coat of mail, and then Harold king of the English came over the bridge and his army with him.  We have no details of the straggle which must have raged along the rising ground on which the modern village of Stamfordbridge stands, nor do we know with certainty how Harold Hardrada and Tostig fell, but it is clear that the result of that day's fighting was an unequivocal victory for the English; the men who had been left in charge of the Norwegian fleet at Riccall were willing to accept peace at Harold's hands and were allowed to depart with their ships to Norway. Harold indeed in this great fight had proved himself a worthy inheritor of the crown of the West Saxon kings, and it was a strange destiny which ruled that the last victory in the struggle of three centuries between Englishman and Northman should fall to no descendant of Egbert or Alfred, but to an English king who was half a Northman himself by blood. But a stranger destiny was it which ruled that one week should see the overthrow of the last great invader from the north and the opening of a new era for England in the entry of the greater invader from beyond the Channel. Harold Hardrada fell at Stamfordbridge on Monday, William of Normandy landed at Pevensey on Thursday.
1. The scheme of policy which Green (Conquest of England, 522-524, ed. 1883) founded an relation to their marriage rests upon this assumption.
2. Poem in Worcester Chronicle, 1057.
3. Vita Eadwardi Confessoris (R. S.), 410.
4. Worcester Chronicle, 1042 : "All the people chose Edward and received him for King, as it belonged to him by right of birth."
5. Chadwick, Studies in Anglo-Saxon Institutions, Excursus iv.,p.355.
6. The one contemporary account of Harold's oath which we possess is that given by William of Poitiers (ed. Giles, 108). According to this Harold swore (i) to be William's representative (vicarius) at Edward's court; (2) to work for William's acceptance as king upon Edward's death; (3) in the meantime to cause Dover castle to receive a Norman garrison, and to build other castles where the duke might command in his interest. In a later passage William of Poitiers asserts that the duke wished to marry Harold to one of his daughters. In all this there is nothing impossible, and to assume with Freeman that the reception of a Norman garrison into a castle entrusted to Harold's charge would have been an act of treason is to read much later political ideas into a transaction of the eleventh century. William was Edward's kinsman and we have no reason to suppose that the king would have regarded with disfavour an act which would have given his cousin the means of making good the claim to his succession which there is every reason to believe that he himself had sanctioned twelve years before.
7. Vita Edwardi Confessoris (R. S.), 432
8. William of Poitiers, 123.
9. William of Malrnesbury, Gesta Regum, ii., 299.
10. The statement that William promised, if successful, to hold England as a fief of the papacy is made by no writer earlier than Wace, who has no authority on a point of this kind.
11. Monumenta Gregoriana.
12. Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville, 8.
13. William of Poitiers, 124.
14. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum.
15. The list followed here is that printed by Giles as an appendix to the Brevis Relatio. Scriptores, p.21.
16. Guy of Amiens, 34: "Appulus et Caluber, Siculus quibus jacula fervet."
17. Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, ed. 1889, p. 368.
18. This was Freeman's final view. N. C. iii., 625.
19. Florence of Worcester, 1066.
20. Ordericus Vitalis, P.120.
21. Chronicles of Abingdon, Peterborough, and Worcester, 1066.
22. John of Oxenedes, a thirteenth-century monk of St. Benet of Holme, asserts that Harold entrusted the defence of the coast to AElfwold, abbot of that house. The choice of an East Anglian abbot suggests that his appointment was intended as a precaution against the Scandinavian danger.
23. Heimskringla, page 165.
24. Simeon of Durham, 1066.
25. This episode forms the last entry in the Abingdon version of the Chronicle, and it is described in a northern dialect.