by John Marsden
Some modern historians accept that such contact had been made, but by an emissary acting for Tostig rather than the man himself, even though there is no mention of such a go-between anywhere in the sources and it would have been quite uncharacteristic of the always deeply suspicious Harald to have planned such a momentous venture with an ally of whom he can have known very little, if anything at all, and had yet to meet in person. One factor possibly underlying the ‘emissary theory’ is that of the time required for Tostig to travel from Flanders to Denmark and Norway, then back to Flanders before launching his own (reliably recorded) raid on the Isle of Wight before the end of May or, at the very latest, in early June. Yet the four-month period available to him need not exclude any of those destinations when considered in the light of the saga evidence for seafaring, and especially when all the sea-travel involved would have been undertaken during the better weather of advancing spring.
All of which would have been familiar territory to a saga-maker and, not least among them, Snorri Sturluson. In fact and despite the late date of its composition, there is good reason to credit the substance of his account, even in preference to that of earlier sources. First of all, he offers none of the usual signals of his own doubt as to the accuracy of his information and, indeed, it would be utterly remarkable were he to describe an entirely fictional episode in such thoroughly convincing detail. The greater likelihood, then, might be that his saga account of the initial negotiations between Harald and Tostig had been informed by his own privileged access to Norwegian diplomatic circles when he was an honoured guest at King Hakon Hakonsson’s court in 1218.
To dismiss all this Scandinavian evidence as total fiction would mean that the invasion of 1066 was entirely of Harald’s own devising, and yet – despite widespread assertion to the contrary – there is nowhere any indisputable evidence of such intention on his part prior to the early months of 1066 in which the saga places his meeting with Tostig. Indeed, an entry in the Worcester manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1048 (being the year after the death of Magnus had enabled his succession as sole king of Norway) records Harald’s despatching assurances to King Edward of his peaceful intentions as regards England. It is true, of course, that his nephew had inherited a claim on the English kingship following the death of Hardacnut, but as Gwyn Jones points out, ‘there is little evidence that Magnus seriously considered the conquest of England’.2 Indeed, Edward had been unwilling to supply ships and men in response to a request from Svein Estridsson while he was in contention with Magnus, and it is most unlikely that Harald would have entertained any serious thought of conquest of England while Edward still lived.
The fragments of evidence picked out by all the historians taking a contrary view are associated with an attempt made by Ælfgar, father of the aforementioned Edwin and Morcar, to win back his earldom of Mercia from which he had been deposed earlier in the same year of 1058. Entries in the Worcester manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Irish Annals of Tigernach and a thirteenth-century recension of the Welsh Annales Cambriae have led to the widespread conclusion that Ælfgar and his ally Gruffydd ap Llywelyn secured the assistance (perhaps on a mercenary basis) of a Norwegian fleet at large in the Irish Sea at the time and under the command of Harald’s eldest son, Magnus. This same conclusion has led to the proposal that such an expedition would have been sent under Harald’s own authority and with the probable intention of testing the defences of the English coast, yet a closer examination of the evidence of those three sources would indicate nothing of the kind.
The ‘pirate host from Norway’ noticed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is more meticulously described by the Irish annalist as ‘a fleet [led] by the son of the king of the Lochland [Scandinavians], along with the gallaib [literally ‘foreigners’, but meaning Norsemen] of the Orkney isles, of the Hebrides and of Dublin’, which would actually indicate an assembly of the same viking elements regularly found summer-raiding along the western seaboard. These same free-booters are recorded in employment as mercenary naval forces on a number of occasions through the eleventh and twelfth centuries and so their services would have been available to Gruffydd, who was well connected in the Irish Sea zone, as also to Ælfgar, who had similarly hired a dozen viking ships to force his return the last time he had been driven from his earldom. As to the commander of such a viking coalition, the person identified by Tigernach as ‘the son of the king of the Lochland’ could well have been the son of a Norse chieftain in the Western Isles (customarily styled rig or ‘king’ in the Irish sources). If his name really was ‘Magnus, Harald’s son’ as is claimed by the Welsh annalist (but by no other source), it would be quite implausible to identify him with Harald Hardrada’s son of that name by his Norwegian ‘wife’ Thora, because that Magnus could not possibly have been born earlier than 1047 (1049 being the more likely date indicated by the saga) and the claim for a boy no older than eleven placed in command of a viking fleet such as that described by Tigernach lies entirely beyond the bounds of credibility.
Thus it can be said that there is no indisputable evidence for Harald’s planning a conquest of England prior to the spring of 1066 and everything to support Kelly DeVries’ proposal of Tostig as ‘the prime instigator’ of the expedition which was to lead him to his death at Stamford Bridge in the September of that same year.3 The question remains, however, as to how Tostig managed to persuade him – or how he persuaded himself – to undertake the English enterprise and, indeed, what it was that he hoped to gain from it.
This last question is perhaps the most easily answered, if only on the strength of the claim made in the Ágrip and by Theodoric’s history (and also, indeed, by Orderic Vitalis) that Tostig offered Harald half of England, intending to rule the other half as his vassal (the submission of fealty being attested by Adam and Saxo, as also by two of the English sources). No such offer is specified by Snorri’s account and yet it might be implied in Tostig’s claim that the majority of English chieftains would be his friends and supporters, an assurance which Harald had little reason to doubt, at least in respect of the English north country, because he would always have known of York, which stood as the capital centre of Tostig’s former earldom, as Jorvik and of its stature as a principal stronghold of the northmen west-over-sea through two centuries. Indeed, the old kingdom of Northumbria would still have been recognisable to him, if only in terms of cultural fusion, as an Anglo-Scandinavian province and the greater extent of the English territory formally recognised as the Danelaw since the second half of the tenth century. This, of course, had also been the earldom of which Tostig had been deprived scarcely six months before, so the very least achievement expected of their projected invasion was to reclaim Northumbria for its former earl who would thenceforth rule as the liege client of a Norwegian overlord. When his liegeman was also a scion of the current English royal house, the conquest of all England surely lay within reach – and it was that prospect which offered the irresistible lure to the ‘vengeful’ Harald.
Snorri tells of his thinking carefully over Tostig’s proposal, recognising the ‘truth in his words and realising at the same time his own great desire to win this kingdom’. When the mighty Cnut had won that same kingdom scarcely half a century before, England had represented his crowning achievement and yet it was one which his sons could not sustain. Assured that England was now his ‘for the taking’, Harald was presented with the opportunity to take his vengeance at last upon the man long since buried at Winchester but still bearing the ultimate responsibility for the death of Olaf in the battle he had contrived at Stiklestad. Harald’s very last act before leaving Nidaros to join the great invasion fleet awaiting him in the Solund Isles was to open the saint’s shrine and to trim his half-brother’s hair and nails. While the saga does not record whatever words he might have spoken while standing alone in that silent place, it is hard to believe they did not include some form of promise made by an avenging kinsman.
Whether or not Tostig realised that he mig
ht have awoken Harald’s thirst for vengeance, he surely intended the most flattering appeal to his warrior pride. So too, he would have been ideally placed to inform a realistic assessment of the opponent Harald could expect to meet in England, because Tostig had taken his own prominent part in his brother Harold’s principal military triumph some three years earlier. Indeed, the Norwegian Harald may already have known something of the campaign launched against Gruffydd ap Llywelyn in 1063, when Tostig had brought a force out of Northumbria down to the Dee and there linked up with the fleet Harold had brought north round the Welsh coast from Bristol to drive Gruffydd into flight over the Irish Sea. Together the Godwinsons had inflicted such widespread devastation across Gruffydd’s kingdom of Gwynedd and such grievous suffering upon its people that they rejected and put to death their own king when he attempted to return to his ruined domain later the same year.
News of this decisive destruction of a Welsh king long notorious for his raiding over the border may well have been brought to Norway by means of the regular traffic plying the sea-road linking Dublin with Scandinavia by way of the Hebrides and Orkney. No less likely is that Harald would have heard tales of the English Harold’s later warrior service to Duke William in Normandy (reliably dated to 1064), because his Norman sojourn and his swearing of fealty to William was so well known to Snorri as to be recorded in remarkable detail in his Harald’s saga. Harald assuredly knew at least something of William the Norman too, but it is unlikely that he would have been daunted by either of these men. Both were his juniors, Harold (born c. 1022) by at least six years and William (born 1028) by more than a dozen, and neither could boast a military reputation bearing any comparison to the one he had earned throughout three and a half decades of warfaring across the greater extent of the known world. For all Harald’s undoubted appreciation of his own warrior fame, he was not spared a word of hard-headed caution from his old comrade-in-arms Ulf Ospaksson, who is said by the saga to have warned him to expect no easy conquest, by reason of ‘the army called in England the king’s housecarls and formed of men so valiant that one of them was worth more than two of Harald’s best men’. Snorri emphasises the significance of this caveat with a strophe of verse which he attributes to the marshal himself (although perhaps more likely the work of Stein Herdisason, the skald closely associated with Ulf in life and the author of his memorial lay).
In fact, Ulf’s advice would well correspond to the opinion of at least one modern historian who believes it ‘likely that there was no force in Europe equal to the Anglo-Saxon huscarls . . . so well-trained that they were able [if only on the evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry] to use both the two-handled battle axe and the sword with equal dexterity’.4 Ironically and as the name ‘housecarls’ suggests, this body of professional fighting-men had been introduced into the English military by Cnut when he became king of England in 1016, but fifty years later the ranks of the ‘royal housecarls’, and their counterparts in the service of the earls, were more often filled by warriors of native stock eager for the status associated with a warrior elite and, of course, the pay that went with it. Unlike the Scandinavian housecarl who was usually rewarded with land grants, his English equivalent had always been paid in cash, initially funded by a general tax specially levied for the purpose by Cnut, but later from the treasuries of the king and his earls after the tax had been abolished by Edward the Confessor.
While there was little difference between the essential weaponry of the English and Scandinavian housecarl – sword and shield, axe and spear making the complement in each case – there would have been finer points of variation reflecting different foreign influences. Just as the arms and armour of some Norwegian warriors might be expected to reflect the Russo-Slavic, or even Byzantine, characteristics brought home by the east-farers, and Germanic styles were more likely to be found among their counterparts in Denmark and Sweden, so the Anglo-Saxon (or, perhaps more accurately, ‘Anglo-Danish’) housecarl of the mid-eleventh century would reflect the Norman influence which had long since found its way into the English court and its military. His mail-coat extending to the knee (thus longer than the Scandinavian custom) and his helmet of a one-piece forging fitted with a nasal guard are two such examples, while his long kite-shaped shield, similar in design to those associated with the Norman knight, would be another. There was, however, something particularly significant about this fighting-man because – like the Varangian in Byzantium and the galloglach in medieval Ireland – he was similarly representative of the elite mercenary axe-bearing warrior type found right across the Scandinavian expansion in the early Middle Ages.
While Ulf’s pessimistic comparison of English and Norwegian housecarls might be thought less than fair, it does serve to illustrate the international reputation of the foemen whom Harald was to face in England. So too, it reflects the wise caution characteristic of this old soldier who was sadly and deeply mourned by his king when he died in that same spring. ‘There lies the man who was most faithful and loyal of all to me’ are the words said to have been spoken by Harald as he walked from Ulf’s graveside – and I can think of no other occasion where the saga record touches so convincingly on the core of human warmth beneath the mail-coat of the warrior king.
‘In the spring’ – according to the saga and apparently shortly after Ulf Ospaksson’s passing – Tostig left Norway and sailed westward to Flanders, there to rejoin the men who had come with him into exile and the other troops who had since gathered to his cause out of England and from Flanders too. Having already agreed with Harald to mount their joint invasion later that summer, Tostig appears to have made the first move on his own account, crossing from the Flemish coast – ‘with as many housecarls as he could muster’, according to two manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – to attack the Isle of Wight where he plundered provisions for his troops and funds for his war-chest. The early sources offer no indication as to why Tostig should have chosen to strike at the south coast of England, but it has been persuasively suggested that he specifically chose the Isle of Wight as his first target in emulation of his father, Earl Godwin, who had himself been briefly exiled to Flanders during Edward’s reign and made his own successful return with a landing on the same island. It is no less likely, however, that the more general direction of his attack might have been chosen by Harald in Norway with the strategic intention of concentrating the greater strength of English forces in the south.
Just such was indeed the result of Tostig’s sudden appearance on the Isle of Wight, because the English Harold was in London when he learned of the landing and – perhaps imagining that this was the first phase of the anticipated Norman invasion – urgently commanded a full-scale mobilisation said by the Chronicle to have ‘assembled greater naval and land hosts than any king in this country had ever mustered before’. By this time, Tostig’s fleet already had moved on to harry the Sussex coast and reached Sandwich, where he had occupied the town and was seizing ships and recruiting men (willingly or otherwise) to reinforce his Flemish forces, when news of the advancing royal army prompted him to put back to sea. Sailing up the east coast, he paused to raid Norfolk before entering the Humber estuary with a fleet numbered at ‘sixty ships’ by the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers. It would seem that this strength now included seventeen ships said by the twelfth-century verse chronicle of Geoffroi Gaimar to have been brought from Orkney by Copsi (or Copsig), one of the supporters who had earlier accompanied Tostig into exile, which had joined up with his fleet as it rounded the coast of Thanet.
It was with these quite impressive forces that Tostig came ashore on the south bank of the Humber to plunder and burn around Lindsey (modern Lincolnshire) until confronted by the Mercian and Northumbrian levies mustered against them by the brother earls Edwin and Morcar. Although the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles supply no detail of the engagement or its precise whereabouts, they leave no doubt as to Tostig having been convincingly defeated. Gaimar would appear to credit this victory to Edwin and his Mercians, while Morcar’s
Northumbrian forces remained on the north bank of the Humber to prevent the invaders crossing over into (what is now) east Yorkshire. Thus Tostig was driven back out to sea, where his forces were further reduced by the flight home of the Flemish contingent laden with their plunder. So it was with only a dozen ships that he made his way up the Northumbrian coast and into the Firth of Forth where he found refuge at the Scottish court in Dunfermline and there awaited the arrival of the very much greater fleet being assembled by Harald in Norway.
By way of a footnote to Tostig’s unpromising overture to the greater enterprise, it is perhaps worth mentioning the reference made by the English chroniclers to ‘a portent in the heavens such as men had never seen before’, which remained visible every night for a week after its first appearance on 24 April. This phenomenon, called by some ‘the long-haired star’ and illustrated on the Bayeux Tapestry, was Halley’s Comet and its practical importance here bears on the dating of Tostig’s incursion which is placed by the Chronicle ‘soon after’ the passage of the comet and thus dated to May (or, perhaps just possibly, early June) of 1066. The greater significance of this comet for the chroniclers, of course, appears to have been as an omen and one impressively borne out by the subsequent course of events.
