The Art of War in Twenty Battles (eBook)

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THE VIKINGS ARE COMING: FULFORD GATE 1066

A great calamity befell northern Anglo-Saxon England in September 1066 when the country fought two major battles against marauding Viking forces. At Fulford Gate, the Saxon Army of the North was shattered and Norwegian King Harald Hardrada secured half of England. His Anglo-Saxon rival, King Harold Godwineson, managed to retrieve the situation at Stamford Bridge and snatch victory from disaster just before the Normans, under Duke William, invaded southern England.

While the battles at Stamford Bridge and Hastings remain poignant landmarks in British military history, few have heard of Fulford Gate or considered its significance. It was the very first engagement that fateful summer and Hardrada’s triumph forced Harold to abandon his watch on the southern coast; ultimately, this dictated the relative weakness of his army at Hastings.

The only contemporary sources are Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth-century Heimskringla (Saga of the Norse Kings), in particular King Harald’s Saga, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. King Harald’s Saga is the most detailed account of the whole campaign, but its accuracy is open to endless debate. What is clear is that 1066 saw Anglo-Saxon England threatened with invasion from the south and the north. Both Duke William of Normandy and King Harald Hardrada of Norway had legitimate blood ties with the English throne. When King Edward the Confessor died that year, the Saxon Witan had favoured the succession of his opportunist brother-in-law, Earl Harold Godwineson of Wessex.

The seeds of the northern invasion were laid in 1065 when Harold’s brother, Earl Tostig Godwineson, was expelled from his Northumbrian earldom. Harold did not spring to his defence, an act that could have plunged England into civil war. Tostig’s rule had been so unpopular that it incited rebellion. To appease the rebels, King Edward I (the Confessor) had him banished and replaced him with the teenage Morcar of Mercia. Tostig claimed bitterly that Harold was implicated in the revolt – a slight possibility, as Harold may have seen him as a rival. The end result was that Tostig bore his brother a deep-seated grudge and was determined to regain Northumbria, no matter the cost. Furthermore, Tostig felt that he should have been crowned king on 6 January 1066 and not his brother. Initially, he raided southern England, possibly with the encouragement of Duke William, but was driven north until he found the sympathetic ear of King Harald Hardrada, Thunderbolt of the North.

Harald Hardrada was the last of the great Viking adventurers and had held a senior rank in the Byzantine emperor’s Varangian Guard during 1035–44. His participation in the 1066 campaign heralded the end of the Viking era. Hardrada had a good claim to the English throne as he was related to England’s Danish King Cnut (1016–35). Tostig may have offered his aid and possibly the co-operation of Northumbria in defeating Harold, if Hardrada would promise him the Northumbrian earldom or sub-kingship.

Tostig has always been cast as the villain of the story, which is not necessarily true; nonetheless, he had sailed first to Flanders and then Denmark seeking support. He hoped King Svein of Denmark would provide a Danish army, but ironically the king was too preoccupied defending Denmark against the Norwegians. So Tostig, legend has it, sailed to Norway to see King Harald Hardrada at Oslo Fjord. Hardrada was initially reluctant to invade England; there is some evidence to suggest that his son Magnus tried unsuccessfully in 1058 with a fleet from Norway, Ireland, Orkney and Shetland. In Norway, rather surprisingly, it was felt in some quarters that one Saxon housecarl was equal to two Norwegian warriors.

To the King of Norway, the opportunity of conquering fertile England was indeed a tempting prize. No doubt he felt confident that any Norman invasion would either not take place or could be contained and defeated in the South. His initial plans were simple – seize York, the capital of the North and the third city of the realm after London and Winchester. Finally, Tostig convinced Hardrada of the merits of the enterprise, and in the spring of 1066 Tostig sailed to Flanders to collect his English and Flemish troops.

By June–July 1066, the Norwegians began to gather their forces at Solund Isles and Hardrada sailed from Trondheim to collect them. Before leaving Trondheim, he took the precaution of having Magnus, his eldest son, declared king and regent in his absence. Even so, he took his wife and other children, including Prince Olaf. According to Sturluson, the king dreamt of his dead brother, who told him that death awaited him. Also, while on ship two Norwegian warriors had bad dreams bearing ill omens for the coming invasion – Gydir saw an ogress, who told him they were sailing west to die; while Thord, on a ship near the king’s, saw an ogress riding a wolf prowling in front of the Saxon Army and consuming Norwegian corpses. In such superstitious times, these were foreboding portents of things to come.

By August, the fleet was on route for northern England. Fortunately for King Hardrada, the winds that blew down the North Sea aided his crossing and in turn blew across the English Channel causing Duke William to continually postpone his expedition.

King Hardrada had a very large army, although its exact composition can only be open to conjecture. He sailed from Sogne Fjord near Bergen with 200 longships and forty smaller vessels, which could have carried up to 18,000 men, a full leidang, and this was without the forces collected from the Scandinavian colonies off northern England. It is very unlikely that Hardrada would have taken Norway’s entire fighting force. He probably only took the 7,000–8,000 professional soldiers that he is known to have had available (approximately 7,200 hirdmen fought at the Battle of Nissa in 1062 against the Danes).

England was not unprepared for the threat of invasion. The country was divided mainly between the three great earldoms of Wessex, in the South, and Mercia and Northumbria, which consisted of the Midlands and the North respectively. The rest of England was divided amongst Earl Waltheof, whose father had once been Earl of Northumbria (his earldom consisted of the shires of Huntingdon and Northampton), and Harold’s brothers, Gyrth (Earl of East Anglia) and Leofwine (Earl of the shires of Bedford, Essex, Kent and Surrey).

Half of the war-making potential of England was centred on London and the other half on York. Indeed, the two northern earldoms combined had proved themselves a match for Wessex in 1050, when Harold’s father was defeated in a power struggle. An Army of the North and an Army of the South (though Harold was probably only certain of the Norman attack) countered the threat of double invasion. King Harold, with the Saxon fleet, planned to protect southern England from the Normans, while Earls Morcar of Northumbria and Edwin of Mercia could defend northern England from Norwegian aspirations.

England in 1066.

Anglo-Saxon organisation was based on the fyrd, or militia. Every freeman between 15 and 60 had a military obligation to serve in the General, or great fyrd, which was designed to meet local emergencies, but was badly trained and ill-armed. In contrast, the select fyrd was a more regular force, better equipped and prepared to fight outside their home areas. The majority of the select fyrd consisted of thanes – lesser nobles and the total national force may have been about 4,000. The population of England during this period was only between 1 and 2 million. Professional soldiers were provided from personal retinues of hearth-troops, or hird, very similar to the Vikings.

The royal household maintained a standing force of 4,000 housecarls (also spelled huscarl: the terms hirdmen and housecarl are largely interchangeable, although the latter came to cover all types of professional soldier), who were usually stationed near London and York under normal circumstances. Rather ironically, the Scandinavians provided mercenaries for the Anglo-Saxon armies and the Danes helped to found the original Saxon housecarls in about 1016. The Saxons’ naval forces also provided fighting men in the form of lithsmen (sailors) and butsecarls (marines), some of whom might have been recruited into Edwin and Morcar’s army.

The Norwegian leidang was a levy of ships and men, the nucleus of which was the hird. The hirdmen or thingmen paid retainers were organised under jarls (earls) who maintained sixty men, and supervised four hersir (local military commanders) who kept a further twenty men each. The numbers sixty and eighty being roughly two longships’ complements. Commanding officers consisted of kings, sub-kings, princes and earls, while the senior hird officers were the stallari (marshal) and the merkismadr (marksman, standard-bearer). Hardrada had a personal hird of 120 men – sixty hirdmen, thirty housecarls and thirty gestrs (similar to select fyrds), commanded by Stallari Styrkar. The professionals were supplemented by freemen, peasants and bondi (land-owning farmers), although they were regarded as not particularly reliable.

Hardrada sailed first to the Viking kingdoms of Shetland and Orkney (he left his wife and daughters on Orkney) to gather the forces of Earls Paul and Erlend, Godred of Iceland, an unnamed...