Englishmen and Vikings battle at Stamford Bridge, 1066. Courtesy of O.Vaering. Painting by Peter Nicolai Arbo.

The Norsemen had formed into a traditional shield wall, against which the oncoming English smashed themselves like waves on a rocky shore.

In September 1066, while England warily watched its southern coast, anticipating the Norman invasion force forming up across the channel, a nasty surprise erupted at the other end of the country: A fleet of 300 dragon-headed Viking longships descended from the northeast, bearing some 9,000 armed, plunder-seeking warriors. The berserkers had returned.

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As the village of Cleveland and then the city of Scarborough fell to Norse axes and fire, it became clear that several thousand mounted Normans were no longer England’s most immediate concern. After sacking Scarborough, the Viking force—which largely consisted of Norwegians, as well as Scots, Flemings and some English—sailed up the Humber estuary as far as Riccall on the River Ouse. The invaders lined miles of riverfront with their ships, then disembarked and made for the city of York, just nine miles north of the Ouse.

The Viking commander alone was enough to strike terror in the hearts of English defenders: King Harald III Sigurdsson of Norway, aka Harald Hardrada (“the Hard Ruler”), was a career warlord, a broad-shouldered giant of a man who stood well over 6 feet and who had spent the preceding 35 years honing his martial skills in a variety of conflicts, taking him from the royal court in Kiev to the palaces of Byzantium. Soon after assuming the throne of Norway in 1047, Hardrada—who was flamboyant as he was fierce and a prolific composer of heroic sagas—launched into a protracted war with Denmark, not tasting victory until 1064. By 1066 the ever-ambitious warrior—who, like Duke William of Normandy, was a potential claimant to the English throne—hungered for a new conquest. At the urging of a future ally, Hardrada set his sights on England.

That ally was Tostig Godwinson, the recently deposed earl of Northumbria and the estranged and exiled brother of King Harold Godwinson, who’d been crowned less than a year earlier. A cruel, heavy-handed ruler, Tostig had been ousted from his earldom by a violent rebellion in 1065, during the waning days of the reign of King Edward “The Confessor.” Tostig harbored a venomous grudge against his brother after his fall and suspected Harold of being behind the revolt. Broken and bitter, Tostig sailed to Flanders, the native home of his wife, Judith, who was daughter to the region’s overlord, Count Baldwin IV. From Flanders, Tostig began recruiting pirates and outfitting ships for an armed return to England. Scurrying from court to court, he solicited support from first the French and Normans, then later the Scots and Norwegians.

Eventually, Tostig found a willing coconspirator in Hardrada and made plans to rendezvous off England’s northern coast by summer’s end in 1066. Departing in late August, the Norwegian invaders sailed the same northerly wind that, ironically, kept Duke William grounded. The longships sailed from the Solund Islands to Shetland, then to the Norse-controlled Orkneys to rally additional men and ships. From there the fleet sailed to its appointment with Tostig while the largely unsuspecting English prepared to meet a different foe, the Normans.

Fearing that the south was incapable of providing timely reinforcements—or perhaps due to youthful hubris—two brothers, the young, inexperienced northern earls Edwin of Mercia and Morcar of Northumbria (Edwin, the eldest, was perhaps 18 at the time) mounted the initial English response to the Viking invasion. The brothers placed their armies in Hardrada’s path on a boggy patch of ground near the Ouse at Fulford, about a mile from York. On September 20, the earls positioned their men—many as green as their commanders—along the approach road. A large, water-filled ditch and marshy ground near Heslington protected their left, the Ouse their right. The ensuing clash was a daylong, bloody, shield-smashing slog, as opponents hacked, stabbed, bled and died for every inch of ground.

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