The Battle of Stamford Bridge Explained

Dan Snow's History Hit

Dan Snow explores the Battle of Stamford Bridge in September 1066, where King Harold Godwinson defeated Harald Hardrada, the famed Norse war

Key takeaways

• The Battle of Stamford Bridge was a decisive English victory that ended the last major Viking invasion of England.
• New archaeological evidence, including weapons, armor, and personal items like belt buckles and sword pommels, has helped pinpoint the battlefield's location.

Main topics

• The Viking Age in England
• Harald Hardrada's invasion campaign

Notable quotes

It was a stunning victory. It should rank as one of the greatest ever won by a king of England.

Conclusion

The Battle of Stamford Bridge stands as a defining moment that ended the Viking era in

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History It and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com slash subscribe. Speaker 1 (0:39) It was the last great Viking battle against the last and greatest Viking invader. After so many men hacked down in their prime in almost every corner of Britain, so many feasts for crows, kingdoms toppled and forged, reputations won and lost, here on this field, the Viking Age, in England at least, came to a pretty sudden and decisive end. It was a stunning victory. It should rank as one of the greatest ever won by a king of England. It alone would be enough to cement any other king's legacy. In September 1066, an English royal army led by a bold and skilful king smashed an invading Viking force led by the greatest warrior of the age. A force which had seized York, the most important city of the north, and seemed poised to resurrect Scandinavian rule over England. It was the Battle of Stamford Bridge, and it would be remembered as one of England's greatest battlefield victories, were it not for the fact that it was immediately followed by one of its most humiliating and consequential defeats. Days later, on the rolling fields of southern England, at the Battle of Hastings. Speaker 1 (2:03) This podcast, though, is about the former. It's about Stamford Bridge, because that is a story that deserves to be told. And because it's a story that right now is being radically rewritten by a group of archaeologists and metal detectrists, who I've been privileged enough to have followed for the last couple of years. Their determination and hard work may well have finally uncovered this lost battlefield. For the first time, they've placed it in the landscape convincingly. And most importantly, they have found the artifacts, the stuff, the things those men and women carry. Weapons, male armor, dropped, stamped into the blood-soaked ground, lost, thrown away, now recovered. So we can almost reach out and touch the battle itself. Speaker 1 (2:52) You may have heard about this discovery on the news feeds. You can watch our documentary about it, about this battlefield hunt on our History Hit TV channel. I want to say a huge thank you to the legends, Simon Richardson, John Benfield, their team of metal detectrists, as well as the Stamford Bridge Heritage Society for inviting us to be part of this wonderful adventure. But right here, right now on this podcast, this is the detailed story about that enormous clash and also why we think we've found the field of Stamford Bridge. Let's get into it. The story starts, as so many of them do, with the death rattle of a king. Succession was a dangerous time. The crown of England was contested by pretty much every single person that would become king from the late 900s to the 1300s. Brothers fought brothers, they fought their fathers, cousins fought cousins, and there were always outsiders eyeing up a vacant throne. The year was 1066. Edward the Confessor, the childless king of England, breathed his last in the first few days of January. He would not be the only king of England to die that fateful year. Nature abhors a vacuum. Egotistical psychopaths with a lust for power also abhor a vacuum. And so right across England and beyond, the question of who would rule one of Europe's richest kingdoms, became a burning issue. I'd like to confess that a pretty distant English relative, someone like him descended from the mighty Alfred, Alfred the Great, who in some senses was the great founder of England, but that relative was a boy, probably no more than 13, not quite ready to take his place in the shield wall, not quite ready to hew down his enemies, which seems to be pretty much the chief duty of a king at the time. England had experienced wars and invasions aplenty over the previous century, and a child on the throne was recipe for more. At least that's how the thinking went. The trouble was, so was every other option. There was a homegrown candidate, not the drop of raw blood in his veins, but a warrior through and through. A leader, wealthy, a man with a following, a proven deliverer. He'd crushed the Welsh. He'd fought in France and the Low Countries. It seems that he did have experience fighting the Scandinavian Norse and Danes, those men who we call Vikings, during an attack against Kent in the previous decade. Speaker 1 (5:27) But he was not the only ambitious man in his family. He had a younger brother, Tostig, who was now in exile. He may have harboured dreams of becoming king himself. He certainly harboured dreams of snatching himself a powerful position in the kingdom. To the south, in Normandy, there was a cousin of King Edward's from his mother's side. He sat on the ducal throne of Normandy. He was descended from the Vikings himself, hence Normandy. He was William. He was a survivor. He'd hauled himself up from an unpromising start to rule over Normandy as a duke. He was ambitious, he was smart, he was warlike. He was not a man you wanted as an enemy. Yet he was a man who believed that old King Edward had guaranteed him the throne of England. And that was not all, not by a long stretch, because the north of England, there was a man who believed that he should also rule, by right of succession and by might of arms. He was already a king, a throne he'd won at the tip of a spear. He was King Harald of Norway, known as Hardrada, the Hard Ruler. Hardrada was the thunderbolt of the north. He's said to be seven feet tall. He was certainly a giant of a man. He'd been exiled from his native land as a boy, really, and he'd found fame and fortune fighting in the East, along the rivers of Russia and Ukraine, for the Byzantine Empire against its galaxy of enemies. He fought in the Crimea. It's said that he reduced 80 Arab strongholds across the Middle East. He fought on the Tigris and Euphrates. He helped Christians conquer Sicily. He served in southern Italy. He rose to command the Varangian Guard in Byzantium, a kind of Praetorian guard, which protected emperors or killed and deposed them. He certainly did both during his career. He seems to have visited Jerusalem. He smashed a revolt in Bulgaria and took the nickname Bulgar Burner. When he returned to Scandinavia, it was a case of the old cliche, the exiled prince grown to manhood to reclaim his patronry. His ships were unbalanced because of the amount of gold in their holds. He had a Ukrainian princess for a wife. By the mid to late 1040s, so 20 years before 1066, he is established as king of Norway. He's always launching strikes on Denmark to try and press his claims there. But following the death of Edward the Confessor, he seems to have decided to try and reconstruct the great North Sea empire of his forebear as King of Norway, Cnut the Great, who ruled over not just Norway, but Denmark, bits of Sweden, and importantly, England and the odd bit of Scotland as well. I think it's fair to say that never before or since had the English crown been contested between such able, charismatic, and warlike candidates. And it's that. Which makes 1066 such an astonishing year. English Harold was the first mover. His sister was married to the old King Edward, and so he had access to the dying man in his last days. He burst out from one visit to the bedside of the old king to announce to the world that King Edward had anointed him his successor. Very convenient indeed. Look, he was the most powerful man in the kingdom. His brothers, his younger brothers, were also great lords. He made a deal. I think, with the sort of powerful lords of the north, Edwin and Morcar, earls respectively of Mercia and Northumbria. And his claim was accepted by them and the senior British aristocracy, who probably regarded it as pretty inevitable. Poor Edgar, the child of royal blood, was elbowed out of the way, and Harold was crowned king, possibly on the very same day in the very same place that old King Edward was buried, newly built Westminster Abbey. England certainly had a king now, but it settled nothing. The damage had been done. In Normandy, Duke William seethed and made