The Forgotten Massacre of 1066

Five days before Stamford Bridge, and nearly a month before Hastings, an English army marched out of York to stop a Norwegian invasion and was destroyed in a marsh beside the River Ouse. On 20 September 1066, the earls Edwin and Morcar stood against Harald Hardrada, the most feared soldier in northern Europe, and Tostig Godwinson, the exiled brother of King Harold, at a place called Fulford. By nightfall the English line had broken, the beck and the river had swallowed the men trying to escape, and York was negotiating its surrender.

In this film we follow the road to Fulford, from the Northumbrian revolt that drove Tostig into exile to the Norwegian fleet beaching at Riccall, and ask why two young earls chose to fight rather than wait for the king. We weigh the earliest English record against the Icelandic saga that claimed the dead lay so thick the Norwegians crossed the marsh on their bodies, follow Harold’s march north and the slaughter at Stamford Bridge, and consider whether the losses at Fulford left England weaker when William of Normandy landed at Pevensey. Finally, we return to the battlefield itself, a contested stretch of meadow on the edge of modern York, where the dead of 1066 still lie unmarked.

SOURCES The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (MSS C, D and E), trans. Michael Swanton · The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. Darlington and McGurk · Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Faulkes · Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. Chibnall · Kelly DeVries, The Norwegian Invasion of England in 1066 · Charles Jones, The Forgotten Battle of 1066: Fulford · Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England

FURTHER READING Peter Marren, 1066: The Battles of York, Stamford Bridge and Hastings (Pen & Sword, 2004) · Frank McLynn, 1066: The Year of the Three Battles (Jonathan Cape, 1998) · Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest (Hutchinson, 2012) · Stephen Baxter, The Earls of Mercia: Lordship and Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press, 2007) · Ian W. Walker, Harold: The Last Anglo-Saxon King (Sutton, 1997) · Peter Rex, Harold II: The Doomed Saxon King (Tempus, 2005) · Tom Holland, Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom (Little, Brown, 2008)

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