Crusader Gold: Harald Hardrada and the Battle of Stamford Bridge

David Gibbins

In my novel Crusader Gold, the fate of King Harald Hardrada of Norway is central to the story. Tradition tells us that Harald fell at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire on 25 September 1066, when his Viking army was defeated by King Harald Godwinson of England. Like Jack in my novel, I needed to visit Stamford Bridge in my quest for Harald, ‘Thunderbolt of the North.’ I had followed him just about everywhere else, through many of the events of his extraordinary life: to Kiev, where he had courted a Viking Rus princess; to Constantinople, where he had led the Emperor’s Varangian bodyguard; even to Jerusalem, where he had done what many Crusaders would fail to do, and stood before the Holy Sepulchre. Yet it was here on these fields in England that he secured his place in history. With his defeat the dream of a Viking empire came to an end, and Harald’s warriors so weakened the English army that it was unable to resist the Norman invaders two weeks later, at the Battle of Hastings. Harald may have failed in his quest for the English throne, but the blood-letting wreaked upon the English at Stamford Bridge made him a key figure in the shaping of the medieval world.

I took the photo below in early summer 2006 at the battle site. The low ridge where I was standing is thought to be where the Viking army formed up in battle array to meet the English. Just beyond the line of modern houses in the background is the river Derwent, which the English crossed after overwhelming the Viking defences on the bridge. The main killing field was the low ground visible in the middle of the picture, where the armies joined battle and thousands perished on both sides.

This view above encompasses one of the most momentous events in history; yet hardly anything is known about the battle that took place there almost a thousand years ago. It was completely overshadowed by the Battle of Hastings, and was of no interest to the Norman historians. The only reliable account of Stamford Bridge is a few sentences in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, the annals of events in England at the period. We are told that King Harold Godwinson of England came upon the Vikings beyond the bridge by surprise; ‘there they joined battle, and were fighting very hard long in the day.’ A mighty Viking held the bridge against all comers, then an Englishman came beneath and stabbed him under the mailcoat. ‘Then Harold, King of the English, came over the bridge, and his army along with him, and there made a great slaughter.’

And what of King Harald Hardrada? The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle simply states that he was killed in the battle. More detail comes from King Harald’s Saga, part of the Heimskringla – the history of the kings of Norway - written over a century and a half later by Snorri Sturluson, whose saga-histories have been described as illuminations of the past, not records of it. Sturluson has Harald larger than life, fighting heroically to the end, surrounded by his dwindling band of retainers in the midst of a titanic struggle:

King Harald Sigurdsson (Hardrada) now fell into such a fury of battle that he rushed forward ahead of his troops, fighting two-handed. Neither helmets nor coats of mail could withstand him, and everyone in his path gave way before him. It looked as if the English were on the point of being routed. In the words of Arnor the Earls’ Poet:

Norway’s King had nothing

To shield his breast in battle;

And yet his war-seasoned

Heart never wavered.

Norway’s warriors were watching

The blood-dripping sword

Of their courageous leader

Cutting down his enemies.

 But now King Harald Sigurdsson was struck in the throat by an arrow, and this was his death-wound. He fell, and with him fell all those who had advanced with him …

The last stand of King Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066; a painting by the Norwegian Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831-1892), who specialized in Norse history and mythology. The scene is faithful to King Harald’s Saga: we see Harald in the centre - wearing blue, and exceptionally tall - struck by an arrow in the throat, and around him his men are cut down by the English cavalry. The Norse are shown without their armour, having left it by the seashore with their ships, but they have their weapons and fight back valiantly. The man in front of Harald has a battleaxe – perhaps a war axe of the Varangian bodyguard, and one of Harald’s loyal followers from his days serving the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. Great slaughter is inflicted on both sides, but the picture clearly shows the tide of battle turning in favour of the English.

But how accurate is the saga's account of King Harald’s death? Snorri tells us that a year after the battle Harald’s body was brought from England and buried at Trondheim, in St Mary’s Church. This surely stretches credulity; even if a body was buried in the church, the possibility that it was Harald’s, somehow identified and retrieved from an enemy field of battle, a charnel-house of thousands of corpses, seems remote.  It is impossible to know whether Snorri’s account of Harald’s death is any more historical than the image in the 19th century painting above, which is itself based on his description. The battle took place more than a century before Snorri was born; it would be as if a poet today were to write an account, self-consciously embellished, of the death of, say, Lord Nelson, yet from the point of view of the vanquished, in a battle which had no eyewitness records and was only remembered through an oral tradition of sagas and verse.

I visited Stamford Bridge after I had been to the holy isle of Iona in Scotland, where Jack in Crusader Gold has an extraordinary revelation. He quotes lines from Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur as he gazes out to sea; you can read them by clicking here. The poem begins with the king’s final battle:

So all day long the noise of battle rolled

Among the mountains by the winter sea;

Until King Arthur’s table, man by man,

Had fall’n in Lyonnesse about their Lord,

King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,

The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,

Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,

And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,

A broken chancel with a broken cross,

That stood on a dark strait of narrow land.

On one side lay the Ocean, and on one

Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

Tennyson derived his stories of Arthur from Geoffrey of Monmouth, the English monk who created the legend in the 12th century, only a few generations after the Battle of Stamford Bridge. It was the legend of a great king who survived his final battle, who was put on a ship that sailed off into the west. To Jack, the date seems too much of a coincidence. Was he at the beginning of a story more extraordinary than the saga writers could ever have imagined?

References

The lines quoted from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are from the Abingdon Manuscript (C), in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, translated by Michael Swanton (Phoenix, London, 2000). The excerpt from the Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson is from chapter 92 of King Harald’s Saga, translated by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Pálsson (Penguin, London, 1966).

Margin Illustrations

(Top) One of few known images of the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Emperor, showing their kite-shaped shields, three-pointed Norse banners and fearsome battleaxes. It comes from a 12th century copy of the Synopsis of Histories by John Skylitzes, a Byzantine scholar of the late 11th century whose work covered the time when Harald Hardrada would have been in Constantinople. Undoubtedly there were veterans of the Guard with Harald at Stamford Bridge, and the axes which had struck fear across the Mediterranean decades before may have confronted the English horsemen as they bore down on the King in the heart of the battle. By a twist of fate, some of those English huscarls who survived Stamford Bridge and Hastings may themselves have escaped Norman England to become Varangian guardsmen; there was an influx of Anglo-Saxon mercenaries in the Guard after 1066, and to the Byzantines they were as much 'Northmen' as the Varangians from Rus and Scandinavia.

(Middle two) The other great event of 1066 is famously preservd on the Bayeux Tapestry, an embroidered cloth recounting the story of William of Normandy’s victory over the English at Hastings, only two weeks after Stamford Bridge. The tapestry was probably finished by 1080, so is close to a contemporary record. These two images are particularly interesting because they show Norse features – at the siege of the castle of Dinon in Britanny, shown above, you can see the three-pointed banners, gonfalons, of the Norse, identical to those of the Varangians in the image from the Skylites manuscript, and in the lower scene from the Battle of Hastings a chain-mailed soldier wields a great war axe, possibly gilded. There was Norse blood in all of the armies of 1066, and the scenes of battle on the tapestry could as easily have been at Stamford Bridge.

(Bottom) There are no known portraits of Harald Hardrada, but this one is thought to be his wife Elizabeth. It is in the Church of Santa Sophia in Kiev, Ukraine, one of an extraordinary group of wall-paintings which I photographed  in 2002. The portrait dates from the 11th century, and is one of three women who are probably Elizabeth and her sisters, all the wives of kings. Elizabeth was daughter of King Yaroslav of Novgorod-Kiev, and of his wife Ingigerd, daughter of King Olaf Sköttkonung of Sweden. She wears a gown and cloak of rich materials, but has the plain white headscarf of a Viking woman. According to King Harald’s Saga, she accompanied her husband to England in 1066, so this may be the only portrait to survive of anyone from the great Viking ‘raiding-army’ that met its end that fateful day at Stamford Bridge.

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