Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

‘woven of the plainest and white silk’, but on which a raven, in time of war, would mysteriously materialise, ‘opening its beak, flapping its wings, and restive on its feet’. Deep magic and even deeper time: such banners spoke profoundly to the Northmen of both. Liegemen of Christ they might have become, but in the fluttering of Land-Waster there beat for them the reassurance that they were heroes still, just as their pagan ancestors had been.

By early September, Harald and his monstrous fleet of some 300 ships were doing what so many Viking expeditions had done before them, and slipping down the coast of Scotland bound for Northumbria. Only Tostig, who met up with Harald on his way, had been given due warning of his plans: everyone else in England was taken utterly by surprise. Landing just south ofYork, the invaders discovered to their delight that Harold Godwinsson was far away in Wessex, and that only Earl Morcar and his brother, Edwin, were on hand to confront them. On 20 September, ‘the thunderbolt of the North’ struck at the Northumbrian forces and shattered them. Morcar and Edwin both survived their defeat; but they were now powerless to prevent Harald from forcing York into surrender, and taking hostages from among the leading citizens. Next, withdrawing some seven miles east of the city, to a convenient road junction by the name of Stamford Bridge, the Norwegian king paused, to await the submission of all Northumbria. With Morcar’s levies safely put out of action, and Harald Godwinson presumed still far away to the south, it seemed

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there was nothing to worry about. Everything was going to plan. Land-Waster, which in the battle against the northern earls had carried all thunderously before it, was once again proving its invincibility.

But then, on 25 September, with an unseasonably warm sun standing high in the sky, Harald and Tostig caught sight of a sudden smudge on the western skyline – and realised that it was approaching them fast. Perhaps, they thought at first, a band of Northumbrians was riding in to submit; but soon, as the earth began to shudder, and the glittering of shields and mail coats emerged through the dust, ‘sparkling like a field of broken ice’, the appalling truth dawned. Somehow, impossible though it seemed, Harold Godwinsson had arrived at Stamford Bridge. Frantically, Harald ordered his men to withdraw to the far side of the river. Simultaneously, he sent messengers galloping with furious speed to where his ships lay moored twelve miles to the south, along with their store of mail shirts, and a whole third of his men. But it was too late. For a brief while, it was true, the enemy were held up at the bridge — by a single warrior, according to one account, who kept all at bay with the swinging of his axe, until an Englishman, with underhand cunning, ‘came up in a boat and through the openings of the planks struck him in the private parts with a spear’. The delay, however precisely it had been achieved, was sufficient for Harald to draw up his men on the flats of the far bank – but not for his reinforcements to join him. Even though the Norwegians fought savagely, they could have no real hope of victory without their armour. Sure enough, the river was soon flowing incarnadine. In the end, the survivors broke and fled for their ships. All the afternoon, the English hunted them down. As the light began to fade and crows wheeled upon the carrion-perfumed breezes of evening, there lay spread out beneath them a scene of quite exceptional slaughter. The English victory had been a work of almost utter annihilation. Of the three hundred and more ships that had arrived in England with Harald Hardrada, it was said, only twenty ever made it back to Norway.

And Harald himself, along with Tostig, lay among the mangled dead. So too, trampled down and stained with filth and gore, did his famous banner. At the end, Land-Waster’s magic had failed – and, as it turned out, failed for good.

Conquest

The carnage at Stamford Bridge would long be remembered by the Northmen. As well it might have been – for never again would they cross the seas with the ambition of conquering a Christian land. The consigning of their most celebrated sea king to a foreign grave was a brutal measure of just how fast their horizons were closing in. Shortly before Harald Hardrada made his last stand, it was said, a party of horsemen had ridden out from the English lines and crossed to where the Norwegians stood facing them, lined up in a shield wall. One of the embassy, calling to Tostig, passed on a greeting from his brother, King Harold, and an offer: ‘one-third of all the kingdom’. Tostig, shouting back, demanded to know what his ally, King Harald Hardrada, might expect. ‘And the rider said, “King Harold has already declared how much of England he is prepared to grant the Norwegian: seven feet of earth, or as much as he needs to be buried, bearing in mind that he is taller than other men.”

These were the last words ever spoken between the two brothers – for the rider had been none other than Harold Godwinsson himself. Wit and a defiant cool were the authentic qualities of a man who all his life had been passing ‘with watchful mockery through ambush after ambush’.’ In Harold’s scorning of the invader, however, and the granting to him only of sufficient earth to cover his bones, there had been something more than mere braggart play. The presumption that a land might indeed be sacred to those who trod it was neither an idle nor a novel one. So it was, for instance, that Earl Britnoth, opposing an earlier generation of Vikings at Maldon, had pledged himself ringingly to the defence of ‘folc and foldan: ‘people and soil’. That the two were synonymous was