Harold Godwinson defeated Harald Hardrada near York days before marching south to face William of Normandy.
On 25 September 1066 Harold Godwinson destroyed a Norwegian invasion army at Stamford Bridge, seven miles east of York, killing its king, Harald Hardrada, and his own brother Tostig.
It was a complete victory won by a forced march of about two hundred miles in four days, and it arrived as a total surprise: the Norwegians were encamped without most of their armour, having taken hostages from York two days earlier.
Nineteen days later Harold was dead at Hastings, sixty miles from the south coast, having marched his army the length of England twice in three weeks. Stamford Bridge is therefore both one of the most impressive feats of arms in English history and a substantial part of the reason the English lost the country.
The death of Edward the Confessor in January 1066 left three serious claimants: Harold Godwinson, crowned immediately; William of Normandy, who claimed a promise; and Harald Hardrada of Norway, whose claim ran through an agreement between earlier kings and who had spent his life fighting for thrones.
Hardrada was joined by Tostig Godwinson, Harold's own brother, exiled from the earldom of Northumbria the previous year after a rising against him.
They landed in September with something over three hundred ships, took York, and beat the northern earls Edwin and Morcar at Fulford on 20 September. Harold was on the south coast waiting for William, and the news reached him within days.
Harold moved north immediately with his housecarls and whatever levies could keep up, covering the distance from London to Yorkshire in about four days.
The Norwegians knew nothing of it. They had arranged to receive hostages from the Yorkshire nobility at Stamford Bridge on 25 September, and had left roughly a third of their force with the ships at Riccall, some miles away.
It was a warm day and they had left most of their mail behind. The first the Norwegian army knew of an English army was seeing the dust of one approaching.
The fighting was hard despite the surprise. The Norwegians formed a shield wall on the far bank and were driven back; Hardrada was killed by an arrow through the throat while fighting in the front rank, and Tostig died later in the day.
The story everyone knows — a single Norse axeman holding the bridge alone against the English army until a man in a barrel speared him from beneath — appears only in a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle written some decades afterwards, and not in the earliest versions. It is a very good story and it is not contemporary evidence.
The reinforcements from the ships arrived late and exhausted and were destroyed in their turn. The Norwegian survivors needed twenty-four ships to sail home out of the three hundred or more that had come.
Harold accepted the surrender of Hardrada's son and let him go, which was a mark of a decisive victory rather than of generosity.
Three days later he learned that William had landed at Pevensey on 28 September — the wind that had pinned the Norman fleet in port all summer had finally turned, at the exact moment the English army was two hundred and fifty miles away.
Harold marched south, gathered what forces he could, and fought at Hastings on 14 October with an army that had marched the length of the country twice and had left many of its best men on the field in Yorkshire.
Stamford Bridge ended the Scandinavian claim to England, which had been live since Cnut and had produced two dynasties. It is a genuine end point: no Norwegian king ever came so close again.
It also decided Hastings, though not in the way the victors would have wanted. An army that had not marched to Yorkshire and back, and had not lost men at Stamford Bridge, would have met William fresh and in greater numbers.
Hardrada is often called the last Viking, which is a neat phrase for a man who had served in the Varangian Guard at Constantinople, fought in Sicily and Palestine, ruled Norway for twenty years and died invading England. He is in this archive precisely because his career runs through most of it.