d it was very possibly to await the delivery of further sureties from the rest of the shire that the king moved out of his new conquest to the otherwise undistinguished village of Stamfordbridge.
On the following day King Harold of England himself arrived at York. News of what was happening in Yorkshire must have been brought to London with extraordinary rapidity, for the battles of Fulford and Stamfordbridge were fought, as men remarked at the time, within five days of each other. Harold possessed the permanent nucleus of an army in the famous body of "huscarles" who resided at his court, and with them he dashed up the great road from London to York, taking along with him so much of the local militia of the counties through which he passed as happened to fall in with his line of inarch. At Tadcaster, where the north road crosses the Wharfe, he found and inspected the English "fleet," and on Monday, the 25th of September, one day after Harold Hardrada had entered the capital of Northtunbria, it opened its gates to Harold of England. At this time Harold can have done scarcely more than pass through the city for the same day he covered the ten miles which separate York from Stamfordbridge and fell unexpectedly upon the Norwegian army scattered in utter unpreparedness along either bank of the Derwent. The Norwegians on the right, or York, bank of the Derwent were driven into the river by the English attack, and then occurred a strange incident of which the record, curiously enough, is only preserved in the chronicle of the distant monastery of Abingdon. It was essential for the English to get possession of the bridge which spanned the unf ordable river before the Norwegians on the left bank should have time to form up in line of battle, and we are told:
"There was one of the Norwegians who withstood the Englishmen so that they could not climb over the bridge and gain the victory. Then one of the Englishmen shot with an arrow and that did nothing, and then came another under the bridge and stabbed him underneath his 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 ca