Yet there was another battle that occurred on English soil that year, one that preceded both Stamford Bridge and Hastings: the Battle of Fulford, also known as the Battle of Gate Fulford.

Here are ten facts about the battle.

1. Fighting was sparked by the arrival in England of Harald Hardrada

The Norwegian king, Harald Hardrada reached the Humber estuary on 18 September 1066 with up to 12,000 men.

His aim was to take the English throne from King Harold II, arguing he should have the crown because of arrangements made between the late King Edward the Confessor and the sons of King Cnut.

2. Hardrada had a Saxon ally

Tostig, the exiled brother of King Harold II, supported Harald’s claim to the English throne and had been the one who initially convince Harald to invade.

When the Norwegian king landed in Yorkshire, Tostig reinforced him with soldiers and ships.

3. The battle occurred south of York

An image of Harald Hardrada in Lerwick Town Hall in the Shetland Islands. Credit: Colin Smith / Commons.

Although Hardrada’s ultimate aim was to gain control of the English crown, he first marched north to York, a city that was once the epicentre of Viking power in England.

Hardrada’s army, however, soon found themselves confronted by an Anglo-Saxon army just south of York on the eastern side of the Ouse River near Fulford.

4. The Anglo-Saxon army was led by two brothers

They were Earl Morcar of Northumbria and Earl Edwin of Mercia, who earlier in the year had decisively defeated Tostig. For Tostig this was round two.

The week before the battle, Morcar and Edwin hastily gathered together an army to confront Hardrada’s invasion force. At Fulford they fielded some 5,000 men.

5. Morcar and Edwin occupied a strong defensive position…

Their right flank was protected by the River Ouse, while their left flank was protected by ground too swampy for an army to march through.

The Saxons also had a formidable defence to their front: a stream three metres wide and one metre deep, that the Vikings would have to cross if they were to reach York.

Swampland by the River Ouse south of York. Similar land protected the Saxon’s left flank at Fulford. Credit: Geographbot / Commons.

6. …but this soon worked against them

Initially only Harald and a small portion of his army arrived at the battlefield facing Morcar and Edwin’s army as most of Harald’s men were still some distance away. Thus for a time the Anglo-Saxon army outnumbered their foe.

Morcar and Edwin knew that this was a golden opportunity to attack but the River Ouse’s tide was then at its highest and the stream in front of them was flooded.

Unable to advance, Morcar and Edwin were forced to delay their attack, watching with frustration as more and more of Harald’s troops began to assemble on the far side of the stream.

7. The defenders struck first

At around midday on 20 September 1066 the tide finally receded. Still bent on attacking their foe before the full might of Harald’s force could arrive, Morcar then led an attack on Harald’s right flank.

After a melee in the marshlands, Morcar’s Saxons began to push Hardrada’s right flank back, but the advance soon petered out and came to a standstill.

8. Harald gave the decisive order

He pushed forwards his best men against Edwin’s Saxon soldiers stationed nearest the Ouse River, quickly overwhelming and routing that wing of the Saxon army.

As a small hill ensured Edwin’s force was not within sight of them, Morcar and his men probably did not realise their right wing had collapsed until it was too late.

Harald’s best men routed the right flank of the Saxon army. Credit: Wolfmann / Commons.

9. The Vikings then surrounded the remaining English

Having chased Edwin’s men away from the riverbank, Harald and his veterans now charged the rear of Morcar’s already engaged men. Outnumbered and outmanoeuvred, Morcar sounded the retreat.

The English lost nearly 1,000 men although both Morcar and Edwin survived. It did not come without cost for the Vikings however as they too had lost a similar number of men, presumably mostly against Morcar’s forces.

10. Hardrada did not have long to savour his victory at Fulford

After Fulford York surrendered to Harald and ‘the Last Viking’ prepared to march south. He didn’t need to, however, as barely five days after Fulford, he and his army were attacked by Harold Godwinson and his army at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

This article is an edited transcript of 1066: Battle of Hastings with Marc Morris, available on History Hit TV.

The year 1066 saw several candidates emerge as rivals for the English crown. Having defeated the Vikings at Stamford Bridge, King Harold Godwinson journeyed south very quickly to respond to the new Norman threat that had landed on the south coast.

Harold could have travelled 200 odd miles from York to London in around three or four days at that time. If you were the king and you travelled with a mounted elite, you could ride hell-for-leather if you needed to get somewhere quick, and the horses could be replaced.

Whilst he was doing that, Harold would have had other messengers riding out into the provinces, proclaiming a new muster in London in 10 days’ time.

Should Harold have waited?

What we’re told by several sources about Harold is that he was too hasty. Both English and Norman chronicles tell us that Harold set out for Sussex and William’s camp too soon, before all his troops had been drawn up. That fits with the idea that he disbanded his troops in Yorkshire. It wasn’t a forced march south for the infantry; it was instead a gallop for the king’s elite.

Harold would likely have done better to wait rather than to rush down into Sussex with fewer infantry than might have been ideal.

He would have had more troops if he had waited a bit longer for the muster, which involved counties sending their reserve militiamen to join Harold’s army.

The other thing to note is that the longer Harold waited, the more likely he was to gain more support from Englishmen who didn’t want to see their farms put to the torch.

Harold could have played a patriotic card, positing himself as a king of England protecting his people from these invaders. The longer the prelude to battle went on, the greater the danger for William’s position, because the Norman duke and his army had only brought a certain amount of supplies with them.

Once the Normans’ food ran out, William would have had to start breaking up his force and going out to forage and ravage. His army would have ended up with all the disadvantages of a being an invader living off the land. It would have been much better for Harold to wait.

William’s invasion plan

William’s strategy was to loot and sack settlements in Sussex in an attempt to provoke Harold. Harold was not only a crowned king but a popular one too, which meant he could afford a draw. As a 17th-century quote from the Earl of Manchester, about the Parliamentarians versus the Royalists, says:

“If we fight 100 times and beat him 99 he will be king still, but if he beats us but once, or the last time, we shall be hanged, we shall lose our estates, and our posterities be undone.”

If Harold was defeated by William but managed to survive, he could have headed west and then regrouped to fight another day. That exact thing had happened 50 years earlier with the Anglo-Saxons versus the Vikings. Edmund Ironside and Cnut went at it about four or five times until Cnut eventually won.

This illustration depicts Edmund Ironside (left) and Cnut (right), fighting one another.

All Harold had to do was not die, whereas William was gambling everything. For him, it was the biggest roll of the dice of his career. It had to be a decapitation strategy. He wasn’t coming over to plunder; it wasn’t a Viking raid, it was a play for the crown.

The only way William was going to get the crown was if Harold obliged him by coming to battle early and dying.

William thus spent time harrying Sussex to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of Harold’s lordship, and Harold rose to the bait.

Harold’s defence of England

Harold used the element of surprise against the Vikings to win his decisive victory in the north. He rushed up to Yorkshire, secured good intelligence on their location and caught them unawares at Stamford Bridge.

So surprise worked well for Harold in the north, and he attempted a similar trick against William. He tried to hit William’s camp at night before the Normans realised he was there. But it didn’t work.

Hardrada and Tostig were completely caught with their pants down at Stamford Bridge. That’s literally the case in terms of dress, because we’re told by an 11th-century source that it was a hot day and so they had gone from York to Stamford Bridge without their armour or their mail shirts, putting them at a massive disadvantage.

Hardrada really dropped his guard. Harold and William, on the other hand, were probably equally matched in their generalship.

William’s reconnoitring and his intelligence were better than Harold’s, however; we’re told that the Norman duke’s knights reported back to him and warned him of the impending night attack. William’s soldiers then stood guard throughout the night in expectation of an attack.

When an attack didn’t come, they set off in search of Harold and in the direction of his camp.

The site of the battle

The tables were turned and instead it was William who caught Harold unawares rather than the other way round. The place he met Harold at the time didn’t have a name. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says they meet at the grey apple tree, but nowadays we call that place “Battle”.

There has been some controversy in recent years about the site of the battle. Lately, there has been a suggestion that the only evidence that the monastery, Battle Abbey, was placed on the site of the Battle of Hastings, is the Chronicle of Battle Abbey itself, which was written more than a century after the event.

But that isn’t true.

There are at least half a dozen earlier sources that say William built an abbey on the site where the battle was fought.

The earliest of them is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in William’s obituary for the year 1087.

The Englishman who wrote it says that William was a great king who did many dreadful things. He writes that of the good things he did, he ordered an abbey to be built on the very spot where God granted him victory over the English.

So we have a contemporary voice from the time of William the Conqueror, an English voice from his court, that says the abbey is situated where the battle was fought. It’s as solid evidence as we will find for this period.

One of the most titanic, climactic battles in British history, saw Harold begin in a very good defensive position, anchored to a large slope, blocking the road to London.

Harold had the high ground. Everything from Star Wars onwards tells us that if you’ve got the high ground, you’ve got a better chance. But the issue with Harold’s position is that it was too narrow. He couldn’t deploy all of his men. Neither commander had an ideal position. And that’s probably why the battle descended into a long, drawn-out melee.

This article is an edited transcript of 1066: Battle of Hastings with Marc Morris, available on History Hit TV.

King Harold Godwinson spent much of 1066 anticipating a Norman invasion in the south of England, led by the Duke of Normandy, the future William the Conqueror. Since Scandinavia had been wracked by internal conflict for the last decade, the English monarch was not expecting a Viking attack.

After waiting around four months for a Norman invasion, Harold could not sustain his army any longer, and disbanded it on the 8 September.

He sent his men back to the provinces, and then proceeded to ride inland to London.

The Vikings arrive

When Harold returned to London two or three days later, he was informed that an invasion had taken place – but that it wasn’t a Norman invasion. Instead, it was an invasion by Harold Hardrada, King of Norway, and Tostig Godwinson, Harold’s very own estranged and bitter brother, who had a large fleet of Vikings with them.

Harold was probably very frustrated at that point, because he had held an army together for around four months to resist William, and, as he was literally in the process of standing it down, the Norwegians arrived in northern England.

If they had arrived any sooner then the news would have reached Harold in time for him to keep his army together.

It was very bad timing for Harold. He then had to race northwards with his own bodyguard, the Housecarls, and his household cavalry, all while sending out fresh writs to the shires saying that there was a new muster in the north to deal with the Viking invasion. He marched north from the end of the second week in September.

The Normans had been waiting in Saint-Valery since mid-September. But they must have known about the Viking invasion because it only took up to around 24 hours to get a ship across the Channel at that time, and usually less than that.

We know there were spies and information passing between the two countries the whole time. The Normans know the Norwegians had landed and that Harold had set off to confront them.

But the extraordinary thing is that when the Normans set sail for England on the 27 or 28 September, they could not have known the outcome of that clash in the north.

Harold Godwinson destroys them

We know that on 25 September, Harold Godwinson met Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge and smashed the Viking army to pieces.

It was a great victory for Harold. But the news could not have travelled the 300 odd miles from Yorkshire to Poitiers – where the Normans were waiting – in two days. When they set sail, and even when they landed in England, they didn’t know which King Harold (or Harald) they were going to have to fight.

The amazing thing about the Battle of Stamford Bridge is that, if it had been the only thing to happen that year, 1066 would still have been a famous year.

It was one of the great early medieval victories in English history, and Harold Godwinson completely annihilated a Viking army.

We’re told the Vikings turned up in 200 or 300 ships, and that they returned in 24, or somewhere close to that. Critically, King Hardrada was killed, and he was one of the foremost warriors in Europe at that point.

Described by William of Poitiers (William the Conquerer’s biographer) as the strongest man in Europe, he was known as the “Thunderbolt of the North”. Thus, Harold’s was a huge victory. If the Norman invasion hadn’t happened then we might still be singing songs about King Harold Godwinson and his famous victory.

The Vikings did threaten to come back frequently, including in 1070, 1075 and, in a very serious way, 1085 – with the latter provoking Domesday. But Harald Hardrada’s invasion marked the last major Viking incursion into England, and Stamford Bridge the last big Viking battle. There were, however, other battles that happened in Scotland in the later Middle Ages.

Following Stamford Bridge, Harold believed that he had secured his kingdom. Autumn was coming on, and the king had nearly got through his first year on the throne.

Responding to the Norman invasion

We don’t know exactly where or when Harold got the news that William had landed on the south coast because, with this period, determining certainties is like trying to nail jelly to the wall a lot of the time.

The certainties when it comes to Harold’s movements are Stamford Bridge on 25 September, and Hastings on 14 October. But where he was in the meantime is a matter of supposition.

Because he had already stood down his army in the south, a reasonable supposition is that Harold’s assumption – or maybe his prayer – must have been that the Normans weren’t coming.

The Battle of Stamford Bridge marked the last major Viking engagement in England.

The unexpected invasion by the Norwegians had forced Harold to call out an army again and rush north. On the morrow of Stamford Bridge, Harold would probably still have assumed that the Normans weren’t coming. He had won his victory against the Vikings. They had been decimated.

Like any commander in the Middle Ages, with the battle won and the dragon slain, Harold disbanded his army for a second time. All the call-up troops were sent home. Mission accomplished.

Until about a week later, it is reasonable to assume that Harold was still in Yorkshire, because he needed to pacify the region. Lots of people in Yorkshire had been very pleased to see the arrival of a Scandinavian king because that part of the world has strong cultural ties, political and cultural ties to Scandinavia.

Harold, therefore, would have wanted to spend time in Yorkshire, pacifying the locals and having a serious conversation with the people of York about their loyalty, while also burying his dead brother, Tostig, among other things.

Then, just as he was settling down again, a messenger arrived posthaste from the south and informed him of William the Conqueror’s invasion.

This article is an edited transcript of 1066: Battle of Hastings with Marc Morris, available on History Hit TV.

With Harold Godwinson’s coronation as King of England in 1066 – a single day after the death of his predecessor, Edward the Confessor – Duke William of Normandy, the future William the Conqueror, went ballistic. Harold Godwinson had no blood link to the crown and, while he did have a marital link, his claim to the throne was weak enough that rivals to the crown emerged.

William’s claim to the English throne rested on Edward the Confessor’s designation – 15 years before, in 1051 – which had promised him the crown.

William had a slightly stronger claim than Harold because he had a weak blood claim – he was a second cousin of Edward the Confessor. But his main claim came through the designation.

The contenders emerge

We only have later sources, around 100 years after the event, that actually describe William’s reaction. He apparently felt that, after 15 years of being promised the English throne, he was suddenly hearing that Harold had claimed what belonged to him.

A couple of years prior, Harold had been in Normandy and had sworn an oath to William that he would uphold the Norman duke’s claim. Thus, William supposedly went into a rage.

Elsewhere in Europe, the Scandinavians were interested in the crown of England. The first time anyone on the British mainland seemingly realised that the Scandinavians were interested, however, is when they arrived in England in September 1066.

Indeed, there’s nothing in the original source material to suggest that an invasion from Scandinavia was expected or feared at the start of 1066.

To the victor the spoils

England was a very rich and prosperous country. In spite of all the invasions it had endured in the 11th century, the reason that the Vikings had been raiding it since the 10th century was precisely because it was a rich, well-governed country that could raise huge taxes.

The English had been raising taxes to pay off the Danes since the late 10th century. It had a very strong government that could raise lots of money with a strong silver coinage.

This was all based on the fact that England specifically (rather than the rest of the British Isles) is an easy country to farm – it is lowland and arable.

Conflict begins

Harold fired the starting gun by having himself crowned immediately upon Edward’s death. But prior to that, William was already preparing his invasion force. It was William who actually made the first move.

Harold Godwin’s coronation, as depicted by the Bayeux Tapestry.

Indeed, Harold didn’t start preparing his troops until he realised that William was serious about mounting an invasion.

This was a surprise because launching an invasion across the sea hadn’t been tried for a really long time. Although the Normans began their career as Vikings, by 1066 they were not famous for their seafaring activities.

William went into preparation mode. He twisted the arms of his magnates to get them to promise him military service. He ordered ships to be built or borrowed or bought. He wrote to the pope and even sent a messenger to lay out his case and get papal support.

It was only when William was in overdrive on all these fronts, military, political and diplomatic, that Harold realised in the spring of that year that the Norman duke was actually going to put his money where his mouth was.

That was when Harold responded, beginning to raise and call out the English army and the English fleet in early May.

The Scandinavian threat

There are older books by very eminent scholars on the Norman conquest that discuss a threat from Scandinavia mounting throughout the 1050s and into the 1060s. But there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to support such an idea.

Harald Hardrada, the King of Norway, was completely preoccupied with internal warfare in his own country and another war with Denmark until the eve of 1066 itself. He was fighting his own battles in Scandinavia, and he didn’t have time to launch an attack on England.

The key figure was in fact Tostig Godwinson, Harold Godwinson’s troublesome younger brother.

Throughout the 1050s and early 1060s, Harold and Tostig had collaborated very well, including successfully invading Wales together in the 1060s. Tostig had been made Earl of Northumbria in 1055, which wasn’t then the modern county of Northumbria, but a huge swathe of land comprising everything north of the River Humber up as far as the Scottish border.

Tostig contrived very quickly to alienate Northumbrian society, provoking a big rebellion against him in 1064.

Harold and Tostig fell out because Harold refused to back his brother against the Northumbrian rebels, and Tostig was sent into exile. From that point on, the two men were enemies.

It’s not entirely clear what happened with Tostig because we only know the story from much later legends, either 12th-century chronicles or 13th-century Norse sagas. It is clear, however, that Tostig roamed the courts of northern France and Scandinavia, looking for military support to topple Harold.

It doesn’t seem as though Tostig was aiming at the crown himself. He seemed more interested in toppling his brother, while also restoring his own power. So it was a revenger’s tragedy.

He ended up persuading Harald Hardrada to support an invasion, with the ultimate goal of restoring his earldom.

Nobody in England was predicting an attack from Scandinavia, because the region had been on good terms with England since the 1040s. The previous reference to Harald Hardrada in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle prior to 1066 is 1042 or 1043, when he made peace with Edward the Confessor.

The status quo with Scandinavia was peaceful.

Just 50 or 60 miles across the water in Normandy, however, it was no big secret that an invasion was coming. The boatyards of Normandy were humming with activity.

William rounded up a fleet from all the way across the northern coast of France from friendly powers. Harold and everybody in southern England saw that this was where the threat was brewing, and the English king stationed an army on the south coast throughout 1066 in preparation for William’s invasion.

This article is an edited transcript of 1066: Battle of Hastings with Marc Morris, available on History Hit TV.

Harold Godwinson was one of the contenders for the English throne in 1066, along with William the Conqueror and Harald Hardrada. However, Harold Godwinson’s claim to the throne was delicate.

According to English sources, on his deathbed Edward the Confessor nominated his brother-in-law, Harold Godwinson, as his successor.

A variety of sources, both English and Norman, argue that Edward the Confessor merely entrusted the crown to Harold or imply that he appointed Harold to something less than the crown itself, suggesting it was only a regency or that Harold was supposed to be a stopgap ruler.

Then Edward died. Edward’s problem was that, despite having been the king of England for nearly a quarter of a century (he was 24 years into his reign at that point), he hadn’t produced any children of his own.

His whole career, but particularly the last few years, had been overshadowed entirely by the question of who would succeed him.

In the meantime, Harold Godwinson had become the most powerful man in England – arguably even more so than Edward himself.

He was the power behind the throne and when Edward died on 5 January 1066 he simply took the throne. The next day Edward was buried and Harold was crowned in his place.

A 13th century illustration of Harold Godwinson’s coronation.

Rapid coronation

In that period, it was very unusual that a king would be crowned so soon after the death of a predecessor. In fact, it can be seen as the most suspicious act in the whole drama of the Norman conquest.

In the period before 1066, kings were not made by the act of crowning them, they were simply chosen. We frequently see phrases in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle such as, “He was chosen king by the whole people,” or, “All the thanes chose him as king”.

Normally you would be sworn in as king the moment your predecessor died, but you wouldn’t need to be crowned.

Coronation was just a confirmation, and it was unnecessary to hold a big ceremony and have God bless your rule until months later.

A good example was Edward the Confessor himself, who became king in June 1042 but who didn’t have his coronation until Easter 1043. He waited a whole nine months before being crowned.

Harold, very significantly, was crowned the day after Edward died, and on the same day that he was buried. He had nothing to support his claim other than designation by his predecessor; he didn’t have a blood link, so he was keen to have God’s blessing bestowed upon him.

He needed to bolster his rule in any way he could, and he viewed a rapid coronation as his best bet.

An elective monarchy?

There’s a story about the Anglo-Saxons that claims the Anglo-Saxon monarchy was elective, and that the great men would get together in the Witenagemot (an assembly of the ruling class whose primary function was to advise the king) and pick the worthiest among them.

It sounds wonderfully proto-democratic but is likely a myth because it was very rare during that period for the crown to pass to anyone other than a close relative of the former monarch.

Even if you look back a couple of centuries before 1066, to the time of King Alfred, and you look at who took the crown, the line of succession runs from son to brother, to son, to grandson, to son, to son, to brother. The crown was always kept within the royal family. There wasn’t a democratic process to decide on the question of succession.

The only time that the crown wasn’t kept within the royal family was in the 11th century, when there was a Viking conquest just 50 years before the Norman conquest. King Cnut then inherited the throne, which altered the tidy succession from father to son somewhat.

Really, the first person to crash in out of left field without any kind of blood link to his predecessor was Harold himself. Instead, he was married to Edward’s the Confessor sister, so he was linked by marriage but not by blood.

In fact, the rhetoric around the early Anglo-Saxon monarchy being so ahead of its time in its elective nature may have come from the circumstances of Harold’s coronation.

People who seize the throne without any dynastic link are always keen to argue that they have the popular vote and that people are supporting them over any potential rivals.

King Stephen did the same thing in 1135 when Henry I died. He had a blood link but it wasn’t as strong as Matilda’s claim to the crown, and so he claimed that he had the support of the people.

That’s where the urgency around Harold’s coronation comes from, a desperate need to assert his fledgling status as a monarch.

1. It was sparked by the invasion of Viking king Harold Hardrada

Harald, King of Norway, was one of at least five claimants to the English throne in 1066. After Edward the Confessor died in January of that year, his right-hand man, Harold Godwinson, ascended the throne. But the Harald with an “a” believed that he had a rightful claim to the crown and in September landed in Yorkshire with an invading force.

2. Harald had teamed up with Harold’s own brother

Tostig Godwinson wanted vengeance after being exiled by King Edward and Harold in November 1065. The decision to outlaw Tostig had come about after he refused to step down from his position as Earl of Northumbria in the face of a rebellion against him. But Tostig saw the move as unjust and, after first attempting to bring Harold down himself, eventually asked Harald Hardrada to invade England.

3. Harold’s force caught Harald’s men by surprise with their armour off

The Vikings hadn’t been expecting a clash to take place at Stamford Bridge; they had been waiting there for hostages to arrive from nearby York, which they had just invaded. But when Harold got wind of the northern invasion, he raced north, gathering an army along the way and catching Harald and Tostig’s forces unawares.

5. Nearly half of the Viking army was elsewhere

The invading force was made up of around 11,000 Norwegians and Flemish mercenaries – the latter hired by Tostig. But only some 6,000 of them were at Stamford Bridge when Harold arrived with his army. The other 5,000 were about 15 miles to the south, guarding the Norse ships that had been beached at Riccall.

Some of the Vikings at Riccall did rush to Stamford Bridge to join the fight, but the battle was almost over by the time they got there and many of them were exhausted.

6. Accounts talk of a giant Viking axeman…

Harold’s approaching army was reportedly on one side of a single narrow bridge crossing the River Derwent, and the Vikings on the other. When Harold’s men tried to cross the bridge in single file, sources say they were held up by a giant axeman who cut them down, one by one.

7. … who suffered a gruesome death

Sources say this axeman soon got his comeuppance, however. A member of Harold’s army reportedly floated under the bridge in a half-barrel and rammed a large spear up into the vitals of the axeman standing above.

8. Harald was killed early in the battle in a state of berserkergang

The Norwegian was struck in the throat with an arrow while fighting in the trance-like fury for which the berserkers are famed. The Viking army went on to be heavily beaten, with Tostig also killed.

Although a number of major Scandinavian campaigns took place in the British Isles over the next few decades, Harald is commonly held to be the last of the great Viking kings and so historians often use the Battle of Stamford Bridge as a convenient end point for the Viking Age.

9. The battle was incredibly bloody

The Vikings may have ultimately been defeated but both sides suffered heavy losses. Around 6,000 of the invading army were killed while around 5,000 of Harold’s men died.

10. Harold’s victory was short-lived

As Harold was busy fighting off the Vikings in the north of England, William the Conqueror was en route to southern England with his Norman army. Harold’s victorious forces were still in the north celebrating their win at Stamford Bridge when the Normans landed at Sussex on 29 September.

Harold then had to march his men south and gather up reinforcements on the way. By the time his army met with William’s men at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October it was battle-weary and exhausted. The Normans, meanwhile, had had two weeks to prepare for the confrontation.

Hastings would ultimately prove to be Harold’s doing. By the end of the battle, the king was dead and William was on his way to taking the English crown.