Dan Snow's History Hit - The Battle of Stamford Bridge Explained

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

Dan explains how England’s last great Viking invasion met its brutal end. At Stamford Bridge in September 1066, King Harold Godwinson’s army faced Harald Hardrada, the most feared warrior of his age, in a battle of extraordinary courage and bloodshed. Relying on new archaeological discoveries, Dan brings this pivotal clash to life in vivid detail.You can also watch our explanation of the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the Norman Conquest that followed, on YouTube.Written by Dan Snow and edited by Dougal Patmore.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail] Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. It was the last great Viking battle against the last and greatest Viking invader. After so many men hacked down in their prime in almost every corner of Britain, so many feasts for crows, kingdoms toppled and forge,

reputations won and lost. Here, on this field, the Viking Age in England at least, came to a pretty sudden and disdain. decisive end. It was a stunning victory. It should rank as one of the greatest ever won by a king of England. It alone would be enough to cement any other king's legacy. In September 1066, an English royal army led by a bold and skilful king smashed an invading Viking force led by the greatest warrior of the age, a force which had seized York, the most important city of the north, and seemed poised to resurrect Scandinavian rule over England.

It was the Battle of Stamford Bridge. And it would be remembered as one of England's greatest battlefield victories, were it not for the fact that it was immediately followed by one of its most humiliating and consequential defeats? Days later on the rolling fields of southern England at the Battle of Hastings. This podcast, though, is about the former. It's about Stamford Bridge, because that is a story that deserves to be told. And because it's the story that right now is being radically rewritten by a group of archaeologists and metal detectrists, who I've been privileged enough to have followed for the last couple of years. Their determination and hard work may well have finally uncovered this lost battlefield.

For the first time, they've placed it in the landscape, convincingly, and most importantly, they have found the artifacts, the stuff, the things those men and women carry. weapons, male armour, dropped, stamped into the blood-soaked ground, lost, thrown away, now recovered, so we can almost reach out and touch the battle itself. You may have heard about this discovery on the news feeds. You can watch our documentary about it, about this battlefield hunt on our History Hit TV channel. I want to say a huge thank you to the legend, Simon Richardson, John Benfield, their team of metal detectors, as well as the Stanford Bridge Heritage Society, for inviting us to be part of this wonderful adventure.

But right here, right now on this podcast, this is the detailed story about that enormous clash, and also why we think we've found the field of Stamford Bridge. Let's get into it. The story starts, as so many of them do, with the death rattle of a king. Succession was a dangerous time. The Crown of England was contested

by pretty much every single person that would become king from the late 900s to the 1300s. Brothers fought brothers, they fought brothers, they fought fathers, cousins fought cousins, and there were always outsiders, eyeing up a vacant throne. The year was 1066. Edward the Confessor,

the childless king of England, breathed his last in the first few days of January. He would not be the only king of England. England to die that fateful year. Nature abhors a vacuum. Egotistical psychopaths for the lust for power also abhor a vacuum. And so right across England and beyond, the question of who would rule one of Europe's richest kingdoms became a burning issue. A bit to confess that a pretty distant English relative. Someone like him descended from the mighty Alfred Alfred, Alfred the Great, who in some senses was the great founder of England, but that relative was a boy, probably no more than 13,

not quite ready to take his place in the shield wall, not quite ready to hew down his enemies, which seems to be pretty much the chief duty of a king at the time. England had experienced wars and invasions of plenty of the previous century, and a child on the throne was recipe for more. At least that's how the thinking went. The trouble was, so was every other option. There was a home-grown candidate, not the drop of raw blood in his veins, but a warrior through and through, a leader, wealthy, a man with the following, a proven deliverer. He'd crushed the Welsh. He'd fought in France and the low countries. It seems that he did have experience fighting the Scandinavian Norse and Danes,

those men who we call Vikings, during an attack against Kent in the previous decade. But he was not the only ambitious man in his family. He had a younger brother Tostig, who was now an exile. Well, he may have harboured dreams of becoming king himself. He certainly harboured dreams of snatching himself a powerful position in the kingdom. To the south in Normandy, there was a cousin of King Edwards from his mother's side. He sat on the ducal throne of Normandy. He was descended from the Vikings himself, hence Normandy. He was William.

He was a survivor. He'd hauled himself up from an unpromising start to rule over Normandy as a duke. He was ambitious. He was smart. He was warlike. He was not a man you wanted as an enemy. Yet he was a man who believed that old King Edward had guaranteed him the throne of England. And that was not all, not by a long stretch,

because to the north of England there was a man who believed that he should also rule, by right of succession and by might of arms. He was already a king, a throne he'd won at the tip of a spear. He was King Harold of Norway, known as Hadrada, the hard ruler. Hardrada was the thunderbolt of the north. He said to be seven feet tall. He was certainly a giant of a man. He'd been exiled from his native land as a boy, really, and he'd found fame and fortune fighting in the east along the rivers of Russia and Ukraine. For the Byzantine Empire against its galaxy of enemies, he fought in the Crimea. It said that he reduced 80 Arab strongholds across the Middle East. He fought on the Tigris and Euphrates. He helped Christians conquer Sicily. He served in southern Italy.

He rose to command the Varangian Guard in Byzantium, a kind of Praetorian Guard, which protected emperors, or killed, and deposed them. He certainly did both during his career. He seemed to visit Jerusalem. He smashed a revolt in Bulgaria and took the nickname Bulgarian. When he returned to Scandinavia, it was a case of the old cliche. The exiled prince grown to manhood to reclaim his patrimony. His ships were unbalanced because of the amount of gold in their holds.

he had a Ukrainian princess for a wife. By the mid to late 1040s, so 20 years before 1066, he is established as King of Norway. He's always launching strikes on Denmark to try and press his claims there. But following the death of Edward the Confessor, he seems to have decided to try and reconstruct the Great North Sea Empire of his forbear as King of Norway, Cnut the Great, who ruled over not just Norway, but Denmark bits of Sweden and importantly England and the odd bit of Scotland as well. I think it's fair to say that never before or since had the English crown been contested between such able, charismatic and warlike candidates.

And it's that which makes 1066. Such an astonishing year. English Harold was the first mover. His sister was married to the old King Edward, and so he had accessed the dying man in his last days. He burst out from one visit to the bedside of the old king to announce the world that King Edward had anointed him his successor. Very convenient indeed. He was the most powerful man in the kingdom. His brothers, his younger brothers were also great lords.

He made a deal, I think, with the sort of powerful lords of the north. Edwin and Morkar, earls respectively of Mercia and Northumbria. And his claim was accepted by them and the senior British aristocracy, who probably regarded it as pretty inevitable. Poor Edgar, the child of raw blood, was elbowed out of the way, and Harold was crowned king, possibly on the very same day in the very same place that old King Edward was buried, newly built Westminster Abbey. England certainly had a king now, but it settled nothing. The damage had been done. In Normandy, Duke William's seethed and made plans for invasion.

King Harold's younger brother Tostig had been forced into exile, I should tell you about him. He'd been Earl of Northumbria until 1065 the year before, but he'd been so unpopular that he'd been kicked out. There'd been a popular uprising and he'd been thrown out of his job. And he'd expected he'd run off some. and expected his brother Harold as the kingdom's chief enforcer to put him back in charge. But Harold was probably quite a canny politician. He realized that Tostig was not a very good Earl. He was also almost certainly maneuvering for the throne at the time. And so he supported the claims of another candidate, Earl Morkar.

Harold in turn seemed to have expected that Morkar would back him for the throne as he did the following year. Tostig could not believe this bargain that had been made. his own brother had sided with his enemies, and he'd gone into exile. And now a year later he was back. He raided up the East Coast. He provided Harold with his first great challenge as a king, a rogue brother. Imagine that in a royal family. When Tostig reached the River Humber, he was in fact soundly defeated by those northern earls, Edwin and Earl Morka, who had replaced him. He escaped to Scotland looking for support, didn't find much there, and so he steered his little squadron of ships towards Norway. And once in Norway, Tostik found a very willing audience.

Hadrada was keen to invade England, and he now had a useful idiot who could provide him with all sorts of intelligence, a man who'd once been so close to the king, a man who'd once governed the north of England. Perfect. Hardrada called up an army and started gathering the ships necessary to transport them to Britain. In August, that fleet was assembled. No mean feat in itself. I mean, great warriors really have to be great logisticians, particularly in this period, and great sailors too. Taking advantage of an easterly wind, they sailed, perhaps 300 ships or something.

from Sonia Ford on the West Coast, passing towering cliffs of rock, more like a river canyon, until the land fell away into a sprawl of rocky islands and the boat started to rise and fall on the ocean swell, until they left the land behind altogether. They pushed out into North Atlantic. They shook free their sails, and off they went. Those sails were festooned with symbols.

There were carved dragons or effigies on the wooden prow of the ships, brightly coloured shields lining up along the rails. What a sight it must have been. And Hadrado, we're told, was a poet alongside his many other accomplishments. And perhaps he stood squarely on that deck, feeling the boat moved beneath his feet, composing a verse as the salt sea air swelled around him. And he felt the clarity that comes with setting out to sea. His ship was named Serpent.

Beside him his young son Olaf heading out on his first major campaign, an apprenticeship with his father, the greatest warrior of the age. due west they sailed 200 miles or so to the Shetland aimed just south of the setting sun at that time of year the clouds above the Shetlands be visible for 60 or so miles away so to us what seems like a terrifying feat of navigation when no GPS was actually pretty standard I think maybe 36 hours or so

at sea with a fair steady breeze at night you keep the north side you keep Pilaris right athwart your beam and you're going in the right direction from Shetland straight down south to Orgney 50 miles or so hardly out of sight of land really Orkney was a Viking stronghold. It was a Norwegian possession. It was all over oddly in this period. Well, I had two else. They were brothers. They seemed to rob along pretty peacefully. Ireland and Paul, oddly. They and their men were keen enough and they joined the expedition and headed south.

Next, Ardrada visited the east coast of Scotland to try and convince the King of Scots to join. He balked. He did not want to. Maybe the memories of terrible defeats at the hands of English still loomed. He would sit this one out and try and make the most of the aftermath. My sense of it is that he sort of made a contribution. to the expedition that was polite. It was too small to really annoy the English if the English won, but it was large enough to carry favour with Hadrada if he emerged victorious. The fleet crossed into English waters,

and the first week of September, it arrived at the mouth of the Tyne, perhaps 350 ships, perhaps many as 500, with a little transport vessels and things. The Vikings were back, in force. Interestingly, the fleet would have sailed right past Holy Island, the site of that fateful Viking raid on Lindisfarne. in the 790s, which had heralded the onset of the Viking age, almost 300 years before.

They worked their way down the coast, making use of the excellent shelter provided by the great rivers of eastern England. First, the Tyne, where Hardrada probably went ashore, a striking figure's tried to get the beach. Above him unfurled the land-waster, his special banner, white with a black mythical raven. That flag had been a harbinger of terrible violence. it had flown from the tyne to the tigris, and it meant that blood would flow. The people of Scarborough May have provided that first blood. They made the extraordinary decision to try and resist. Hadrada had landed and demanded all of their wealth, all their goods and riches, quite straightforward,

and they said no. Hardrada now needed to make an example of them. Exemplary violence, folks. He made huge bundles of wood. He set fire to them and rolled them down onto the town from the slopes. above. It burnt, and the fleeing townsfolk were cut down as they escaped. Hadrada ordered the entire population put to the sword. The settlement was annihilated. Scarborough ceased to exist. It doesn't appear in that great royal survey of England, the

Doomsday Book compiled about a generation later. And they didn't miss a trick, those guys. Every single pig was included in that. So it was gone. The land was wasted all right. One historian has got a great crow about Hardrado. I think is probably the most euphemistic thing I've ever read. The historian says his personal morality appears not to have matched the Christian ideal. Say that again. On sailed this rather ambiguous character, south into the beautiful Humber Estuary. In its sheltered waters, how druders force I imagine would have shipped their oars, stowed their sails,

possibly taking their mast down, and sat on the thwarts, heaving the looms and the wooden blades through the water. muscle power, replacing wind power. They headed for the mouth of the river Ouse, one of the rivers that trains into this estuary, because their target lay on the banks of the Ouse. It was the great northern city of England. It had once been home to Roman emperors themselves. It had been the seat of kings, Viking and English. It had been a great prize contested for centuries.

It was the city of York. You listen to Dan Snow's history here. The best is yet to come. Stick with us. Hadrata didn't travel all the way up there by boat. He beached his fleet at a place called Rickle. It's true south of York. And he took the last 12 miles on foot.

Outside the city, he found the two most powerful lords of Northern England. I mentioned them before. Earl Edwin of Mercia and his brother Earl Morcah of Northumbria. They were barring his route into the city. They were lined up outside, a place called Fulford. This is where the first great battle of 1060s, would be fought. The English position looked pretty strong. The river oozed their right, and they had some boggy, marshy ground to their left. So they were astride the firm, hard ground leading to the

city of York. They barred the only route that Hadrada had into the city. But this was not by any stretch Hardrada's first rodeo. No, no, no. He led his men up the riverbank, right on the riverbank. It seems he managed to keep them out of sight of the English, so possibly even wading in the shallows. and then he sent Tostig forward in plain sight, in the centre of the line, with his troops. Hadrida guessed, as it turns out correctly, that Earl Morkar would want to smash Tostig and his troublesome English traitors. And sure enough, Morkar saw Tostig's men looking little vulnerable and right for the picking, and he surged forward to wipe them out.

But as the English did so, they exposed their right flank to Hardrada, who led his men up and over the rim. riverbank out of the dead ground to smash into the English. It's just such a bad day in the office when you realise that you've made a mistake like that. And he's got Harold Hardrada rampaging towards you in a surprise attack. Well, there are no surprises in the outcome of this battle. This European champion dispatched the English. It was brutal. It said there were so many English corpses you could walk across the marshy ground without getting your feet wet. Survivors jumped into the ooze. They waded across the marches as they could. They threw their weapons as

sigh. They sprinted if they could. They crawled when they couldn't. The armies of the north were smashed and scattered. York was at Hadrada's mercy. The city leaders were forced to swear an oath to him as king and acknowledged Tostig as their new Earl. The north of England, really, it was effectively Hardradas. But Hadrada and Tostig didn't immediately take up residence in York. Instead, they'd go back to their ships, they'd reorganise, they'd recover, they'd replenish. And they demanded that hostages would be sent to them as a token of submission. No hostages meant that the Vikings would return and lay waste to the city. These hostages should be sent out in five days. The meeting place, the rendezvous, was just west of York, a place where roads converged and there was a bridge across the river,

a place known as Stamford Bridge. Now, way back down in the south of England, King Harold had been sitting on the coast waiting for a different invasion, one from Normandy, not Norway. He'd received intelligence reports that Duke William was assembling a fleet and recruiting mercenaries and adventurers and treasure seekers far and wide. And King Harold responded by calling up vast numbers of troops and waiting near the expected invasion zone. But the masts, they never appeared on the horizon. August turned to September. The weather was surely about to break. I mean, September in the channel can be rough, as I've said many times before on this podcast. The invasion window was closed, surely. His men also needed to go home for the harvest. Supplies were eaten up. He was. He was

forced to disband his army. A day or two later, he gets back to London, and there's a thunderbolt. England has been invaded, but not in the south, not by William of Normandy, but in the north. And what does Harold do? Well, I think he conducts one of the most impressive and bold marches in British military history. He gathers his professional troops around him, the full-timers, the house carls, the pros, and they gallop up the Great North Road, the road built by the Romans. now the A1. He sends messengers ahead to tell any troops who avoided the slaughter at Fulford to meet him just south of York. We think he travels about 185 miles, around 200 miles, in four days. It's pretty astonishing. It was a lightning mark. We think that's characteristic of Harold. He was a

warrior. He'd really impressed in a war against the Welsh, for example. He'd subdued several Welsh leaders, and he was quick. He moved with speed. He knew his way around the battlefield. And he had worked out, the best way to deal with this Viking invasion would be to nip it in the bud, to get there as fast as he could and snuff it out. He gets to just south of the city of York. He meets up with some more troops. He gains some intelligence. He hears about the Vikings and where they're going to be.

So he marches into the city of York, it doesn't stop, marches straight through it to this meeting place at Stanford Bridge. He's going to ambush the Vikings. Meanwhile, Harold Hardrada was feeling great. He was feeling overconfident, in fact. He and some of his troops advanced up from their ships, up from their camp, towards Stamford Bridge. Many had left their armour behind. It was a sweltering hot day. They had no need to worry. They'd just won a crushing victory. He had perhaps a third of his army with him. Many of them had left behind their shields. They left behind bulky equipment.

That's always a bit of a pain when you're marching. And he left the rest of his force behind with his ships in Rickle, no need to drag everyone off to a sort of formulaic exchange of hostages. They sauntered up to Stamford Bridge, and they waited around the fields on either side of river lolling about in the sun. It was a clear day, clear enough for Hadrada to get his first inkling that there was trouble. To the west there was a cloud of dust, impossible to hide when armies march in dry weather on rammed earth roads. It was forming up above the horizon. Then the Viking sagas tell us that Hadrada saw something shining, a glint. It was like the glint of sunshine on broken ice. And it was indeed the glint of sunshine, but it was glint. It was glint of sunshine,

but it was glinting off iron, not ice. The morning sun was falling upon the advancing English royal army. Fluttering overhead was the banner of the King of England, a dragon, and King Harold's personal banner, a fighting man. The English had the Vikings where they wanted them. They launched themselves down the gentle slope towards the river. The Vikings caught on that west bank, trapped on that side of the river. Well, they were doomed straight away.

they were caught between their enemy and the river. Hadrado was on the east bank, he did some quick thinking. If you ordered a general retreat, his men would lose cohesion and they'd be picked off as they raced for the ships. Instead, they must make a stand. He sent messengers off to the rest of his army back there at the ships and told them to come and help. And then he tried to gather the troops he did have together

to hold the English off until they arrived. The English tore through the Vikings on that west bank. and then it was time to cross the river. And that moment gives us our best known story about the battle. The tale goes it was written down much later, but it's a good tale, that one berserk Viking, an enormous warrior, held the bridge himself, an axe-wielding monster held back the entire English advance on that narrow bridge.

He saw off dozens, perhaps 40 Englishmen, before an enterprising soldier clambled into a barrel or a container or something and drifted it under the bridge, and stabbed up into his unprotected grointh through the slats of the bridge. He was transfixed from crotch to chest. It's a great story, and it might just be true. There were certainly other places to cross there, realistically. They weren't all going to use that one bridge.

There were Fords as well as bridges. I waded across one of the Fores last summer. It was a little deeper than I'd been led to expect, but I was still just about standing all the way. At some stage, one of the sources tell us there was a pause, and I'm assuming it was here. And it says that Harold, King Harold rode forward alone, and he talked to his brother.

He offered Tostig back his elder if he changed sides. And Tostig shouted back asking what Hadrada would get. And King Harold said he'd get six feet of English earth for a grave, or more, as he was slightly taller man. Then, Tostig replied, get ready for battle. We would rather all resolve to die with honour or gain England by a victory. Tostig turned his back on his brother for one last time. He'd made his pact with Hardrador.

Hadrada, the two of them would now share death or victory. When Hadrada's messengers arrived back at the fleet, their horses wet with sweat, mouth, throthing, eyes bulging. The call went up to arm and reinforced their king as quickly as possible. On went the hallbarks, these are shirts made from tiny interlocking rings of iron. They take the shape of the torso beneath them and they do allow movement, but they are heavy. And to be more effective, you need really a padded jacket below them. underneath them to try and absorb the shock of an edge weapon which will otherwise shatter your bones.

That combination is hot on a cold day, but a late summer day with a 16-mile jog and a battle in front of you, it's just unimaginable. But that's what those men did. Shields were grabbed, round with an iron grip in the middle, a hole in the wood allowing the fist to curl, protected in turn by a metal shield boss that can be used to punch in combat. Swords, very valuable, perhaps passed down from a father, protected in scabbards. Sometimes we showy chaps the pointy bit at the end of scabbards. They were strapped to belts, axes and knives, thrust into position at the waist. A metal helmet, well, that could be carried and fast into position at the last minute.

No Viking helmet, I need to say this, has ever been found with horns, folks. That's a myth. These ones would look like helmets, frankly, worn by anyone else in this period. They'd have had metal eyes and nose protection, perhaps, but no horns. And off ran those Vikings to try and save them. their king. That king knew how to fight, he knew how to win, and he also knew how to die in a way that would preserve his reputation. In the end, Hadrada would not hide behind that shield wall all day waiting to be rescued. At some point it seems that he made a decision. He would go out in a way

that ensured that men still talked of him in millennia to come. Disdaining a shield, he grabbed his sword in both hands and made a frenzied personal attack on the enemy. He could, carved a furrow through the English army. So usually, I always think Hollywood history gets an essential thing wrong about these kind of battles. Movies tend to show individuals lashing about themselves to right and left, rather than the more visually boring, but probably realistic, sort of rugby scrum of a shield wall. Two lines of men packed together so tight they can hardly raise a hand, pushing, shoving, spitting, cursing, the odd little stabbing motion until one side sort of cracks. But on this occasion, the greatest warrior in Europe, a giant of a man, may well have decided that enough

was enough and he was going to go out with a bang. Lashing out, berserkly, he hacked his way through Englishman until the inevitable happen. He wasn't a Superman, an English archer, perhaps in very close range, loosed an arrow. It flew straight and true into the throat of the hard ruler, the thunderbolt of the north, the Bulgarar burner. Even Hadrada couldn't withstand that, and down went the mighty Norseman. The reinforcements did arrive through the afternoon, as you can imagine. It was a trickle. They arrived in a state of disorder and exhaustion. Some apparently died from the exertion of the run. The reinforcements were led by one of Hardrada's favorites, a nobleman called Aisdine Oire. And he was betrothed, in fact, the king's daughter. But he'd never make

it to the altar. He does briefly seem to have halted the English and rallied the Vikings. That's remembered as Oire's storm, but it wasn't enough. And he was a little. And he was a little. And the English eventually pushed them back. The army reeled south towards their ships. You can imagine a situation where the army just splinters it starts disintegrating. It was a rout. Bodies lay heaped. It was said years later that piles of bones could still be seen whitening in the sun. Among them, as well as Hadrada, Tostig, the first of Harold's family to be killed in battle that autumn, but not the last. At some stage the English troops were reigned in. Must have been exhausting. Harold put a stop to the fighting and allowed a few survivors to return home in their ships,

having sworn oaths never again to attack England. Haldrada's 16-year-old son, Olaf, who'd joined the expedition with such high hopes. He'd remained with the ships, and he led the survivors home. Just 24 vessels sailed out of Rickle, of the hundreds in which they'd arrived just a week or two earlier. And so ended the last major battle fought on English soil against the Norseman. In many ways, it's the end of the Viking era in England. At this point, Harold of England, well, he's won a victory to rank him alongside the greatest of English kings. The battle was won, the dragon has been slain, and he disbanded his second army that year. Once again, he sends troops home. That's it, surely. Job done for the year, mission accomplished. And then, about a week later,

probably the first few days of October, news arrives of yet another invasion. This time it is the Normans and it is in the South. There will be another terrible battle. Another king will fall. England's history will be made. But that is a different story, folks. That's the story of Hastings, which I have told on this podcast a few times. Please do check it out the feed, but I'm sure I'll be telling it again before long because it's one of the best. Before we finish that, I do want to tell you another story, and that's what's been happening to us in the search for the battlefield. No archaeology has ever identified where the battle took place. There is a modern settlement called Stamford Bridge, a town that's got a bridge over the river Derwent. It's got street names that all relate to the battle and the town is alive with

images of the famous clash. You stop anyone on the street there, they'll tell you about the battle. But no artefacts or remains have ever been discovered there by archaeologists. But recently, fines have been coming out of the ground around a mile to the south of Stamford Bridge at a place called Low Catum. And by fines, I mean a lot of fines. Team History and I have been up a couple of times. And I was there when Simon Richardson, the metal detectorist, unearthed a Viking belt buckle, the clasp shaped to look like the head of a mythical beast. You can make out the eyes and ears and the snout. It's from the 11th century. It is definitely Scandinavian. So exciting. You're standing there in a field rubbing the mud off this thing. Doesn't see the light of day for nearly a thousand years.

minutes later in that same field he found a Viking pommel that's the weighted end of a sword which protects the hand it stops it slipping off the grip and it acts as a bit of a counterweight Simon was shaking with excitement as he showed that one to me next we were finding pieces of male shirt coming out of the ground my favourite find of everything that they've come across up there is a very fancy chape I mentioned one earlier it's a decorated piece of metal it sits the tip of a scabbard of a sword

to stop it being damaged as it rubs against the floor or the flank of a horse We contacted Scandinavian experts, and they say it looks very like those chaps that have been recovered from eastern Viking sites, the Balkans, possibly even Bulgaria. So these fields, in Yorkshire, along the River Derwent, contain not just evidence of Vikings, not just evidence of battle, but of Vikings who have come from the East or who have possessions, objects from the East, exactly what we'd expect from those men that surrounded Harold Hardrada. I'll put up a lot of the images on my social feed when this podcast comes out. And also please do check out the History at Television Documentary that we've been making. You're going to love the objects that have come out of these fields. It's very, very exciting stuff. I had some very happy and exciting times with the wonderful team up there,

and I'd like to thank them again for getting me and history hit involved. You can also watch our episode on the Bayer Tapestry on our YouTube channel, which picks up the story where we've left off with the epic Battle of Hastings, the Norman Conquest, make sure you go and check that out. And finally, thank you for listening to this podcast. Thank you for subscribing, for following, for doing all the things you've got to do. And if you fancy leaving a review, obviously that makes a big difference. Please do it. Thank you so much, folks. That was the story of Stanford Bridge. See you next time. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up's history and watch

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