THE BATTLE OF STAMFORD BRIDGE
Having just returned from Iceland my usual Sunday offering has been delayed. While I am off again to Iceland and then Norway next week I shall attempt to resume normal service.
THE BATTLE OF STAMFORD BRIDGE 25 SEPTEMBER 1066 – PART ONE
There is hardly an account of English history, or a chronology of English battles, that does not list Hastings 1066 as a decisive battle – as indeed it was. The Norman victory brought the end of Anglo-Saxon England and heralded a complete upheaval in the law, social structure and land ownership of the conquered. But Hastings, although decisive, did not change history. It was not a tipping point because once William of Normandy was able to land unopposed on the English shore the end result was never in doubt. It was Harold of England’s decision to go north and fight the Battle of Stamford Bridge that was the tipping point, for if he had stayed south then the Norman invasion could have been met on the beaches, when an amphibious operation is at its most vulnerable, and William roundly defeated. His army and his credibility destroyed it is doubtful whether William could even have held on to the Dukedom of Normandy, and the future would indeed have gone down a different fork of the Y junction of history at which it have arrived.
The Romans came to England in force in 43 AD and they ruled it for 300 years. Between 117 and 123 AD the Emperor Hadrian ordered the building of a wall from Newcastle on the east coast running seventy-three miles to Solway Firth on the west. Originally probably a customs control system, it was later fortified and became the northern frontier of the Roman empire, for the Romans made only half-hearted attempts to conquer the Picts and the Scots, the latter originally from Ireland, and never succeeded in doing so. An attempt by Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus, in 138 AD to build another wall 100 miles north was abandoned before completion.
From the beginning of the fourth century the Roman Empire was under threat from Germanic tribes from the north and east, and in the case of Roman Britain from the Celtic tribes to the north. Fortifications were built along the south and east coast – the ‘Saxon Shore’ – and as successive generals attempted to usurp the imperial throne and removed troops from England to do so, and as the central authority in Rome called back the legions to defend the heart of the empire, so the Roman presence in Britain diminished. Imperial administrators were recalled, and when in 410 AD what was left of the British provincial government appealed to Rome, the Emperor Honorius wrote that they must look to their own protection. By 476 AD the Roman Empire in the west had collapsed, and those Britons who had attempted to maintain the Roman way of life found it increasingly difficult to do so. With the legions gone the roads began to deteriorate, trade had dried up and, increasingly, seaborn raiders attacked coastal settlements.
The native rulers of Britain after the Romans left, Celtic but Romanised, found it increasingly difficult to resist pressure from the north, where Pictish tribes were raiding further and further into what would become England and so they resorted to hiring mercenary soldiers from across the Channel. There was nothing strange about that: the Roman legions that had formed the garrison of Britain were professional soldiers from Spain and Germany. To support these hired bands the Britons granted them land on which to settle their families, raise their animals and grow crops, and the next two hundred years is a story of more and more of these people arriving; men and women from what is now the Netherlands, Lower Saxony, Jutland and Denmark. Often referred to as the Anglo-Saxon invasion, increasingly these people came not to fight for the Britons but to settle, and in many cases they turned against their erstwhile employers, with the original inhabitants, the ‘Ancient Britons’ being pushed to the extremities, to Wales, Cornwall, Scotland and Ireland. The legends of King Arthur and other mythical figures are race memories of a struggle by the Britons to resist the Anglo-Saxon tide, ultimately unsuccessfully.
By the end of the sixth century England was divided into seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, those of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Wessex. The Romans had introduced Christianity to England but had never stamped out worship of the old Gods, and while many Anglo Saxons were Christian before coming to England, or had converted at some stage after arrival, worship of various Germanic and Scandinavian deities still persisted. In Wessex King Cenwalh was the first of the ruling dynasty to convert to Christianity in around 642AD and from then on Wessex was the leading Christian kingdom. Saxon kingship was not by primogeniture, but decided upon by the Witan, the assembly of the great men of the kingdom, and while the successor king was often, indeed usually, of the royal family he had to be ‘throne worthy’ which meant that he had to be adult and capable of ruling and leading the state in war, a system that was supposed to exclude the mad, the weak and the infant. King Æthelwulf, who reigned from 839 to 858 had five sons, four of whom ruled after him in succession: Æthelbald 858 – 860, Æthelberht 860 – 865, Æthelred I 865 – 871 and Alfred, later ‘The Great’ from 871 – 899. It was Alfred who began the unification of the English kingdoms, partly by conquest and partly by marriage, but he also had to deal with the depredations of the Vikings who were no longer just seaborn raiders who would land, loot a monastery and sail away, but who had settled in large areas of eastern England with their centre in Jorvik (York). In 865 a ‘great heathen army’ landed in England, its aim being to overcome the entire land for colonisation. In a series of battles Alfred eventually brought them to terms and in 878 the Viking commander, Guthrum, agreed to be baptised as a Christian and to withdraw back into what became known as the Danelaw, being East Mercia, south Northumbria and all land east of the River Thames, except for London, (originally Mercian but which was now to belong to Wessex).
Over the years as the descendants of Viking colonists intermarried with the native Saxons the line became blurred, and although Æthelstan, Alfred’s grandson, was the first to assume the title ‘King of England’ having defeated the York Vikings, it was only when the Norse king of Northumbria, Eric Haraldsson, ‘Bloodaxe’, was driven out and killed north of York at Stanmore in 954 that the part of England that was not part of the Danelaw was truly united, although English kings continued to pay an increasingly burdensome tax to the Danelaw to ensure that the peace was kept. The St Brice’s day massacre of 1002 was an attempt by King Æthelred II ‘the unready’, literally ‘ill advised’, to assert his authority when those of Scandinavian descent living in Anglo-Saxon England were set upon and killed, their homesteads burned and their property looted. This did little to reconcile the Anglo Saxons and their Norse neighbours, and in 1013 Sweyn Forkbeard, heir to the Danish throne, and his son Cnut (‘Canute’) led an army into England. Many of the magnates in the Danelaw and in Northern England supported the invaders, and to cement the alliance Sweyn married Cnut to Ælgifu of Northampton, daughter of one of the most influential northern houses. For a time the campaign swung to and fro, with now the English having the upper hand, then the Danes, until on 18 October 1016 Cnut won a decisive battle at Ashingdon, roundly defeating Edmund ‘Ironside’, son of Æthelred who had died in April. Cnut became king of England by conquest, and now the Danelaw and the rest of the country would be truly one. A year after assuming the throne Cnut took a second wife and married the widow of King Æthelred, Emma of Normandy, daughter of Robert I Duke of Normandy.
King of England from 1016, the Scots submitted to Cnut in 1017 and in 1018 with the death of his father he became king of Denmark too. Ten years later he acceded to the throne of Norway, and now presided over a potentially powerful Scandinavian empire that united England, Denmark, Norway and part of Sweden, although he never became king of Sweden. Cnut died in 1035, and his empire did not survive him. His son out of Emma, Harthacnut, became king of Denmark, Norway was lost to Magnus Olaffson, son of an earlier Norse king who had been deposed, and Harold ‘Harefoot’ (‘fleet of foot’) son of Cnut’s first wife Ælgifu, ruled as king of England. In 1037 Emma, fearing persecution from Harold, fled initially to Bruges and then to her home in Normandy, as she had also done when Sweyn Forkbeard had conquered England. Harold died in 1040 and the throne of Denmark was seized by Magnus of Norway. Harold’s half-brother Harthacnut, having lost Denmark, became king of England, and Emma could return. Showing little sibling affection one of Harthacnut’s first actions was to have Harold, his predecessor, dug up and his remains scattered in a marsh.
Harthacnut had no children, and in 1041 he invited Edward, son of Emma by her first husband, King Æthelred, to come to England as his prospective heir. Edward, born in around 1004, had spent most of his youth in exile, probably in Normandy at the court of Robert I, Duke of Normandy, and would have been familiar with Robert’s son, William (later ‘The Conqueror’), born in 1028. Emma was William’s great aunt, and although he was only nine years of age when Emma sought exile in Normandy, they would have at least known one another. Harthacnut died suddenly in 1042, at a marriage feast, and there are conflicting accounts of his death, some saying that he was poisoned. As he was only 24 years of age we can assume that whatever he died of, it was unlikely to be of natural causes.
The English did not want another Danish king, and now they had an Anglo-Saxon one. Certainly Edward’s father, Æthelred, was indeed an Anglo Saxon, but Edward’s mother was Norman and Edward had spent most of his youth in Normandy and was a middle-aged man of thirty-seven when he came to England. One has to question where his sympathies and ultimate loyalties lay, and he did appoint a number of Normans to important posts both in the church and in the administration. This leaning towards the Normans did not find favour with some of the Anglo-Saxon nobility, particularly with the forty year old Earl Godwin. Godwin had supported Edmund ‘Ironside’ in the war with Cnut, but was one of the very few Anglo-Saxon noblemen who survived Cnut’s culling of the nobility and its replacement by Scandinavians. Having managed to transfer his allegiance to Cnut, Godwin was created Earl of Wessex by him. Other great men rose and fell, were executed or exiled, but Godwin was the great survivor. On the death of Cnut Godwin voted for Harthacnut to succeed, but finding himself outvoted managed to transfer his support to Harold Harefoot, and during his reign Godwin was held responsible for having Alfred, the youngest son of Æthelred and Emma and hence a possible threat to Harefoot, kidnapped and blinded. Alfred died as a result and when Harthacnut came to the throne Godwin had to pay a large indemnity (a magnificent warship), as a penalty for his cruelty to Harthacnut’s half-brother.
During the reign of Cnut and his successors Godwin had amassed more power, more land and more riches, and by Edward’s time he was the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon nobles, increasing his influence even more when King Edward, aged forty-one, married his twenty- year-old daughter Edith in 1045. The relationship between Edward and Godwin was not an easy one – Godwin had, after all, been responsible for the blinding and subsequent death of Edward’s brother Alfred – but reality and practical politics made it essential that they worked together. Edward needed the support of the most powerful man in the kingdom, and Godwin needed the king’s approval to hold on to his lands and titles. Godwin had seven sons and four daughters, all of whom were either married well (daughters) or in the case of sons favoured by King Edward, although only the eldest, Sweyn, was granted lands and an earldom. That said, the relationship was not always amicable. Sweyn was exiled for a time for a number of crimes which included the abduction of the Abbess of Leominster and the murder of a cousin, the two not connected. Then in 1051 when Eustace of Boulogne, whose first wife was one of Edward’s sisters, arrived to take over the grant of Dover Castle, the local people objected to what they saw as yet more favouring of Normans (although Eustace was born in Lorraine and was not a Norman) and a scuffle ensued during which some of Eustace’s men were killed. Godwin was ordered to punish the people of Dover but in fact sided with them and fighting ensued when nineteen of Eustace’s men were killed by Godwin’s. King Edward ordered Godwin to punish the killers and, when Godwin refused, Edward saw this as a direct challenge to his own authority. With the support of the other earls Godwin was exiled to Flanders. Edward repudiated his wife, Godwin’s daughter, and sent her to a nunnery, although his reasons were probably as much due to her failure to bear a child as to her parentage. Sweyn, Godwin’s eldest son, took himself off to Jerusalem on pilgrimage and died on the way back, leaving the second son, Harold, as his father’s heir. A year later Godwin returned, backed by a sizeable contingent of soldiers and, although he was furious, Edward had little choice but to forgive him and restore his lands and titles. In April 1053 Godwin, aged fifty-two, was attending a royal banquet at Winchester when he collapsed, probably of a stroke. He lived for three days, without being able to speak or move, and died. His eldest surviving son, Harold, inherited his title as Earl of Wessex and also his lands.
King Edward, known as ‘the confessor’ for his alleged religious piety, reigned for twenty-four years, and despite the spats with the Godwins, in general it was a time of peace with only four cases of rebellion and exile throughout the period. He defended the kingdom against attacks from Scotland and Wales, and ordered the building of Westminster Abbey, although he died on 5 January 1066 before it was completed. As in Wessex, succession to the throne in Anglo-Saxon England was not by primogeniture, although the successor was usually of the blood royal, but by selection of the Witan. There were a number of possible candidates: Eustace of Boulogne might have been an outside candidate due to his first wife being a daughter of King Æthelred, although that marriage was childless. Edgar, the grandson of King Edmund ‘Ironside’, and the last direct descendant of the ancient line of Wessex, was the nearest candidate by blood, but was only fifteen years of age. Harald Sigurdsson, ‘Hardrada’, king of Norway, was another claimant due to his descent from King Cnut, as was Sweyn of Denmark, grandson of Sweyn Forkbeard, and nephew of King Cnut. Another possible claimant was William, Duke of Normandy, first cousin once removed of King Edward through their common ancestor Emma of Normandy, wife of Æthelred (and then of Cnut).
TO BE CONTINUED