The Battle of Stamford Bridge Explained

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0:32This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay.

1:05Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at applecard.com. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance.

1:39Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST.

2:18That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Hey, it's Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball cat litter. It delivers long-lasting odor control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy, so that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over.

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3:12It was the last great Viking battle against the last and greatest Viking invader. After so many men hacked down 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 skillful 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.

4:12It 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.

4:36This 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've found the artifacts, the stuff, the things those men and women carry. Weapons, mail, armor, dropped, stamped into the blood-soaked ground, lost, thrown away, now recovered.

5:21So we can almost reach out and touch the battle itself. 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 legend, 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.

6:03The 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.

6:55And so right across England and beyond, the question of who would rule one of Europe's richest kingdoms became a burning issue. Abit confessed 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.

7:30At least that's how the thinking went. The trouble was, so was every other option. There was a homegrown candidate, not a drop of royal 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. but he was not the only ambitious man in his family he had a younger brother Tostig who was now an exile he may have harbored dreams of becoming king himself he certainly harbored 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.

8:25He 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 he 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.

9:05Hardrada 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.

9:44He 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 patrony. 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.

10:34I 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. are very convenient indeed. He was the most powerful man in the kingdom. His brothers, his younger brothers, were also great lords.

11:08He 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 plans for invasion.

11:48King Harold's younger brother, Tostig, had been forced into exile. I should tell you a little about him. He'd been Earl of Northumbria until 1065 the year before, but he'd been so unpopular that he'd been kicked out. There'd been a popular uprising and he'd been thrown out of his job. And he'd expected, he'd run off south and expected his brother Harold, as the kingdom's chief enforcer, to put him back in charge. But Harold was probably quite a canny politician. He realised that Tostig was not a very good earl. He was also almost certainly manoeuvring for the throne at the time. And so he supported the claims of another candidate, Earl Morkar.

12:21Harold, in turn, seemed to have expected that Morkar would back him for the throne, as he did the following year. Tostig could not believe this bargain that had been made. His own brother had sided with his enemies, and he'd gone into exile. And now a year later, he was back. He raided up the East Coast. He provided Harold with his first great challenger as a king, a rogue brother, imagine that, in a royal family. When Tostig reached the River Humber, he was in fact soundly defeated by those northern earls, Edwin and Earl Morka, who had replaced him. He escaped to Scotland looking for support, didn't find much there, and so he steered his little squadron of ships towards Norway.

12:58and once in Norway, Tostik found a very willing audience. Hardrada was keen to invade England and he now had a useful idiot who could provide him with all sorts of intelligence, a man who'd once been so close to the king, a man who'd once governed the north of England. Perfect. Hardrada called up an army and started gathering the ships necessary to transport them to Britain. In August, that fleet was assembled. No mean feat in itself. I mean, great warriors really have to be great logisticians, particularly in this period, and great sailors too. Taking advantage of an easterly wind, they sailed, perhaps 300 ships or so from Sonia Ford on the west coast, passing towering cliffs of rock, more like a river canyon, until the land fell away into a sprawl of rocky islands and the boat started to rise and fall on the ocean swell.

13:40Until they left the land behind altogether, they pushed out into the North Atlantic. They shook free their sails and off they went. Those sails were festooned with symbols. There were carved dragons or effigies on the wooden prow of the ships, brightly coloured shields lining up along the rails. What a sight it must have been. Hardrada, we're told, was a poet, alongside his many other accomplishments. And perhaps he stood squarely on that deck, feeling the boat move beneath his feet, composing a verse as the salt sea air swelled around him, and he felt the clarity that comes with setting out to sea.

14:14His ship was named Serpent. Beside him is young son Olaf, heading out on his first major campaign, an apprenticeship with his father, the greatest warrior of the age. Due west they sailed, 200 miles or so to the Shetlands, aimed just south of the setting sun at that time of year. The clouds above the Shetlands be visible for 60 or so miles away, so to ask what seems like a terrifying feat of navigation with no GPS was actually pretty standard, I think. Maybe 36 hours or so. At sea, with a fair, steady breeze. At night, you keep the north side, you keep Polaris right, athwart your beam, you're going in the right direction.

14:50from Shetland straight down south to Orkney 50 miles or so hardly out of sight of land really Orkney was a Viking stronghold it was a Norwegian possession and it was ruled over oddly in this period by well I had two L's they were brothers they seemed to rub along pretty peacefully Ireland and Paul oddly they and their men were keen enough and they joined the expedition and headed south next Aldrada visited the east coast of Scotland to try and convince the king of Scots to join he balked he did not want to maybe the memories of terrible defeats at the hands of English still loomed. He would sit this one out and try and make the most of the aftermath.

15:22My sense of it is that he sort of made a contribution to the expedition that was polite. It was too small to really annoy the English if the English won, but it was large enough to carry favour with Hardrada if he emerged victorious. The fleet crossed into English waters. In the first week of September, it arrived at the mouth of the Tyne. Perhaps 350 ships, perhaps many 500 with the little transport vessels and things. The Vikings were back in force. Interestingly, the fleet would have sailed right past Holy Island, the site of that fateful Viking raid on Lindisfarne in the 790s, which had heralded the onset of the Viking Age almost 300 years before.

16:02They worked their way down the coast, making use of the excellent shelter provided by the great rivers of eastern England. First, the Tyne, where Haldrada probably went ashore. A striking figure striding at the beach. above him unfurled the land waster, his special banner, white with a black mythical raven. That flag had been a harbinger of terrible violence. It had flown from the Tyne to the Tigris, and it meant that blood would flow. The people of Scarborough may have provided that first blood. They made the extraordinary decision to try and resist. Hardrada had landed and demanded all of their wealth, all their goods and riches, quite straightforward, and they said no.

16:42Hardrada now needed to make an example of them. Exemplary violence, folks. He made huge bundles of wood, he set fire to them and rolled them down onto the town from the slopes above. It burnt, and the fleeing townsfolk were cut down as they escaped. Hardrada ordered the entire population put to the sword. The settlement was annihilated. Scarborough ceased to exist. It doesn't appear in that great royal survey of England, the Doomsday Book, compiled about a generation later, and they didn't miss a trick those guys every single pig was included in that so it was gone the land was wasted all right one historian has got a great crow about hardrada which i think is probably the most euphemistic thing i've ever read the historian says his personal morality appears not to have matched the christian ideal say that again on sailed this rather ambiguous character south into the beautiful humber estuary In its sheltered waters, Hardrada's force, I imagine, would have shipped their oars, stowed their sails, possibly taken their masts down, and sat on the thwarts, heaving the looms and the wooden blades through the water.

17:51Muscle power replacing wind power. They headed for the mouth of the river Ouse, one of the rivers that drains into this estuary, because their target lay on the banks of the Ouse. It was the great northern city of England. It had once been home to Roman emperors themselves. It had been the seat of kings, Viking and English. It had been a great prize, contested for centuries. It was the city of York. You listened to Dan Snow's history hit, The Best is Yet to Come. Stick with us.

18:28This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing. more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffle historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.

19:01Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at TikTok.com slash discovermore.

19:30year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end-of-year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at applecard.com. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text.

20:03You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average $21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments, you just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends.

20:39You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. This ad is sponsored by ZocDoc. Hi, it's Danny Pellegrino from Everything Iconic. Have you been putting off that annual doctor's appointment because you don't want to make the call? Or maybe you've been meaning to find a new dentist, but you have no idea where to start.

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22:20I'd rather he didn't travel all the way up there by boat. He beached his fleet at a place called Rickle. It's true south of York. And he took the last 12 miles on foot. Outside the city, he found the two most powerful lords of Northern England. I mentioned them before. Earl Edwin of Mercia and his brother, Earl Morcar of Northumbria. They were barring his route into the city. They were lined up outside a place called Fulford. this is where the first great battle of 1066 would be fought. The English position looked pretty strong. The river oozed their right, and they had some boggy, marshy ground to their left.

22:53So they were astride the firm, hard ground leading to the city of York. They barred the only route that Hardrada had into the city. But this was not by any stretch Hardrada's first rodeo. No, no, no. He led his men up the riverbank, right on the riverbank. It seems he managed to keep them out of sight of the English, so possibly even wading in the shallows. And then he sent Tostig forward in plain sight, in the centre of the line, with his troops. Hardrada guessed, as it turns out correctly, that Earl Morcar would want to smash Tostig and his troublesome English traitors. And sure enough, Morcar saw Tostig's men looking vulnerable and ripe for the picking, and he surged forward to wipe them out.

23:35But as the English did so, they exposed their right flank to Hardrada, who led his men up and over the riverbank, out of the dead ground, to smash into the English. It's just such a bad day in the office when you realise that you've made a mistake like that and you've got Harold Hardrada rampaging towards you in a surprise attack. Well, there are no surprises in the outcome of this battle. This European champion dispatched the English. It was brutal. It said there were so many English corpses you could walk across the marshy ground without getting your feet wet. Survivors jumped into the ooze.

24:09They waded across the marches if they could. They threw their weapons aside. They sprinted if they could. They crawled when they couldn't. The armies of the north were smashed and scattered. York was at Hardrada's mercy. The city leaders were forced to swear an oath to him as king and acknowledge Tostig as their new earl. The north of England, really, was effectively Hardrada's. But Hardrada and Tostig didn't immediately take up residence in York. Instead, they'd go back to their ships. They'd reorganize. They'd recover. They'd replenish. and they demanded that hostages would be sent to them as a token of submission.

24:45No hostages meant the Vikings would return and lay waste to the city. These hostages should be sent out in five days. The meeting place, the rendezvous, was just west of York, a place where roads converged and there was a bridge across the river, a place known as Stamford Bridge. Now, way back down in the south of England, King Harold had been sitting on the coast waiting for a different invasion, one from Normandy, not Norway. He'd received intelligence reports that Duke William was assembling a fleet and recruiting mercenaries and adventurers and treasure seekers far and wide. And King Harold had responded by calling up vast numbers of troops and waiting near the expected invasion zone.

25:21But the masts, they never appeared on the horizon. August turned to September. The weather was surely about to break. I mean, September in the Channel can be rough, as I've said many times before on this podcast. The invasion window was closed, surely. His men also needed to go home for the harvest. Supplies were eaten up. He was forced to disband his army. A day or two later, he gets back to London, and there's a thunderbolt. England has been invaded, but not in the south, not by William of Normandy, but in the north. And what does Harold do? Well, I think he conducts one of the most impressive and bold marches in British military history.

25:59He gathers his professional troops around him, the full-timers, the housecarls, the pros, and they gallop up the Great North Road, the road built by the Romans, now the A1. He sends messengers ahead to tell any troops who avoided the slaughter at Fulford to meet him just south of York. We think he travels about 185 miles and around 200 miles in four days. It's pretty astonishing. It was a lightning mark. We think that's characteristic of Harold. He was a warrior. He'd really impressed in a war against the Welsh, for example. He'd subdued several Welsh leaders and he was quick. He moved with speed.

26:33He knew his way around the battlefield. And he had worked out the best way to deal with this Viking invasion would be to nip it in the bud, to get there as fast as he could and snuff it out. He gets to just south of the city of York. He meets up with some more troops. He gains some intelligence. He hears about the Vikings and where they're going to be. So he marches into the city of York, doesn't stop, marches straight through it to this meeting place at Stamford Bridge. He's going to ambush the Vikings. Meanwhile, Harold Hardrada was feeling great. He was feeling overconfident, in fact. He and some of his troops advanced up from their ships, up from their camp towards Stamford Bridge.

27:10Many had left their armour behind. It was a sweltering hot day. They had no need to worry. They'd just won a crushing victory. He had perhaps a third of his army with him. Many of them had left behind their shields. They left behind bulky equipment. That's always a bit of a pain when you're marching. And he left the rest of his force behind with his ships in Rickle. No need to drag everyone off to a sort of formulaic exchange of hostages. They sauntered up to Stamford Bridge. and they waited around the fields on either side of the river, lolling about in the sun. It was a clear day, clear enough for Hardrada to get his first inkling that there was trouble.

27:43To the west there was a cloud of dust, impossible to hide when armies march in dry weather on rammed earth roads. It was forming up above the horizon. Then the Viking sagas tell us that Hardrada saw something shining, a glint. It was like the glint of sunshine on broken ice. and it was indeed the glint of sunshine but it was glinting off iron, not ice. The morning sun was falling upon the advancing English royal army. Fluttering overhead was the banner of the King of England, a dragon and King Harold's personal banner, a fighting man. The English had the Vikings where they wanted them. They launched themselves down the gentle slope towards the river.

28:27The Vikings caught on that west bank, trapped on that side of the river. Well, they were doomed straight away. They were caught between their enemy and the river. Hardrada was on the east bank. He did some quick thinking. If he ordered a general retreat, his men would lose cohesion and they'd be picked off as they raced for the ships. Instead, they must make a stand. He sent messengers off to the rest of his army back there at the ships and told them to come and help. And then he tried to gather the troops he did have together to hold the English off until they arrived. The English tore through the Vikings on that west bank.

29:01And then it was time to cross the river. And that moment gives us our best-known story about the battle. The tale goes, it was written down much later, but it's a good tale, that one berserk Viking, an enormous warrior, held the bridge himself. An axe-wielding monster held back the entire English advance on that narrow bridge. He saw off dozens, perhaps 40 Englishmen. before an enterprising soldier clambled into a barrel or a container or something and drifted it under the bridge and stabbed up into his unprotected groin through the slats of the bridge. He was transfixed from crotch to chest. It's a great story, and it might just be true.

29:42There were certainly other places to cross there, realistically. They weren't all going to use that one bridge. There were fords as well as bridges. I waded across one of the fords last summer. It was a little deeper than I'd been led to expect, but I was still just about standing all the way. At some stage, one of the sources tell us there was a pause, and I'm assuming it was here. And it says that Harold, King Harold, rode forward alone. And he talked to his brother. He offered Tostig back his Eldam if he changed sides. And Tostig shouted back, asking what Hadrada would get. And King Harold said he'd get six feet of English earth for a grave, or more, as he was a slightly taller man.

30:16Then, Tostig replied, get ready for battle. We would rather all resolve to die with honour Or gain England by a victory Tostig turned his back on his brother For one last time He'd made his pact with Hardrada The two of them would now share Death or victory When Hardrada's messengers arrived back at the fleet Their horses wet with sweat Mouths, throthing, eyes bulging The call went up to arm And reinforced their king as quickly as possible On went the Hulburks These are shirts made from tiny interlocking rings of iron. They take the shape of the torso beneath them, and they do allow movement, but they are heavy.

30:57And to be more effective, you need really a padded jacket below them, underneath them, to try and absorb the shock of an edge weapon, which will otherwise shatter your bones. That combination is hot on a cold day, but on a late summer day with a 16-mile jog and a battle in front of you, it's just unimaginable. But that's what those men did. Shields were grabbed, round with an iron grip in the middle, a hole in the wood allowing the fist to curl, protected in turn by a metal shield boss that can be used to punch in combat. Swords, very valuable, perhaps passed down from a father, protected in scabbards, sometimes with showy chapes, the pointy bit at the end of scabbards.

31:35They were strapped to belts, axes and knives, thrust into position at the waist. A metal helmet, well that could be carried, and fastened into position at the last minute. No Viking helmet, I need to say this, has ever been found with horns, folks. That's a myth. These ones would look like helmets, frankly, worn by anyone else in this period. They'd have had metal eyes and nose protection, perhaps, but no horns. And off ran those Vikings to try and save their king. That king knew how to fight. He knew how to win. And he also knew how to die in a way that would preserve his reputation. In the end, Hardrada would not hide behind that shield wall all day waiting to be rescued.

32:14At some point, it seems that he made a decision. He would go out in a way that ensured that men still talked of him in millennia to come. Disdaining a shield, he grabbed his sword in both hands and made a frenzied personal attack on the enemy. He carved a furrow through the English army. So usually, I always think Hollywood history gets an essential thing wrong about these kind of battles. Movies tend to show individuals lashing about themselves to right and left, rather than the more visually boring, but probably realistic, sort of rugby scrum of a shield wall. Two lines of men packed together so tight they can hardly raise a hand, pushing, shoving, spitting, cursing, the odd little stabbing motion, until one side sort of cracks.

32:54But on this occasion, the greatest warrior in Europe, a giant of a man, may well have decided that enough was enough, and he was going to go out with a bang. Lashing out berserkly, he hacked his way through Englishman, until the inevitable happened. He wasn't a superman. An English archer, perhaps in very close range, loosed an arrow. It flew straight and true into the throat of the hard ruler, the thunderbolt of the north, the bulgar burner. Even Hadrada couldn't withstand that. And down went the mighty Norseman. The reinforcements did arrive through the afternoon, as you can imagine. It was a trickle.

33:33They arrived in a state of disorder and exhaustion. Some apparently died from the exertion of the run. The reinforcements were led by one of Hardrada's favourites, a nobleman called Eistin Ore, and he was betrothed, in fact, to the king's daughter, but he'd never make it to the altar. He does briefly seem to have halted the English and rallied the Vikings. That's remembered as Ore Storm, but it wasn't enough, and the English eventually pushed them back. The army reeled south towards their ships. You can imagine a situation where the army just splinters as it starts disintegrating. It was a rout.

34:08Bodies lay heaped. It was said years later that piles of bones could still be seen whitening in the sun. Among them, as well as Hardrada, Tostig. The first of Harold's family to be killed in battle that autumn. But not the last. At some stage the English troops were reined in. Must have been exhausting. Harald put a stop to the fighting and allowed a few survivors to return home in their ships, having sworn oaths never again to attack England. Haldrada's 16-year-old son Olaf, who'd joined the expedition with such high hopes, he'd remained with the ships and he led the survivors home. Just 24 vessels sailed out of Rickle, of the hundreds in which they'd arrived just a week or two earlier.

34:53and so ended the last major battle fought on English soil against the Norsemen. In many ways, it's the end of the Viking era in England. At this point, Harold of England, well, he's won a victory to rank him alongside the greatest of English kings. The battle was won, the dragon has been slain, and he disbanded his second army that year. Once again, he sends troops home. That's it, surely. Job done for the year. Mission accomplished. And then, about a week later, probably the first few days of October, news arrives of yet another invasion. This time it is the Normans and it is in the south. There will be another terrible battle.

35:31Another king will fall. England's history will be made. But that is a different story, folks. That's the story of Hastings, which I have told on this podcast a few times. Please do check it out in the feed, but I'm sure I'll be telling it again before long because it's one of the best. Before we finish that, I do want to tell you another story and that's what's been happening to us in the search for the battlefield. No archaeology has ever identified where the battle took place. There is a modern settlement called Stamford Bridge, a town that's got a bridge over the River Derwent. It's got street names that all relate to the battle, and the town is alive with images of the famous clash.

36:02You stop anyone on the street there, they'll tell you about the battle. But no artifacts or remains have ever been discovered there by archaeologists. But recently, finds have been coming out of the ground around a mile to the south of Stamford Bridge at a place called Low Catton. And by finds, I mean a lot of finds. Team History and I have been up a couple of times, and I was there when Simon Richardson, the metal detectorist, unearthed a Viking belt buckle, the clasp shaped to look like the head of a mythical beast. You can make out the eyes and ears and the snout. It's from the 11th century.

36:34It is definitely Scandinavian. So exciting. You're standing there in a field rubbing the mud off this thing. It hasn't seen the light of day for nearly a thousand years. Minutes later, in that same field, he found a Viking pommel. That's the weighted end of a sword which protects the hand. It stops it slipping off the grip and acts a bit of a counterweight. Simon was shaking with excitement as he showed that one to me. Next, we were finding pieces of mail shirt coming out of the ground. My favourite find of everything that they've come across up there is a very fancy chape. I mentioned one earlier.

37:03It's a decorated piece of metal that sits at the tip of a scabbard of a sword to stop it being damaged as it rubs against the floor or the flank of a horse. We contacted Scandinavian experts and they say it looks very like those chapes that have been recovered from eastern Viking sites, the Balkans, possibly even Bulgaria. So these fields in Yorkshire along the River Derwent contain not just evidence of Vikings, not just evidence of battle, but of Vikings who have come from the east or who have possessions, objects from the east. Exactly what we'd expect from those men that surrounded Harold Hardrada.

37:38I'll put up a lot of the images on my social feed when this podcast comes out. And also please do check out the History Hit television documentary that we've been making. You're going to love the objects that have come out of these fields. It's very, very exciting stuff. I had some very happy and exciting times with the wonderful team up there, and I'd like to thank them again for getting me and History Hit involved.

38:02You can also watch our episode on the Bay of Tapestry on our YouTube channel, which picks up the story where we've left off with the epic Battle of Hastings, of the Norman Conquest. Make sure you go and check that out. And finally, thank you for listening to this podcast. Thank you for subscribing, for following, for doing all the things you've got to do. And if you fancy leaving a review, obviously that makes a big difference. Please do it. Thank you so much, folks. That was the story of Stamford Bridge. See you next time.

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