Battle of Stamford Bridge

Nineteen days before Hastings, an English king fought the battle of his life in a Yorkshire field, and won it.

Then he marched south and lost everything.

In September 1066 a Norwegian fleet came into the Humber, at the exact moment England's army had been sent home for want of food. It broke the northern earls outside York. Five days later Harold Godwinson was on the far side of the city with an army nobody in the Norwegian camp knew existed, and by the end of the day a king of Norway and Harold's own exiled brother were dead.

This Turbo History short tells the forgotten half of 1066, and is honest about how little anybody can actually prove:

• The three claims to the English throne, including the strange one built on a deal between two other men about two other countries
• Fulford, the hostage bargain that pulled the Norwegians seventeen miles from their ships, and the morning they were caught without warning
• The lone Norwegian holding the bridge, and why almost everything you remember about him comes from one twelfth-century Englishman rather than from the Chronicle
• "Seven feet of English ground": magnificent writing, composed in Iceland around 1230, and found in no English source of any date
• Why the claim that this battle ended the Viking Age does not survive a look at 1069, 1075 and 1085
• The battlefield itself, where the traditional site has never produced a weapon or a body, and the argument about where it really is that broke open again in 2026

No army sizes, because nobody wrote any down. Just the date, the river, and what the sources will actually carry.

Read it in under an hour. Free on Kindle Unlimited.