The Battle of Stamford Bridge, 25 September 1066

Having been favourably received in York and won the support of its citizens, the Norwegians withdrew to their ships at Riccall. Before they set out to conquer the south, however, it had been agreed that there would be another meeting, at which hostages from the rest of Yorkshire would be handed over. For reasons that remain obscure, the location selected for this meeting was neither Riccall nor York, but a small settlement eight miles to the east of the city, a crossing of the River Derwent known as Stamford Bridge. Hardrada and Tostig were waiting there on 25 September in expectation of a final round of submissions before they advanced to subdue the rest of the kingdom.

What they encountered in the event was Harold Godwineson at the head of a new royal army. The English king had advanced northwards and reassembled his host far more quickly than his opponents had anticipated. After leaving London around the middle of the month, he had arrived in the Yorkshire town of Tadcaster on 24 September, having covered the intervening 200 miles in little more than a week. According to the Chronicle, he had expected to find Tostig and Hardrada holding York against him and had drawn up his forces against an attack from that direction. But the following morning he discovered that his brother and the Norwegian king had left for their appointment at Stamford Bridge, evidently quite oblivious to his approach. It was an opportunity not to be missed. Harold marched his men straight through York and out towards the crossing on the Derwent, a distance of some eighteen miles. The day must already have been well advanced by the time the English king fell upon his unsuspecting enemies.

The accounts of the Battle of Stamford Bridge are not much better than those for the encounter at Fulford five days before. Snorri is once again on fine (i.e. unreliable) form, giving an account of the preliminaries entirely at odds with that of the Chronicle, including an improbable interview between the two King Harolds before the onset of hostilities (notably for its oft-quoted line that Hardrada would be granted only ‘seven feet of ground’). One element of Snorri’s account which does merit attention, however, is his claim that the Norwegians had gone to Stamford Bridge wearing their helmets and carrying their weapons, but without their mail shirts because the weather was warm and sunny. Special pleading, you might think, but the story is corroborated by a contemporary chronicler called Marianus Scotus. The C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contributes a few more details, confirming that the English king caught his enemies ‘unawares’, describing the fighting as ‘fierce’ and adding that it lasted until late in the day. It concludes with a story, added in the twelfth century and repeated by several other writers, of how the English were for some time prevented from crossing the bridge over the Derwent by a single Norwegian warrior, apparently wearing a mail shirt, until at length an inspired Englishman sneaked under the bridge and speared the Viking in the one place where such armour offers no protection. This was supposedly the turning point of the battle: Harold and his forces surged over the undefended bridge and the rest of the Norwegian army were slaughtered. Both Hardrada and Tostig were among the fallen.

It was, said the D Chronicle, ‘a very stubborn battle’. When the remaining Norwegians tried to flee back to their ships at Riccall, the English attacked them as they ran. Some drowned, says the Chronicle, some burnt to death, and others died in various different ways, so that in the end there were very few survivors. The author of the Life of King Edward, weeping for the death of Tostig, wrote of rivers of blood: the ‘Ouse with corpses choked’, and the Humber that had ‘dyed the ocean waves for miles around with Viking gore’. Only those who made it back to Riccall – the D Chronicle names Hardrada’s son, Olaf, among them – were given any quarter, their lives spared in exchange for a sworn promise never to return. Above all, the scale of the Norwegian defeat is indicated by the Chronicle’s comment that it took just twenty-four ships to take the survivors home.

After the battle, the bodies of thousands of Englishmen and Norwegians were left in the field where they had fallen; more than half a century later, Orderic Vitalis wrote that travellers could still recognize the site on account of the great mountain of dead men’s bones. But the body of Tostig Godwineson was recovered from the general carnage and carried to York for an honourable burial; William of Malmesbury, who had a fondness for such human details, reports that it was recognized on account of a wart between the shoulder blades (the implication being that all the earl’s other distinguishing features had been too badly maimed). His older brother, it is as good as certain, also returned to York in the aftermath of his victory. Apart from anything else, he would have wanted to have a serious conversation with its citizens about the alacrity they had shown in supporting his Norwegian namesake. Quite possibly, therefore, Harold Godwineson was present at Tostig’s funeral, whipped by the wind that continued to blow from the north.

Two days after the battle, however, the wind changed direction.

The Norman Conquest, pp. 163-5

11 September 1297 - The Battle of Stirling Bridge

Few men living in the summer of 1297 were genuinely enthusiastic about the prospect of fighting in Flanders alongside Edward I, but John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, was a clear exception. All his life – and this year he would be sixty-six – the earl had been a staunch supporter of the Crown and the king’s close friend.

On this occasion, however, Warenne’s anxiety to serve had less to do with his loyalism, and more to do with avoiding the responsibility that had been foisted upon him the previous year. In 1296, true to form, he had marched with Edward against the Scots, and had led the English in their decisive victory at Dunbar. But the earl’s reward for this feat had been his appointment as Scotland’s new royal governor, and it was a role he clearly did not relish: within a few months he was actively offering the job to others. The king may have been well pleased to have ‘rid himself of a turd’, but his old friend was correspondingly dismayed to find himself charged with its custody. Warenne, in fact, behaved entirely as one might expect in such circumstances, and stayed as far away as possible, saying that the task was bad for his health. According to Walter of Guisborough, the earl found the Scottish weather so unbearably awful that he spent most of his time in the North of England.

Inevitably, the absence of the governor had a deleterious effect on Scotland’s new English government, which by 1297 was already struggling to cope with a host of additional problems. Imposed on the country against the will of its people, the regime was in any circumstances likely to have proved unpopular and been perceived as oppressive. As it was, thanks to the stream of emergency demands emanating from England, the administration was from the first a genuinely extortionate affair. The Scots, like the other peoples of Edward I’s empire, were expected to supply the money and materials that would enable their overlord to prosecute his war against France. When, in May 1297, they were asked to supply the manpower as well, it proved to be the last straw: at that point unrest and resistance in Scotland boiled over into outright revolt. Trouble started in the West, at Lanark, where the English sheriff was killed.

Behind this revolt, it seemed, lurked the usual suspects. One of the prime movers, for example, was Robert Wishart, the bulldog bishop of Glasgow, who six years earlier had stood up to Edward I at Norham. Also involved were several high-ranking members of the Scottish nobility, not all of whom had been captured or imprisoned during the English invasion the previous year. A surprising newcomer to their rebel ranks was the young earl of Carrick, Robert Bruce. Grandson of the late competitor for the throne, son of the disappointed collaborator of 1296, this third Robert might have been expected to toe the family line and aid the English. But instead he broke with ancestral tradition and threw his weight behind the patriotic cause. ‘I must join my own people’,he reportedly told his father’s knightly tenants, ‘and the nation in which I was born’.

Alas for the Scots, however, their aristocratic and ecclesiastical leaders once again proved stronger in their patriotism than they did in arms. Towards the end of June an English army crossed the Border from Cumbria, and within days the rebels were forced to surrender. On 7 July Wishart, Bruce and their allies submitted to terms at Irvine on Scotland’s western seaboard. To the young English commanders who had obtained this easy victory, it seemed that was the end of the matter. They rode east to the government’s base at Berwick, from where a letter was dispatched to the king a fortnight later. ‘Sire,’ it read, ‘your enemies are dispersed and dismayed’.

The author of this now-anonymous announcement was evidently not the new regime’s treasurer, Hugh Cressingham. Unlike the military men fresh in from the field, or his boss, John de Warenne, who continued to linger in England, Cressingham worked in Berwick at the centre of the web. He could perceive the whole picture and, as he explained in his own letters to Edward, it was deeply alarming. ‘By far the greater part of your counties in Scotland still have no keepers,’ he said, ‘because of death, sieges or imprisonment’. There were other rebels massing in the North, beyond the River Forth, and also in the South, in the Forest of Selkirk. Cressingham himself had wanted to march against them immediately – indeed, he had personally raised an army for this purpose – but had been outvoted. The consensus at Berwick was that they should wait for Warenne to arrive. ‘And so,’ the treasurer lamented as he drew to a close,‘matters have gone to sleep’.

While the English slumbered, the Scots were indeed being roused. Those in the North were led by Andrew Murray, the son and heir of a prominent local lord. Captured the previous year at Dunbar, he had escaped during the winter and raised rebellion in the spring. By August a number of northern towns and castles were already in his hands.

Meanwhile, in the South, leadership had been assumed by a certain William Wallace. Unlike Murray, Wallace was a virtual nobody – nothing at all is heard of him before this juncture, bar a possible reference in a court roll of 1296 which mentions‘William le Waleys, a thief’. When, the following year, he bursts unheralded into the picture, he is described by English chroniclers as ‘a bloody man’, ‘a chief of brigands’, ‘a vagrant and a fugitive’. Most likely he was a younger son of Alan Wallace, a minor landowner in Ayrshire; such origins would account for the fact that his earliest activities were concentrated in western Scotland. The death of the sheriff of Lanark in May 1297 had been his handiwork, and thereafter he appears to have based himself in Selkirk Forest with his growing band of followers. ‘The common folk of the land followed him as their leader and ruler,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough, ‘the retainers of great lords adhered to him’. By August 1297, Wallace had his popular army had moved into northern Scotland, where they linked arms with Murray’s forces.

By this point, finally, John de Warenne had arrived in Berwick, and been convinced by a no doubt frantic Cressingham of the urgent need for military action. There was yet more delay while they waited for those Scots who had surrendered at Irvine to complete their submissions (a process which was deliberately drawn out by the likes of Wishart and Bruce). But at last, probably as the end of August approached, the English army and its reluctant captain set out to crush the Scottish rebels.

To do so they had to enter northern Scotland, and that meant crossing the River Forth –a feat easier said than done. The Forth rises in the west, near Loch Lomond, and flows east to meet the sea, and thus effectively cuts the country in half. Moreover, for much of its eastern length it forms a broad tidal estuary, or firth, which could not be crossed except by boat. In fact, in the thirteenth century, the Forth was referred to as ‘the Scottish Sea’, and on contemporary maps, northern Scotland was designated as Scotia ultra Marina – Scotland beyond the Sea.

Warenne therefore marched his army towards the first place that the Forth could be bridged, which at that time was the royal burgh at Stirling. As the principal gateway between northern and southern Scotland, Stirling had a unique strategic importance (indeed, on one thirteenth-century map, the town’s bridge is shown as the only link between the two halves of the country). It was also a brilliantly defended gateway: half a mile from the bridge, on the river’s southern shore, stood Stirling Castle. Nothing survives of the original medieval fortress, but it was almost certainly built of stone, and (like its latter-day replacement) rendered all but impregnable from its situation atop a great outcrop of volcanic rock.

When the earl arrived at Stirling in early September, he discovered that Wallace and Murray were waiting for him on the opposite side of the Forth. By all accounts the Scots were greatly outnumbered, and thus the English commanders naturally assumed that, as at Irvine, their enemies would wish to negotiate. On this occasion, however, the negotiators were turned away with a celebrated rebuke.‘Go back and tell your people that we have not come for the benefit of peace,’said Wallace, ‘but are ready to fight, to avenge ourselves, and to free our kingdom’.

According to Walter of Guisborough, who preserved these attributed words, this was invitation enough for the more hot-headed in the English camp. But wiser heads, the chronicler added, had surveyed the surrounding terrain and foreseen the danger. The bridge, their only way forward, was also their major obstacle, for it was only wide enough for men to cross in two-by-two formation. In addition, there was not much room to manoeuvre once they reached the other side. At Stirling the Forth meanders in large, lazy loops, and consequently the northern end of the bridge connects not to an open plain but to a narrow tongue of land. ‘There was no better place in the kingdom of Scotland’, Guisborough was later told,‘to put the English into the hands of the Scots – the many into the hands of the few’.

Nevertheless, in the final council of war, the voices of caution were overruled. Cressingham, conscious of the enormous daily cost of fielding the army, argued for an immediate advance. Warenne, once woken from a long lie-in, agreed, and the order was duly given. It was late in the morning of 11 September 1297, and events that day unfolded with all the inevitability that had been predicted. The English began to cross the bridge and array themselves on the northern shore, but were attacked while their host was only half-formed. The Scots rushed towards the river, seized the bridgehead, and so divided their enemies. Those English who had already crossed – Cressingham was among their number –were surrounded and killed. Those stranded on the southern shore – who included Warenne – could only watch the slaughter as it happened. Eventually the earl came to his senses, ordered the bridge to be destroyed, and rode hard in the direction of England. From Stirling to Berwick it is nearly a hundred miles. The old man, says Guisborough, did not rest until he reached the Border.

A Great and Terrible King, 301-5.

The Death of William the Conqueror, 9 September 1087

Although we cannot say for certain how tall he was or what he looked like, it is hard to think of William the Conqueror as anything other than a formidable figure. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes him as ‘a man of great wisdom and power, surpassing in honour and strength all those who had gone before him, and stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will’. Another contemporary source suggests that his voice was harsh, and William of Malmesbury tells us that he used it to good effect, employing colourful oaths ‘so that the mere roar of his open mouth might somehow strike terror into the minds of his audience’.

After his return to Normandy in 1086, however, it appears that such theatrics were not having the desired effect. William was by this stage in his late fifties, which made him old by contemporary standards. He was also, according to Orderic Vitalis, extremely fat – a condition not uncommon among medieval aristocrats later in life, as the exercise of hunting failed to counteract the quantities of venison consumed. Moreover, William’s military reputation on the Continent had been nothing to brag about in recent years, following his defeats at Dol and Gerberoy. The king may have rushed home to defend his duchy from attack, but in the event his physical presence proved to be no deterrent.

Trouble began in the Vexin, a region on Normandy’s eastern border which had served as a buffer with France until Philip I had fortuitously acquired it ten years earlier. At some point in 1087, presumably on the French king’s instructions, his garrison in the town of Mantes went on the offensive and made repeated raids into Normandy. According to Orderic, whose account looks to be very well informed, they overran the diocese of Evreux, harrying the countryside, driving off cattle and seizing prisoners. They grew bold in their arrogance, he says, and taunted the Normans.

And, if we believe William of Malmesbury, the cruellest taunt of all came from the lips of King Philip. ‘The king of England lies in Rouen,’ he allegedly joked, ‘keeping his bed like a woman who’s just had a baby.’ William, the chronicler explains, had been confined to his capital for some time, on account of his stomach, for which he had taken a drug. Generally historians have understood this remark to refer simply to the Conqueror’s obesity, but the mention of confinement, bed rest and medicine make it sound as if the king was physically ailing. It may have been knowledge of this, above all, that had caused his enemies to start snapping at his heels.

But Philip’s insult, says Malmesbury, eventually reached William’s own ears, and stirred him into action. ‘When I go to Mass after my lying in,’ he swore, ‘I will offer a hundred thousand candles on his behalf.’ This was a grim joke on the part of either the king or the chronicler, for towards the end of July 1087 William assembled an army and invaded the Vexin, setting fire to the fields, vineyards and orchards as he went. His principal target was Mantes, the town from which the recent French raids had been launched, and this too was put to the torch. The castle was burnt down, as were countless houses and churches. A great many people perished in the consuming flames, says Orderic, and notoriously (for several other chroniclers mention it) at least one of them was a religious recluse.

Inevitably, therefore, some monastic writers saw what subsequently happened to the Conqueror as divine retribution. ‘A cruel deed he had done’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘but a crueller fate befell him. How crueller? He fell sick and suffered terribly.’ According to William of Malmesbury, some people said that the king was injured when his horse jumped a ditch, driving the front of its saddle into his overhanging stomach, but Malmesbury himself follows Orderic in stating that William succumbed to heat exhaustion caused by the flames and the warm summer weather. Quite possibly, since he appears to have been suffering since before the campaign’s outset, William was simply beset by the return of his earlier illness. Whatever the cause, suddenly in great pain, he sounded the retreat and retired to Rouen.

Back in the capital, it soon became clear that the Conqueror was dying, and all his doctors could do was try to minimize his discomfort. Orderic provides a long but gripping account of the king’s final days, which he claims to have carefully investigated and truthfully described. Rouen, he says, was a crowded and noisy city, and so at his own command William was carried beyond its walls to the church of St Gervase which stood on a hill to the west. There he lingered for the rest of the summer, suffering terrible agonies but retaining the power of speech. ‘I was brought up in arms from childhood’, he groaned, ‘and am deeply stained with all the blood I have shed.’ These are, of course, Orderic’s words rather than William’s, but both statements are incontestably true. The king accordingly spent many hours confessing his sins to the bishops, abbots and monks who stood by his bedside, endeavouring to wash clean his soul. For the same reason he also commanded that his treasure be distributed among the poor and divided up among various churches, specifying precise sums for each, and paying particular attention to rebuilding the ones he had recently burnt down in Mantes. Finally he attempted to please God by ordering the release of all the prisoners in his custody – a list which included Earl Morcar and Earl Roger, Siward Barn, and even King Harold’s brother, Wulfnoth, handed over as a hostage as long ago as 1051 and held captive ever since. The only exception to this general amnesty was Odo of Bayeux, whom William insisted was still too great a threat to be at liberty. But after incessant pleading by his other half-brother, Robert of Mortain, as well as various other Norman magnates, the king eventually relented, and Odo was also set free.

During these last days the king also made known his wishes about the succession. Among the throng of magnates and priests by his bedside were his two younger sons, William Rufus and Henry. Robert Curthose chose to stay away, remaining at the court of the king of France. Yet despite this final slight and his own forebodings about the future, the Conqueror in the end felt compelled to recognize his eldest son as his heir. As the king allegedly explained to those present, Robert had been invested with Normandy in 1066 and had received the homage of its barons; such bonds could not be undone.

But this was true only of Normandy – England was not part of the inheritance, but an acquisition obtained by conquest. And because it had been won with so much blood, William declared that he dared not transmit it to anyone. ‘I name no man as my heir to the kingdom of England,’ he concluded, ‘but entrust it to God alone.’ Again, these are Orderic’s words, but their content draws strong support from the fact that the king is known to have bequeathed the royal regalia he used in Normandy – his crown, rod, sceptre, chalice and candlesticks– not to any of his sons, but to his abbey of St Stephen’s in Caen. He did, however, express a personal hope that William Rufus would succeed him as king of England, if that turned out to be God’s will.

At last, on Thursday 9 September, the end came. Having slept peacefully through the previous night, William woke as the sun was rising over Rouen to the sound of a great bell tolling in the distance. On asking what time it was, he was informed that the hour of prime (6 a.m.) was being rung in the cathedral of St Mary. The king then raised his eyes and hands towards heaven, commended himself to Mary, and died.