Harald Hardrada (30 page)

Following his departure from the Danish court, Tostig is said by the saga to have travelled on to Norway by way of the modest sea-crossing through the Kattegat and into the Vik, whereabouts Harald Hardrada was still in residence at his winter court. While there is no evidence for any earlier contact between the two, Harald's reputation must have been no less famed in Anglo-Danish Northumbria than elsewhere in the Scandinavian world and so Tostig would have been well acquainted with the warfaring prowess of Norway's king, if only from what he had learned in York. Indeed, just such is the indication of Snorri's form of words when he has Tostig tell Harald that ‘all men know that no greater warrior than you has come out of the northlands'. As before at the Danish court, the saga's detailed, but still more expansive, account of the exchanges between these two can only be of Snorri's own reconstruction and yet, for all that, it is no less convincing both in character and in substance.

Tostig (whom Snorri erroneously describes as the eldest of the Godwinsons) is said to have told Harald of his banishment from England and his unsuccessful quest for an ally in Denmark which had led him to approach the ‘greater warrior' in search of support for his claim on the English throne. The saga indicates Harald's initial reluctance on the grounds that Norwegians would be disinclined to make war on England under an English commander when ‘people say that the English are not entirely trustworthy'. Tostig counters with a reminder of Harald's nephew Magnus having informed King Edward of his own claim to the kingships of both Denmark and of England under the terms of his agreement with Hardacnut. When Harald is sceptical, Tostig next asks why he does not hold kingship of Denmark as his predecessor Magnus had done, only to be assured that the Norwegians had ‘left their mark on those [Danish] kinsmen of yours'. To which Tostig responds with the undeniably truthful statement that Magnus had won the support of the Danish chieftains (whereas Harald had all the Danes against him), but did not attempt conquest of England because its people all wanted Edward as their king. At which point, he offers his most tempting lure in the form of an assurance that most of the chieftains in England would be his friends and support him should he wish to attempt its conquest – paying off with the pointed comment that ‘it does seem very strange that you should have spent fifteen years failing to conquer Denmark and yet now show such little interest when England is yours for the taking'.

Harald is said to have considered all this carefully, to have recognised ‘the truth in Tostig's words' which led him to acknowledge his own ‘great desire to win this kingdom'. Thereafter, the two spoke again at length and in detail before reaching their decision to invade England in the coming summer of the year 1066.

Having followed the template of Snorri's
Harald's saga
thus far in this chapter, it would be unjust to overlook the objections raised by very many scholarly historians to his account of Harald and Tostig, objections which amount to serious doubt that there was any such meeting between the two in Norway, or anywhere else in Scandinavia, in the early months of 1066. The first basis for these objections is the fact that the meeting is noticed almost exclusively in Scandinavian sources, the awkward exception being Orderic Vitalis, whose account bears striking similarities to those found in the
Ágrip
, in Theodoric's
Historia
and, most curiously, to the speeches recorded in the kings' sagas, among which, of course, Snorri's
Heimskringla
stands foremost here.

The historian Kelly DeVries offers an astute comment on the interpretation of these various sources by modern historians when he suggests that ‘it is much easier to believe that the Norwegian invasion of England was Harald's scheme alone and that his alliance with Tostig Godwinson was an afterthought made only when the two met for the first time, probably in Scotland or Northumbria. . . . Simply declaring the saga accounts of this meeting to be fiction places a lot of belief in the accuracy of the other sources, most of which are silent about any of Tostig's movements not taking place in England.'
¹
The obvious answer might be as straightforward as the quite different sources of information available to the various earlier authorities working in widely different locations or, put most simply, to ask how they might have known what they say they know.

For example, Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus, whose works represent the more formal historical record set down within the Scandinavian orbit, both seem to know of prior contact between Harald and Tostig, if not of its date or location, and yet there is no obvious reason why English or Anglo-Norman chroniclers should have had information about such a meeting, and especially so if the sagas are correct in locating it in Norway. Interestingly, though, one of the earliest versions of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(the ‘C' manuscript of the Abingdon text) tells of Harald's fleet arriving at the mouth of the Tyne in September 1066 where it is joined by Tostig's ships ‘as they had previously arranged', which would clearly indicate knowledge of an earlier contact between the two.

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 might 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.