36 And so it had proved.Nor, having won his throne, did he intend ever to be forced into exile again. Harald’s record as king over the two decades of his reign would be a ruthless one. “Hardrada,” his subjects came to call him: “Hard-Ruler.” Funded by his plentiful stock of treasure, he threw himself with his customary swagger into all the traditional activities of a Viking king: slapping down his rivals among the local chiefs, waging pointless wars against his neighbours, incinerating their towns, and menacing their coastlines with showy dragon-ships. Even as the cult of St. Olaf went from strength to strength, and Trondheim began to swell with pilgrims drawn from across the Christian world, Harald remained wedded to the old ways, in which Christendom existed primarily as a resource to be plundered. Inevitably, then, as his reservoirs of Miklagard gold finally began to run out in the mid-1060s, he did as generations of Viking warlords had done before him: look around for a foreign milch-cow. Specifically, he looked to England.As well he might have done – for the English by now were as rich as they had ever been. Although Edward had proved to be a doggedly unsensational king, pallid even, his reign had nevertheless served to provide his subjects with something truly precious: a respite from upheaval. Prosperity had returned to the kingdom: its trade had swelled, its wealth had grown, its towns had boomed. To be sure, there had been the odd alarm. In 1045, for instance, nervous of Magnus’s intentions, Edward had assembled a massive fleet to patrol the coastline of Kent. Then, early in the 1050s, a rupture between the king and the Earl Godwin had appeared to threaten civil war. But men on both sides, rather than storming headlong over the abyss, had opted instead to pause and draw back. “For they reflected that it would be a great piece of folly if they joined battle, for in the two hosts there was most of what was noblest in the kingdom, and they considered that they would be opening a way for their enemies to enter the country and to cause much ruin.”37 Relations between Edward and Godwin, however uneasily, had been patched up. Even though the earl himself had died soon afterwards, concord between his heirs and the king had been preserved. Edward, devoting himself to the pleasures of the hunt and to the occasional miraculous cure of the sick, had increasingly been content to leave the running of the kingdom to Godwin’s sons. And to two of them, in particular. One, Tostig, had been appointed to the rule of Northumbria; his elder, Harald, had inherited the earldom of Wessex. “Two great brothers of a cloud-born land, the kingdom’s sacred oaks,” they were hailed by one enthusiast. “With joined strength and like agreement they guard the bounds of England.”38All in all, then, for Harald Hardrada, it might have been thought, this was a most unpromising state of affairs. But was it? Firmly rooted though both the Godwinssons might appear, the truth was that one of them, after a decade in power, was coming to be battered by increasingly stormy crosswinds. Northumbria, Tostig’s earldom, remained what it had always been: a realm much given to violence. In the savagery of the landscape, and in its remoteness from the kingdom’s West Saxon heartlands, there was held up a fitting mirror to the inveterate factionalism of the locals. Even the women, on occasion, would think nothing of sticking the heads of captured Scotsmen on poles. Hardly the place, in short, to look with much favour on a southern earl. Tostig, a man renowned for his courage and cunning, but also possessed of an often fiery temper, had tended to respond to hints of restiveness with all the forcefulness he could muster. As a result, he had ended up widely hated. By 1065, the Northumbrian lords had had enough. Raising an army, they marched first on York and then on Wessex itself. Edward, despite initial attempts to stand firm, had found himself powerless to resist their demands: that Tostig be deposed from his earldom and replaced with the Northumbrians’ own nomination, a young lord by the name of Morcar. Even Harald, recognising that his brother’s cause was doomed, had shrunk from making the kingdom bleed in Tostig’s defence. A statesmanlike call, no doubt – but one that had left Tostig himself with a burning, indeed almost frenzied, sense of grievance. That November, as the humiliated earl left England for exile in Flanders, he did so breathing vengeance on his brother.And casting about for any foreign warlord who might be persuaded to assist him. The time for such treason was ripe. Edward, as Tostig well knew, had recently suffered a number of strokes, and by Christmas he was rumoured to be mortally ill. The moment of its king’s death was always a fateful one for any kingdom – but for England, that New Year, it promised to be especially so. For Edward had no son, nor even a daughter, to succeed him. Later ages would attribute this withering of his line to a godly vow of chastity, or else to his hatred of the Godwins – but neither explanation appears a likely one. Edward, in his own way, it seems, had grown close to Edith, and dependent upon her for advice – whether in matters of dress, or interior decoration, or the very gravest affairs of state. Perhaps, then, as many of the English were coming to fear, the otherwise inexplicable barrenness of their king’s marriage was a punishment imposed upon them for their sins. Edward, with shallow subtlety, had always exploited his childlessness for his own ends, promising the throne to rival candidates as and whenever he had required their assistance. Now, however, it seemed, with no obvious heir to the throne, there would have to be a reckoning. No wonder, then, as the New Year came and went, and reports from the royal sickbed steadily worsened, that the English looked forward to 1066 with a sense of mounting anxiety.And all the while, beyond the northern seas, the King of Norway was biding his time. Soon enough fateful tidings were being brought to him from London. Edward was dead; and sitting upon his throne, consecrated and crowned with indecent speed, or so it was reported, was no man of royal blood, but Harald Godwinsson. Affront and opportunity: Harald Hardrada took the news as both. Dusting down the claim to England that he had inherited long back from his nephew, he duly began to plan for war. The precise object of his task force, however, he still kept close to his chest; for he intended that his hammer blow, when it fell, should come out of the blue. How gratifying it was, then, that emissaries from Tostig should have arrived at his court in the very midst of his preparations, proposing what he had already settled upon.39 How gratifying as well that even in the skies all things seemed to be moving in his favour: for in the spring there appeared above the lands of the North a mysterious star with a blazing tail. Well might men in England have been filled with dread at the sight, and reported seeing phantom ships out at sea:40 for there existed no more infallible portent of a looming crisis than a comet. By the late summer, when Harald’s forces were ready at last to embark, the omens had grown even more pointed. One warrior, a member of the king’s own bodyguard, dreamed that he saw an ogress holding a knife and a trough of blood; another that he saw a hag riding on a wolf, and that the wolf had a corpse in its mouth.Admittedly, there were some among Harald’s followers who read these sanguinary visions as a foreboding, not of their lord’s victory, but rather of his doom: for the old carnivore was fifty, and long in the tooth. Not for Harald himself, however, any pessimistic notions that he might be venturing on an adventure too far – still less that the very era of the sea kings might be slipping him by. Naturally, as befitted the brother of a martyr, he had made sure to pray at Olaf’s shrine before departing, and to obtain some keepsakes by giving the saintly hair and nails a trim; but his most potent treasure, as he set sail for England, was one that any of his pagan ancestors would have hailed. “Land-Waster,” it was called: “a banner that was said to bring victory to whomever it preceded into battle.”41 Canute had owned one very similar, “woven of the plainest and white silk,” but on which a raven, in time of war, would mysteriously materialise, “opening its beak, flapping its wings, and restive on its feet.”42 Deep magic and even deeper time: such banners spoke profoundly to the Northmen of both. Liegemen of Christ they might have become, but in the fluttering of Land-Waster there beat for them the reassurance that they were heroes still, just as their pagan ancestors had been.By early September, Harald and his monstrous fleet of some 300 ships were doing what so many Viking expeditions had done before them, and slipping down the coast of Scotland bound for Northumbria. Only Tostig, who met up with Harald on his way, had been given due warning of his plans: everyone else in England was taken utterly by surprise. Landing just south of York, the invaders discovered to their delight that Harald Godwinsson was far away in Wessex, and that only Earl Morcar and his brother, Edwin, were on hand to confront them. On 20 September, “the thunderbolt of the North”43 struck at the Northumbrian forces and shattered them. Morcar and Edwin both survived their defeat; but they were now powerless to prevent Harald from forcing York into surrender, and taking hostages from among the leading citizens. Next, withdrawing some seven miles east of the city, to a convenient road junction by the name of Stamford Bridge, the Norwegian king paused, to await the submission of all Northumbria. With Morcar’s levies safely put out of action, and Harald Godwinsson presumed still far away to the south, it seemed there was nothing to worry about. Everything was going to plan. Land-Waster, which in the battle against the northern earls had carried all thunderously before it, was once again proving its invincibility.