Harald Hardrada (29 page)

Harald returned to Oslo after the peace-making and passed the summer there while his officers went again into the Upplands and were again refused their dues, payment still being held back for the return of Jarl Hakon who was said to have already assembled a great force of Gautlanders. That news apparently prompted Harald to action and by the end of the summer he had sailed to Konungahella where he assembled a fleet of light craft to carry his troops up the Gaut Elf river. Snorri tells of these vessels being hauled ashore and carried overland around the waterfalls (now called the Trollhätten Falls) as the expedition made its way upriver – a passage which would have been reminiscent for Harald of the Dnieper rapids on his voyage to Miklagard some thirty years before – and thus they eventually came to the wide expanse of Lake Vanern. Rowing eastward across the lake, Harald came ashore on the far side and there learned of Hakon's whereabouts, but the jarl had already had word of the Norwegian advance and was bringing a sizeable force of Gautlanders to meet it, apparently expecting to repel a plunder raid.

Harald left his ships at the mouth of a river and a company of warriors there to guard them, before leading the greater strength of his troops overland. The saga tells of the king and some of his officers on horseback, but most of his warriors going on foot, as they made their way through woodland and marsh overgrown with brushwood until reaching a ridge of higher ground from which they could see Hakon's forces on the far side of more marshy ground. Now within sight of each other, both armies formed up into battle array, but Harald ordered his men to stay on the higher ground and wait to see if the enemy meant to attack. ‘Hakon is a very impetuous man.'

Although Snorri writes of Harald having set out on this expedition in late summer, it would seem to have turned into later autumn by the time the armies met, because the saga account has the battle fought in frosty weather with light flurries of driving snow. Up on their higher ground, the Norwegians sheltered behind their shields, while Hakon's ‘lightly clad' Gautlanders, likewise ordered to hold back and await Harald's move, were feeling the chill of the day. All of which would seem to have been included in Harald's tactical plan, when his warriors suddenly leaped to their feet, raising a war-whoop and beating their shields. The headman of the Gautlanders (whom Snorri styles their ‘Lawman') had tethered his horse to a stake which was torn from the ground and hit him on the head when the animal bolted at the sound of the shouting and shield-beating.

At this the Lawman galloped away while Hakon had his banner brought forward, signalling the Gautlanders to advance across the marshy ground towards the Norwegian position atop the ridge, but as soon as they reached the foot of the hill Harald's men came down on them in a headlong charge. While some of Hakon's men fell under the impact and were slain, the rest of them took flight, but there was little point in pursuit because it was now evening and Harald had taken possession of Hakon's banner, which is said to have formerly belonged to King Magnus. The battle of Vanern was over and Harald had the victory, but as it was to be his last battle fought in Scandinavia, it might be worth a little more attention than it is generally offered by historians and particularly in terms of military detail.

By the mid-eleventh century, European influence had become more evident on Scandinavian battlefields and the better equipped Swedish warrior, although armed with the traditional sword and shield, may have worn a helmet of the conical Norman design with a nasal guard (although possibly of German manufacture) and been armoured in ring-mail, while the humbler ‘lightly clad' fighting-men who apparently made up the majority of Hakon's force would have been without mail armour and dressed in woollen hats, tunics and straight trousers. Their fairly basic armament would have certainly been a ‘flat', all-wooden slightly curved bow of the characteristic northern type, with a simple spear for hand-to-hand combat and a leather-faced round wooden shield hanging from a sling around the upper body. The majority of Harald's warriors would have been more heavily armed housecarls, wearing helmets of spangenhelm construction similarly fitted with a nasal guard and worn with a mail byrnie. Some of their swords and shields may have reflected eastern design, so wooden shields of longer Slavic rectangular style could have been found alongside the traditional heavy wooden disc type and some swords with single-edged blades showing the influence of the steppe warrior and the Byzantine armoury. Thus equipped, the impact of a downhill charge by battle-hardened warriors thrown against the lighter-armed and effectively unarmoured Gautlanders would been have very much as it is described in the strophe from Thjodolf quoted in the saga: ‘Fallen the flocks of Steinkel's followers; sent straight to
Hel
.'

Snorri does supply a telling tailpiece to the battle of Vanern in his description of the Norwegian march back to their ships, when a man suddenly jumps out of the woodland to spear the warrior carrying Hakon's banner and seize it from his hand. To which Harald responds with the shout ‘The jarl still lives! Bring me my coat of mail!', but the man has long disappeared into the brush, so the march continues on its way back to the boats – and Hakon Ivarsson has just made his last appearance along Harald's warrior's way.

It remained only to deal out retribution to the recalcitrant Upplanders and so, in the winter following his defeat of Hakon (1064/5), Harald embarked on a circuit of tribute-collection with menaces, which must have been long familiar to him ever since his first winter in northern Russia. He chose to move first against the bonders of Romerike, charging them not only with refusing payment of lawful taxes but also with support of the king's enemies. Some were ordered to be maimed, others to be killed and the rest to have their property seized. Through the next twelvemonth the king moved on to Hedemark, inflicting similar destruction to that dealt out in Romerike, afterwards with fire and sword to Hadaland and finally to Ringerike, all of this confirmed by three strophes from Thjodolf telling of Uppland farmsteads left derelict and empty. Yet there is a note of irony which cannot pass without notice, because Ringerike had been the small kingdom of Harald's own father, Sigurd Syr, and so it would almost seem as if his time in the northlands had come full circle by the ending of the year 1065.

W
ithin eighteen months of the peace settlement with Svein of Denmark – according to Snorri's saga and a quoted strophe from the skald Thjodolf – Harald's campaign of intimidation against the Upplanders had brought about their full submission and when Hakon Ivarsson disappeared into the Swedish woodland after the battle of Vanern the long-standing challenge from the dynasty of Lade melted away with him. The rumbling dissension in the formerly troublesome Trondelag had been stilled for most of fifteen years and, so too, the death of Olaf had been avenged when Kalv Arnason was sent to his death on Fyn island, bringing to an end a blood-feud unsatisfied for two decades and, at the same time, fulfilling Olaf's prediction as to the future character of his half-brother: ‘You will be vengeful one day, my kinsman'.

By the end of the year 1065, and for the first time in twenty years, there would seem to have been no reason why the fifty-year-old Harald should not have passed the Yuletide season undisturbed by the preparation of a campaign planned for the coming spring – and yet, by March of the following year, he was mustering his armies and assembling his fleet for an invasion of England. Just how long he might have had ambitions in that direction has been a subject of speculation among historians even since the time of Saxo Grammaticus – and, of course, will bear further consideration here – yet the sagas make no reference to the prospect of such a conquest until the arrival of a visitor to his court in the early months of 1066. Nonetheless, the short passage of chronological summary placed after the conclusion of the Uppland campaign is followed by a discernible pause in the narrative before Snorri launches into his own version of events in England during the early 1060s.

He tells how ‘Edward Æthelredsson' was accepted as king by the English on the death of his half-brother Hardacnut and of Edward's marriage to ‘Edith, the daughter of Earl Godwin Wulfnothsson'. Although English by descent and the son of a South Saxon thane, Godwin had stood high in Cnut's favour and already begun his rise to prominence by 1018, when he is thought to have returned with the king to Denmark and there been married to Gyda (or Gyða), the sister of Jarl Ulf Thorgilsson who was himself the husband of Cnut's sister Estrid and, of course, the father of her son Svein. Already made an earl by that time (‘earl', or
eorl
, being the English form of the Old Norse
jarl
, and a title introduced into England during Cnut's reign), Godwin's lordship was extended to the earldom of all Wessex by 1020 and he had become one of the most powerful men in the land by the time of Cnut's death in 1035, thereafter playing an important and often contentious role through the reigns of the three successor kings until his own death in 1053.

The sole significance of this Earl Godwin in the saga, of course, is as the father of the two men destined to be of such ominous significance along the final passage of Harald's warrior's way, and it is to the brothers Harold and Tostig Godwinson that Snorri next turns his attention. As the eldest surviving son, Harold succeeded to the earldom of Wessex on his father's death and was to establish himself and his family as a still greater power in the land, while his younger brother Tostig was to become earl of Northumbria when Siward, a Danish warlord thought to have first come to England in Cnut's following, died in 1055 leaving a young son Waltheof who was not yet of an age to succeed to his father's earldom. Thus by the later 1050s, virtually all the land of Edward the Confessor's kingdom – excepting only the earldom of Mercia – lay within the grasp of the Godwinsons and remained so until the autumn of 1065 when the Northumbrians, weary of the heavy taxation demanded by Tostig (largely for his personal benefit) and the equally heavy-handed manner of its collection, rose in revolt. Tostig himself, always an especial favourite of the king, was with Edward and his court at Oxford on 3 October while the Northumbrians were declaring him an outlaw, slaying every last one of his housecarls, and seizing all the contents of both his armoury and his treasury at York.

The man they invited to take over his earldom was Morcar, the younger brother of Edwin who had quite recently succeeded their father Ælfgar as earl of Mercia, and so it was with the new earl Morcar at its head that a great host of insurgent northerners marched south to Northampton where Earl Edwin was to bring a Mercian contingent to join their advance. In the event, they were met at Northampton by Harold of Wessex ready to negotiate on behalf of King Edward. Recognising the risk of disastrous civil war, he acceded to their preferred choice of earl and persuaded the king to ratify his decision, which Edward was to do on 1 November before bidding farewell to Tostig and lading him with wealth before his departure into exile at the court of his wife's kinsman, Count Baldwin of Flanders. In fact, this parting from Tostig was to be the last public act of Edward's reign, because the Confessor soon afterwards fell ill and passed from this life on 5 January. On the following day, Harold Godwinson was consecrated king of England.

If Tostig expected the new king's first priority to be the restoration of his brother to his earldom or, at the very least, his recall from exile, he was to be disappointed because Harold's first public act following his succession would seem to have been his wedding ceremony. Having already fathered a number of children on his mistress, the woman whom Harold now chose to marry was not only the widow of the Welsh king Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (on whom the Godwinson brothers had jointly inflicted a decisive defeat just three years before), but also the sister of Earl Edwin of Mercia and Earl Morcar of Northumbria. Presumably the king's choice of bride was driven by the imperative of national unity, when this marriage served to link the noble houses of Wessex and Mercia, but to Tostig it can only have added a high varnish of insult to painfully recent injury. Thus deprived of any prospect of restoration in England, Tostig's fury evidently drove him to seek an ally in support of his cause, but it is at this point that the various sources of historical record prove less than helpful. He is said by Orderic Vitalis – an English-born chronicler living in Normandy and writing in the second quarter of the twelfth century – to have first approached Duke William of Normandy, but this claim is unsupported by any other source and given little, if any, credence by later historians.

A quite different first line of approach on Tostig's part is suggested by all the Scandinavian sources, Snorri Sturluson's
Heimskringla
foremost among them. In fact, there is good reason to accept at least the substance of Snorri's account of events in his
Harald's saga
because, although clearly inaccurate on some points of detail, its proposal of Tostig's journey from Flanders to Denmark, by way of Frisia, in order to seek the support of his cousin Svein Estridsson has the full measure of plausibility. The close kinship between the two is beyond question – Tostig's mother Gyda and Svein's father Ulf having been brother and sister – and the practicality of the journey itself is hardly in doubt, even in the earlier months of the year when it could have been made overland on horseback over flat coastal country. Snorri's detailed presentation of their conversation at the Danish court can only have been of his own reconstruction and yet corresponds perfectly well to the wider scheme of things while being fully in character on both parts: Tostig pleading his case and Svein responding with the generous offer of a home and a jarldom in Denmark, although unwilling to provide the military support requested. He had enjoyed just two years of peace after enduring some fifteen years of hostility from his warlike neighbour in Norway, and was too well aware of his own limitations ‘to vie with the prowess of my kinsman, King Cnut' by attempting a campaign of conquest in England. Bitterly disappointed by his cousin's refusal, Tostig announced his intention to ‘find a friend in a less likely quarter' and Snorri records that ‘the two parted on less than cordial terms'.