by John Marsden
The earls’ forces took the initiative with a charge – made along the line of the dike and led by Morcar’s standard – which drove into the right flank of the Norwegian line and apparently caused it to break up on impact. Whether this reflected the weakness of Tostig’s contingent or represented a tactical feint typical of Harald’s guile is uncertain, but it was that point in the battle which the king chose to order his left wing into an attack against the facing ranks of Edwin’s forces. With his Land-ravager standard to the fore, the swerve of the Norwegian charge crumbled the enemy into disorder and a great many were slain even before they took flight, some along the riverbanks but most of them into the dike ‘where their dead soon lay so thickly that the northmen could cross the waterlogged swamp dry-shod’.
Whether success came quite as swiftly as the saga suggests or only after the ‘long contest’ described in the English sources, it was still a truly historic triumph – not only the last of so many credited to Harald himself, but also the very last Scandinavian victory on English soil. It would seem, nonetheless, to have been won at no small cost when John of Worcester tells of Morcar’s men having ‘fought so bravely at the onset of the battle that many of the enemy were laid low’, so it is very likely that Tostig’s right wing would have suffered heavy casualties in Morcar’s initial onslaught. Yet all the saga-makers are in error when they claim Earl Morcar to have been slain in the fighting, because he certainly survived the battle, probably by taking flight and perhaps to his own country of East Anglia where he was to reappear in 1071 and with his brother Edwin among the leaders of a revolt against the Norman conquest. The authority for this premature obituary of Morcar appears to be an oddly formed strophe quoted in the Heimskringla version of the saga where it is attributed to the skald Stein Herdisason, and so perhaps even the learned Snorri was misled in this instance by the acrobatic complexities of skaldic syntax. So too, it seems that misinterpretation of another line of verse might have led him to identify Morcar’s brother earl Edwin as Waltheof, presumably meaning the son of the late Earl Siward of Northumbria. This strophe, quoted from an otherwise unknown and unattributed Haraldsstikki, tells of ‘Waltheof’s warriors by weapons slain, lying fallen thickly in the fenland’, but does not indicate this Wæltheow either as Morcar’s brother or as an earl (even though he had been given an earldom in the Midlands). Yet Siward’s son was certainly of an age to fight at Fulford and may well have done so – possibly among Edwin’s Mercian contingent – because he is known to have fought with the English forces just a few weeks later at Hastings.
Neither of these two skaldic authorities quoted in the saga can be said with any certainty to have been present at the battle of Fulford, but there was one skald who is known to have accompanied the expedition to England in 1066 and he was, of course, Harald’s favourite court-poet Thjodolf Arnorsson who composed his last known verses on the field of his king’s last battle and is said by a credible Icelandic source to have been killed at Stamford Bridge.7
Not until the passage immediately following the account of the blood-fray at Fulford, however, does the saga find occasion to notice that Tostig had earlier joined the expedition and to add an almost apologetic note of the earl having taken part ‘in all these battles’. It is also at this point in the narrative that Snorri makes his first reference to the place-name of Stamford Bridge (or Stafnfurðubryggja) when he tells of Harald’s assembling his forces there while preparing to advance on York (apparently imagining Stamford Bridge on the Derwent some seven miles east of the city to have been very much closer to the fleet at Riccall).
The saga next tells of English friends and supporters of Tostig flocking to join the victorious army – ‘just as Jarl Tostig had previously promised’ – and of all the inhabitants of the countryside around the city offering submission to Harald after learning of the defeat of their ‘powerful chieftains’. In fact, these few sentences must represent a summary of the invaders’ activity during the three days following the battle, events which culminated in Harald’s receipt of a message sent out by the inhabitants of York to offer – in the words of his saga in Fagrskinna – ‘themselves and their town into his power’.
Agreement on the terms of submission was to be made at a meeting just outside the city walls on the following Sunday (24 September), to which Harald arrived accompanied by his whole army. Having demonstrated the potential of his military might, the king is said by the saga to have been given the allegiance of the townsfolk and ‘the sons of their leading men’ (a choice apparently guided by Tostig’s local knowledge) as the customary hostages. In fact, these terms would appear to have been even more reasonable than indicated by the saga, because John of Worcester and Simeon of Durham tell of an exchange of hostages, a hundred and fifty being given over by each side. Such generosity would have been sensibly diplomatic on Harald’s part, if his greater need was recruitment of local warriors to replenish the manpower thinned down at Fulford before moving south against the English Harold, and would also have been in Tostig’s best interests if York was to be the capital of his earldom once again.
Of still greater value in explaining the subsequent course of this hostage exchange is the evidence of the Abingdon ‘C’ version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle because its indication of the Yorkshire hostages being delivered to Harald on the following day would imply their being gathered from the surrounding districts, the Wolds and the vales of Pickering and of York, as well as from the city itself. The best-appointed place of delivery from these different directions would have been the crossing over the Derwent where the old Roman roadways linking York to outer-lying centres of population at Bridlington, Malton and Thornton-le-Street all converged on Stamford Bridge.
Having returned with his army to the ships on the Sunday night, Harald rose on the next morning to breakfast in bright sunshine before dispersing his forces for the day ahead. One warrior out of every three was to stay with the ships and under the command of his son Olaf, his new marshal Eystein Thorbergsson, called Orri (‘the heathcock’), and the two Orkney jarls, while the other two thirds of his army were to accompany him for collection of the promised hostages at Stamford Bridge. Taking up their shields, helmets, swords and spears, there seemed no need to burden themselves with the great weight of mail-coats on such a day and so their armour was left behind. The saga even describes the troops as ‘very carefree’ when they set out from Riccall that morning, because they were as yet entirely unaware that Harold Godwinson and his army, numbered by the chroniclers in the ‘many thousands’, was just seven miles away.
There is no precise indication of when news of the invasion reached the English king, whose greater concern as regards impending invasion from Normandy had kept him in the south while his northerly earls saw off the nuisance of his brother Tostig’s raiding around the east coast, but he evidently moved with the greatest urgency as soon as he knew of the Norwegian landing at Riccall, summoning his housecarls and ‘marching northward, by day and night’ – according to the Abingdon ‘C’ Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – ‘as quickly as he could muster his fyrd’.
This fyrd was the English equivalent of the Scandinavian leiðang, although much more reliably recorded and in detail before the mid-eleventh century. Put most simply, then, the fyrd was a levy raised on the basis of one man from every five hides (a ‘hide’ being the land necessary to support a household, varying between different parts of the country and so ranging between 60 and 120 acres). Although unarmoured and equipped only with such weaponry as the bow and the axe which otherwise served them as the customary tools of the countryman, the select fyrd – meaning those most usually called out and kept in some measure of military training – nonetheless represented a semi-professional fighting force forming the rank and file of an Anglo-Saxon army, while the mail-coated, sword-bearing housecarls were the real professionals who formed its true cutting-edge.
In all probability, the royal housecarls would have accompanied the king on horseback so as to make all possible spee
d on the long road to York. Some members of the fyrd may also have had horses to ride, but the greater majority would have been on foot and mustered to join the march as it passed through their shires. By whatever means the army travelled, it clearly managed a remarkable pace for almost 200 miles, because the king was already on his way when he had news of the earls’ defeat at Fulford and yet had reached the Wharfe in time to spend the night of Sunday 24 September at Tadcaster. On the following morning, his troops made directly for York, where they would have been informed of the place of the planned hostage-collection and so marched straight through the city to advance on Stamford Bridge.
For whatever reason – possibly the belief that Harold was too far distant to present any immediate threat or perhaps sheer over-confidence in the wake of a decisive victory – the usually deeply suspicious Harald of Norway had neglected to post any watch on the main approaches to the city itself, because the sources are unanimous as to his being caught entirely unawares when a swelling dust cloud was seen in the distance from the ridge of higher ground where he stood with his men on the east bank of the Derwent. The saga tells of the sunlight picking out the gleam of shields and glint of mail through the rolling cloud, prompting Harald to ask of Tostig who this host might be. Admitting that it did indeed appear hostile, Tostig still hoped that it might be the approach of more of his friends seeking protection from the all-conquering invader, and yet the king chose to wait until more was known about this army. ‘So they did’ – according to the saga – ‘and the nearer came the host, the greater it appeared and its glitter of its weapons sparkled like a field of broken ice.’
By this time Harald can have been in no doubt that this was the enemy host and surely led by the English king himself. Tostig’s first thought was ‘to turn and hasten back to the ships for the rest of the men and the weapons, and to put up a defence among them with the ships to prevent their horsemen riding over us’, but Harald had another plan: ‘We shall send three good warriors on the fastest horses, to ride with all speed to bring our men to come to our assistance at once. The English will have a hard fight of it before we are all brought down.’ These two statements – probably true in substance, but otherwise of the saga-maker’s own reconstruction – introduce a question which stands at the centre of the historians’ debate about Stamford Bridge when it concerns the role of horses in the battle, not least as regards the sagas’ claim for Anglo-Saxons fighting as cavalry.
It is usually assumed that northmen coming ashore from their ships to plunder inland would have simply seized any available horses to speed their progress and this was assuredly the case in the earlier ‘viking’ period, but King Harald was not embarked upon any such free-booting enterprise in 1066. This was a full-scale invasion akin to that in which he had served as a Varangian officer in the front line of Maniakes’ landings in Sicily almost thirty years before. There he quite certainly saw the warhorses of the Tagmata being brought ashore from the imperial fleet, so Harald may have been seeking to emulate the Greeks if he shipped horses of a quality befitting a conquering king and his retinue aboard the fleet he brought out of the Solunds that autumn.
The supposed English cavalry of such concern to Tostig are another question entirely, and one which will bear further consideration shortly, but attention must first be paid to a feature of the opening phase of the battle which seems to have entirely escaped the notice of the saga-makers. Saxo Grammaticus agrees with all the other Scandinavian sources when he tells of the Norwegians having ‘left off their armour’ when leaving their camp, but stands alone in his assertion that their intention was to plunder the surrounding land, yet he would seem to have some support from Geoffroi Gaimar’s reference to ‘thieving cattle’. Kelly DeVries has linked these two references to the story found in some English chronicles and telling of a Norwegian contingent caught on the other side of the bridge when the enemy host appeared. His very convincing theory proposes some of the northmen having earlier crossed the river from Harald’s position to replenish their provisions by slaughtering cattle grazing in the meadow on the west bank.8 There is every reason, in that case, to believe that they would have been attacked by the first English arrivals, some attempting to take flight back across the river while others made a stand at the bridge, if only to buy more time for the main force to arrange its defensive formation. The heroism of one of these warriors – a burly axe-man who apparently had chosen to wear his byrnie that day – is celebrated by the twelfth-century historians Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury as also by an interpolation of the same date into the Abingdon ‘C’ Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, all describing how he held the bridge against the enemy, his mail-coat deflecting their arrows until a spear thrust from below finally dealt him his death wound and allowed the English free passage across the river.
Surprisingly, there is no account of this magnificent stand in any version of the saga, possibly because it simply went unnoticed by his comrades on the east bank who were more urgently concerned with preparation for battle, but if there is any truth in the story then Harald and his men owed no small debt to the time he bought for their formation into the shield-wall which was to long hold off the English onslaught. The sagas all describe the use of this characteristic defensive tactic, with Snorri supplying the most detail of a ‘long and rather slender line, its wings bent back until they met to form a wide circle of even depth all round, with shields overlapping both before and above’. Harald was inside the circle with his standard and his warrior retinue, as was Tostig with his company and his own banner, but Snorri goes on to explain that the archers (who cannot have been numerous) were to remain inside the circle while the men in the front rank fixed their spear-shafts into the ground with the points levelled directly against oncoming cavalry, both the men and their mounts.
By this time Harold Godwinson had arrayed a ‘vast army, of both cavalry and infantry’, and the saga records the sequence of verbal exchanges which usually form a prelude to battle. The first of these occurs when Harald falls from his ‘black horse with a blaze [on its nose]’ while riding around the shield-wall and clambering swiftly back to his feet as he declares: ‘That fall was the farewell to fortune.’9 All of which is said to have been seen from a distance by the English Harold who asks of some Norse-speakers who were with him if they recognised the ‘big man who fell from his horse, the man in the blue tunic and beautiful helmet’ and is told that it was the king himself. ‘What a large and formidable man he is! Let us hope now that his luck has run out.’
Now the saga tells of twenty horsemen riding out from the English host and up to (or at least within earshot of) the Norwegian lines. One of them asks whether Tostig is with the army and the man himself replies in the affirmative. The foremost of the riders presents him his brother Harold’s greetings along with an offer of peace and all of Northumbria as well. Indeed, and rather than have his brother refuse to join him, he would even concede a full third of his kingdom. Tostig recalls his brother’s very different attitude of the previous winter before asking what might be offered to King Harald Sigurdsson for all his endeavours, only to be told of the precise extent of England which was to be allowed the Norwegian Harald: ‘Seven feet of earth or as much more as he is taller than other men.’
This reply is set down in slightly variant forms across the versions of Harald’s sagas (excepting only that in Morkinskinna which records nothing of these preliminary exchanges) and with such close similarity as to indicate their having drawn it from a common source. If this, presumably Scandinavian and probably Norwegian, original represented an entirely fictional construction, it is one quite remarkable for its splendidly English resonance, and all the more so when it appears nowhere in the earlier English historical record. As so often on these occasions, if no such statement really was spoken at the time then there is every reason to feel that it ought to have been – even though no such eloquence was to sway Tostig, who compared the earlier ‘treachery’ of Harold his brother with the loyalty shown by
Harald his ally, and declared their shared intention to win the realm of England by a victory or to die with honour in the attempt.
As the rider and his company rode back to the English lines, the Norwegian Harald asked Tostig if he knew ‘the man who had spoken so well’. When told that it had been Harold Godwinson himself, the king said he wished he had known that earlier so as to ensure that ‘this Harold should not live to tell of the deaths of so many of our men’. Tostig admitted to having expected as much and so to have revealed the identity of his brother would have effectively amounted to becoming his murderer. ‘Rather that he should kill me than I him.’ ‘What a small man,’ was Harald’s comment on the English king as he turned towards his own warriors, ‘but how well he stood in his stirrups.’
At which point in the darkening narrative, Snorri quotes a strophe said to have been composed by Harald at the time which tells of going ‘forward into battle against blue blades, [while] my byrnie and all our armour lies with the ships’. Snorri takes this opportunity to describe the king’s mail-coat as being so long that it reached below the knee (thus closer to the Norman style than that of the thigh-length northern byrnie) and nicknamed ‘Emma’ (perhaps as a satirical reference to Cnut’s Norman queen and the mother of Hardacnut). Unhappy with his first ‘poor verse’, Harald attempts a more inspiring version which speaks of the ‘Hild of combat [a kenning for one of Odin’s valkyrie daughters, but perhaps alluding also to his own mother] who bade me hold my head high in bloody battle, when blades and skulls are clashing’. To which the skald Thjodolf adds his own strophe promising to guard the ‘eaglet’ princes who are destined to avenge ‘hard-fighting, high-hearted Harald’ should their father fall in the blood-fray now about to begin.