England had in the spring gone on a tour of the north to drum up support there. He had been unwell, and had possibly suffered a stroke in the previous two or three years,3 cured by a German doctor called Adelard who had been sent by the Holy Roman Emperor; Adelard advised Harold to pray at his church at Waltham Cross, which seemed to work.
Harold returned to Westminster from York on April 16, in an atmosphere of increasing paranoia and doom. Ma
ny felt that a terrible catastrophe was facing the country, and everyone had their own theories as to why; Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester (nephew of the ‘Lupus’ Wulfstan from Ethelred’s era) suggested that all the nation’s problems were down to men not cutting their hair. He believed that men who wore their hair long would be as weak as women and so couldn’t defend the country, and all in all seemed quite obsessed with the subject of hair; when men used to go to Wulfstan for Mass whenever they bowed their heads he cut off little bits with a knife he kept with him.
It was at this point that Tostig turned up. Having left England in 1065 he fled to Flanders, his wife’s home, and at some point came up with the harebrained idea of invading England. Tostig had spent the spring of 1066 sailing around the North Sea trying to get someone—anyone—to invade with him. First he had tried invading Lincolnshire by himself but was driven away by Edwin and Morcar and most of his sailors deserted them.
Tostig had then asked his cousin Sweyn Estridsen of Denmark to invade. He said no. Even though Tostig appealed to the king’s descent from the Viking Sweyn Forkebeard, father of Canute, Sweyn Estridsen said he knew he couldn’t win, which was hardly the old Viking spirit, and Tostig then taunted him with cowardice—but that didn’t work either. However Sweyn was so alarmed at the prospect of either Harald Hardraada or Duke William becoming king of England that he sent troops to Harold instead; there were most likely Danes on the English side at Hastings.
Tostig might also have been rebuffed in Flanders and Normandy, but the king of Norway agreed, and an invasion plan was launched, one that in retrospect seems astonishingly unwise. At the time Norway was cut off from the rest of Europe, so Harald didn’t know much about the internal politics of England, in the way the leaders of Denmark or Flanders would have, specifically that everyone in England hated Tostig, apart from maybe his sister. The plan was entirely reckless, and some of Harald’s actions suggest he didn’t think he was coming back; perhaps he just thought the whole adventure would make a good poem one day, and that’s all that mattered. As for Tostig, his behavior at the time is the most puzzling, so some historians think the only logical explanation is that he had gone insane.