England in 1066: three claimants, three battles in three weeks, and the conquest that remade the kingdom.
The death of Edward the Confessor in January 1066 left England with no undisputed heir and three men prepared to fight for it: Harold Godwinson, crowned within days; Harald Hardrada of Norway, pressing a claim inherited from an old treaty; and William, duke of Normandy, who said Edward had promised him the throne and that Harold had sworn to support him.
What followed is the most compressed decisive campaign in medieval English history. Hardrada landed in the north and beat the northern earls at Fulford on 20 September. Harold marched an army two hundred miles and destroyed him at Stamford Bridge on the 25th. William landed in Sussex three days later. Harold marched back south and was killed at Hastings on 14 October.
The consequences were not merely dynastic. Within twenty years the English landholding aristocracy had been almost entirely replaced, the language of government had changed, castles had appeared across the country, and England had been surveyed in a document with no parallel anywhere in Europe. The kingdom's centre of political gravity moved to the continent and stayed there for four hundred years, which is where the Hundred Years' War ultimately comes from.
The archive covers all three claimants, all three battles, and the dynasties on either side of the break.