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But then, on 25 September, with an unseasonably warm sun standing high in the sky, Harald and Tostig caught sight of a sudden smudge on the western skyline – and realised that it was approaching them fast. Perhaps, they thought at first, a band of Northumbrians was riding in to submit; but soon, as the earth began to shudder, and the glittering of shields and mail coats emerged through the dust, “sparkling like a field of broken ice,”44 the appalling truth dawned. Somehow, impossible though it seemed, Harald Godwinsson had arrived at Stamford Bridge. Frantically, Harald ordered his men to withdraw to the far side of the river. Simultaneously, he sent messengers galloping with furious speed to where his ships lay moored twelve miles to the south, along with their store of mail shirts, and a whole third of his men. But it was too late. For a brief while, it was true, the enemy were held up at the bridge – by a single warrior, according to one account, who kept all at bay with the swinging of his axe, until an Englishman, with underhand cunning, “came up in a boat and through the openings of the planks struck him in the private parts with a spear.”45 The delay, however precisely it had been achieved, was sufficient for Harald to draw up his men on the flats of the far bank – but not for his reinforcements to join him. Even though the Norwegians fought savagely, they could have no real hope of victory without their armour. Sure enough, the river was soon flowing incarnadine. In the end, the survivors broke and fled for their ships. All the afternoon, the English hunted them down. As the light began to fade and crows wheeled upon the carrion-perfumed breezes of evening, there lay spread out beneath them a scene of quite exceptional slaughter. The English victory had been a work of almost utter annihilation. Of the three hundred and more ships that had arrived in England with Harald Hardrada, it was said, only twenty ever made it back to Norway.And Harald himself, along with Tostig, lay among the mangled dead. So too, trampled down and stained with filth and gore, did his famous banner. At the end, Land-Waster’s magic had failed – and, as it turned out, failed for good.
ConquestThe carnage at Stamford Bridge would long be remembered by the Northmen. As well it might have been – for never again would they cross the seas with the ambition of conquering a Christian land. The consigning of their most celebrated sea king to a foreign grave was a brutal measure of just how fast their horizons were closing in. Shortly before Harald Hardrada made his last stand, it was said, a party of horsemen had ridden out from the English lines and crossed to where the Norwegians stood facing them, lined up in a shield wall. One of the embassy, calling to Tostig, passed on a greeting from his brother, King Harald, and an offer: “one-third of all the kingdom.” Tostig, shouting back, demanded to know what his ally, King Harald Hardrada, might expect. “And the rider said, ‘King Harold has already declared how much of England he is prepared to grant the Norwegian: seven feet of earth, or as much as he needs to be buried, bearing in mind that he is taller than other men.’”46These were the last words ever spoken between the two brothers – for the rider had been none other than Harald Godwinsson himself. Wit and a defiant cool were the authentic qualities of a man who all his life had been passing “with watchful mockery through ambush after ambush.”47 In Harald’s scorning of the invader, however, and the granting to him only of sufficient earth to cover his bones, there had been something more than mere braggart play. The presumption that a land might indeed be sacred to those who trod it was neither an idle nor a novel one. So it was, for instance, that Earl Britnoth, opposing an earlier generation of Vikings at Maldon, had pledged himself ringingly to the defence of “folc and foldan”: “people and soil.”48 That the two were synonymous was a presumption widely shared across much of Christendom. Even in regions where borders and loyalties were infinitely more confused, and confusing, than in England, men had long been in the habit of identifying themselves with a “natio” – a nation. “People joined together by a single descent, custom, language and law,”49 one abbot, writing in the Rhineland a whole century before the Millennium, had defined the word.True, there were certain “nations,” the Normans pre-eminent among them, whose beginnings were so recent that their mongrel character could never hope to be smoothed over – but this was a problem only for parvenus. Generally, among the more venerable peoples of Christendom, it was taken for granted that all those who shared a common homeland necessarily shared a common ancestry too; indeed, that they had been united by blood even back in the most primordial of times, when they too, like the pagans who were rumoured still to haunt the steppelands beyond the frontiers of the Rus, had been wanderers, without any roots at all. A convenient notion: for since no one could actually be certain what had happened in such an obscure and distant age, the field had been left free for the learned to rustle up any number of glamorous ancestors for themselves. Frankish genealogists, for instance, had traced the pedigree of their people back to the ancient Trojans; the Saxons, not to be outdone, had claimed to be the offspring of the soldiers of Alexander the Great. Most ingenious of all, perhaps, were the Scots, who bragged, with a formidable disregard for plausibility, that they were originally from Egypt, descendants of the same Pharaoh’s daughter who had discovered Moses in the bulrushes – and whose name, so they cheerfully insisted, in a manner designed to clinch their argument, had been Princess Scota.Far-fetched such stories might have been – and yet they were no less potent for that. Indeed, the myths that peoples told about themselves, and the sense that they had of themselves as distinctive nations, tended to be much more deeply rooted than the monarchies that ruled them. Not that this, for an upstart dynasty, was necessarily a disadvantage. Back in 936, for instance, when Otto I succeeded to his father’s throne, he had been able to do so not merely by right of inheritance, but “as the choice of all the Franks and Saxons.”