1066: who was the rightful king?

It was a terrible start to an extraordinary year. 1066 was barely five days old when Edward the Confessor, king of the English, succumbed to a short illness and breathed his last. Just a week earlier, crowds had gathered to witness the consecration of Westminster Abbey, Edward's personal passion project – and his final resting place. Now the people of England braced themselves for an uncertain future.

Edward’s 23 years on the throne had not been easy. He had restored the English royal line after a period of Danish rule under Cnut the Great and his sons. A political pragmatist, he weathered squabbles among the nobles. He was, chroniclers agreed, a good and righteous Christian. Yet Edward had one huge frailty: he had not produced an heir to succeed him. And that created a power vacuum.

Into that vacuum stepped the dead king’s formidable brother-in-law, Earl Harold Godwinson. Initially, Harold had the crucial advantages of physically being in England when Edward died, and of commanding plenty of support across the realm. Among those supporters was an unknown poet who wrote that the Confessor had “entrusted the realm / To a man of high rank, to Harold himself / A noble earl who all the time / Had loyally followed his lord’s commands.”

In the poet’s eyes, at least, Harold was the right man to fill Edward’s boots. Of course, in the event it was not so simple – and 1066 proved to be a bloody and momentous year.

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The stage was now set for a contest for the English crown between three powerful men and a boy. There was Harold Godwinson; Duke William of Normandy; the Viking king Harald Hardrada; and a young man, probably only a teenager, often omitted from this story: Edgar Ætheling, Edward’s great-nephew. We know, of course, which one of these contenders held the crown in his possession at the end of the year. What is less certain is who was the most deserving.

Debate still rages about what happened on Edward’s deathbed. That anonymous poet agreed with one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that Edward chose Harold to succeed him. The Life of King Edward, commissioned by the Confessor’s wife and queen, Edith (who was also, it has to be said, Harold’s sister), describes Edward stretching his hand out to Harold, declaring: “I commend this woman [Edith] and all the kingdom to your protection.” But was protecting the kingdom the same as taking the throne?

Kingmaker's heir

Harold certainly thought so and had himself crowned on the day after Edward’s death – the day of the Confessor’s funeral. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle remarks, rather ruefully, on Harold’s consecration as king of England that “he met little quiet in it as long as he ruled the realm”.

Harold hailed from a powerful family. His late father, Earl Godwin, was English but had seized the opportunity during the upheaval following the Danish invasion of England (1013–16) to rise to prominence at the court of King Cnut. Harold’s mother was a Danish woman with ties to Cnut’s family.

In the troubled period after the death of Cnut in 1035, Godwin was seen as a kingmaker. The family continued to have considerable influence during Edward the Confessor’s reign, despite periodic tensions between the king and these over-mighty nobles.

Harold had extensive military experience, scoring particularly notable victories against the Welsh. It’s likely that he was viewed as a safe pair of hands by many of the English noblemen who made up the witan, the king’s council, which elected him as king.

Yet Harold wasn’t the only nobleman with a credible claim to the English crown at the time of Edward’s death. Edgar Ætheling was a male heir of the English royal family, the House of Wessex – hence his epithet Ætheling, meaning ‘prince, eligible to be king’. As the great-grandson of one Anglo-Saxon king, Æthelred II, and grandson of another, Edmund Ironside, his pedigree was impeccable, too.

Edgar’s father, Edward ‘the Exile’, had been spirited away from England around the time of Cnut’s invasion of England in 1016. He ended up in Hungary, where Edgar was born c1052. Concerned for the English succession, Edward the Confessor had ‘the Exile’ and his family brought back to England in 1057. On his return, ‘the Exile’ 26 received the approval of the witan – and it seemed, for the briefest of moments, that the succession issue had been solved. But it wasn’t to be. Soon after, ‘the Exile’ died – an event that was, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “to the misfortune of this poor people”.

What was then planned for that ill-fated Edward’s young son, Edgar Ætheling? We know that he remained in England as a possible candidate for the throne, but it is unclear what Edward the Confessor had in store for him. Was he lining up Edgar for the succession? Or did the king fear that it would be difficult to persuade the nobles to accept a young, foreign-born leader?

In 1066, Edgar was likely still only a teenager, and presumably in no position to challenge Harold Godwinson’s popularity. His lack of military experience would surely also have counted against him, with the English lords perhaps worried about potential invasion. In fact, only after Harold’s death at the battle of Hastings did these nobles throw their weight behind Edgar. But their support soon crumbled, and the Ætheling’s repeated attempts to seize William’s crown all ended in failure.

Short and fraught

Harold may have been the obvious choice as the Confessor’s successor in the eyes of England’s nobility, but his reign was a short and fraught one. In April 1066, just three months after Harold’s consecration, a worrying portent arrived. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates: “Then over all England there was seen a sign in the skies such as had never been seen before.”

It was a fiery star, which also appears on the Bayeux Tapestry, and has been identified as Halley’s Comet. The chronicler John of Worcester claimed that the blazing light, visible for a week, was seen “through the whole world”. But perhaps it didn’t take a sign from on high to alert the people of England that their country was potentially under threat.

It didn’t take a sign on high to alert the people of England that their country was potentially under threat

For Harold, when trouble first came it arrived in a shape with which he would have been all too familiar: his younger brother, Tostig Godwinson. Edward the Confessor had made the younger Godwinson Earl of Northumbria in the 1050s, but Tostig had alienated the locals so completely that they ousted him and sent for another English lord instead. To prevent further unrest, Harold and King Edward agreed to the rebels’ demands, even though it meant Harold’s brother being exiled. Now Tostig was out for revenge.

Might Harold’s disaffected brother have had designs on the throne himself? According to Heimskringla, a later collection of Norse sagas, Tostig “would by no means suffer to be the underling of a brother to whom he was equal in birth”.

In the same work, Tostig is described travelling to Denmark to seek the aid of its king, Sweyn Estridsen, to whom he was related through his mother. Tostig reportedly addressed Sweyn, offering “to give you all the support that I have at my command in England if you will go with an army of Danes to England to win land just like your uncle Cnut”. Sweyn, however, knew his own limitations and declined, saying that he did not possess Cnut’s martial instincts.

Having been disappointed in Denmark, Tostig now turned to a man who was prepared to wage war against Harold, and who counts as the third of our four main contenders for the throne of England: Harald III of Norway, known as Hardrada.

Heimskringla recounts Tostig promising to command the support of all of the leading men of England. The saga depicts him using flattery to persuade Harald: “I lack nothing more in comparison with my brother Harold than just the name of king. Everyone knows that no such fighting man has been born in Northern Lands as you, and I find it surprising that you have been fighting for 15 winters to win Denmark, but you will not take England, which now lies open to you.”

Formidable reputation

Harald Hardrada, whose epithet meant ‘Harsh-Ruler’ or ‘Resolute’, had the weakest claim to the English throne of our four contenders but did boast a formidable reputation. He was, in the words of Adam of Bremen, the “Thunderbolt of the North”.

Harald’s military career had begun early, fighting alongside his half-brother, King Olaf II, at the battle of Stiklestad in 1030, when he was probably still just a teenager. It proved a traumatic experience: Olaf was killed and Harald was forced to flee Norway. After spending some time in the land of Rus’ at Kyiv, he went to Constantinople (now Istanbul), where he achieved a high rank in the Byzantine army. His followers there likely formed a precursor to the Varangian Guard – the elite unit of bodyguards to Byzantine emperors, made up of Scandinavian and, later, English warriors. In this capacity, Harald took part in – and even led – military expeditions in Sicily and elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

The Norse sagas portray Harald as not just a skilled warrior but also as a shrewd tactician. One fanciful story tells of him breaking a siege by ordering his men to set fire to wood shavings and attach them to the birds who roosted in the besieged city. The birds’ nests, so the sagas tell us, set all the thatched roofs on fire, enabling Harald to capture the city with ease.

On his return to Norway, Harald was able to use the wealth, loyal followers and experience he had gained abroad to leverage his position to co-rule with his nephew – who, conveniently, died shortly afterwards. By 1066, he had been sole king for almost 20 years, and had proved an effective ruler, strengthening the economy and the church as well as eliminating rivals. Arguably, he was the first king of Norway in a meaningful sense.

Did Harald have any right to the English throne, though? The later Norse sagas claim that his nephew and erstwhile co-ruler, Magnus, had made a pact with one of Cnut’s sons, Harthacnut, king of England and Denmark. They both lacked male heirs, so – according to the alleged pact – when one of them died, the survivor would accede to the other’s thrones. And after Harthacnut died in 1042, Magnus indeed took the throne of Denmark for a time – but not that of England, where Edward the Confessor had himself crowned.

So Harald may have had a tenuous claim to the English throne through his co-ruler Magnus’s pact with Harthacnut. But really he was simply being opportunistic in 1066, and would have ruled by right of conquest, like his Danish predecessors had done. As a wealthy kingdom, England was a tempting prize.

The ‘Thunderbolt of the North’ was among the thousands of Vikings to lose their lives that day

According to Heimskringla, as Harald assembled his fleet and made preparations for his assault on England, “some said, reckoning up King Harald’s achievements, that nothing would be impossible for him, while some said that England would be difficult to defeat” because of its large population and the English king’s personal troop of skilled warriors.

As it turned out, the latter was true. Harald’s invasion of England got off to a promising start, his Viking army defeating an English force at Fulford on 20 September before seizing nearby York. Yet just five days later, another English army – this one led by Harold Godwinson – annihilated Harald’s troops at Stamford Bridge. The ‘Thunderbolt of the North’ was among the thousands of Vikings to lose their lives that day. And Tostig, Harold Godwinson’s rebellious younger brother, was cut down beside him.

Race to the coast

Harold Godwinson had seen off one of the main rivals for this throne. Now he had to turn around, race south and face another. The rival in question was, of course, William, Duke of Normandy.

Normandy (‘the Northmen’s land’) as a territorial entity was only 150 years old. Its roots lay in a grant of land made by King Charles III of the West Franks to a Viking named Rollo, in return for helping ward off the threat posed by other Vikings. Over the years, it had grown rapidly from this initial foothold.

William himself had proved effective at maintaining Norman independence from the French kings, fighting a number of wars on Normandy’s borders in the 1050s.

This achievement is perhaps all the more impressive considering the rocky start to William’s rule. No sooner had he inherited the duchy from his father, Robert I (Rollo’s great-great-grandson), than he had to face down accusations about his legitimacy. His enemies were quick to dub him ‘the Bastard’, a nickname inspired not by his character but by the fact that his parents were not properly married, and his mother was of low rank socially. William never quite shook off this insult, but his parents’ relationship was not uncommon and William was politically legitimate. There was no Norman heir with a better claim.

But what of his claim to England? William did have a familial link to the English royal family, though he wasn’t the direct descendant of a previous English king: he was Edward the Confessor’s first cousin once removed through Edward’s mother, Emma of Normandy (William’s great-aunt). Following the Danish invasion of England, Edward had taken refuge in Normandy with his mother’s family, spending his formative years there, at least partly in the ducal court.

So the Confessor’s links with Normandy are undeniable – and one result of those links was that the Normans exerted a growing influence on England over the course of his reign. We know, for example, that Edward invited friends and allies from across the Channel to his court. What we can never be certain of is whether – as Norman writers claimed – Edward was so grateful for his Norman family’s aid that he named his kinsman William as his successor.

If the truth about the Confessor’s intentions have been a bone of contention for nearly 1,000 years, the question of what happened when Harold Godwinson found himself in Normandy in 1064 has proved even more controversial. William’s claim on the English crown rested in part on the contention that, while in Normandy, Harold had sworn to become William’s vassal, supporting his interests and agreeing to help him take the throne. If Harold had sworn such an oath on holy relics, he would have committed perjury by breaking it when he had himself crowned king of England.

Harold was indeed in Normandy that year – as depicted in a famous scene from the Bayeux Tapestry – probably to secure the release of English hostages. Yet the precise details of what happened while he was there remain shrouded in mystery. An English monk, Eadmer, wrote that Harold had been forced to make the oath after being captured. So, after he was free and back safely in England, he did not consider himself bound to it.

The Norman apologists for William’s conquest are, of course, at pains to cast Harold in a bad light. One of these, William of Poitiers – the duke’s chaplain and, perhaps, personal confessor – put great emphasis on the critical oath and its supposedly voluntary nature.

“Harold swore fealty to him according to the holy rite of Christians,” wrote the cleric. “And, as the most truthful and distinguished men who were there as witnesses have told, at the crucial point in the oath he clearly and of his own free will pronounced these words that as long as he lived he would be the vicar of Duke William in the court of his lord King Edward; that he would strive to the utmost with his counsel and his wealth to ensure that the English monarchy should be pledged to him after Edward’s death.”

Moral high ground

So, in this battle to capture the historical narrative, who occupies the moral high ground? Surely not the Duke of Normandy. William of Poitiers’ use of propaganda to justify the conquest betrays its tenuous grounds.

In fact, as a direct descendant of the long line of English kings, it was clearly Edgar Ætheling who had the best dynastic claim to the crown – but it seems that he was never treated as a serious contender. Birthright was not enough in this instance.

Harold Godwinson was, then, the best placed and most able to rule a realm now as Anglo-Danish as he was himself. His death at the battle of Hastings at the hands of Duke William’s soldiers did, of course, put an end to such ambitions.

What made the clashes of rulers in 1066 so fraught and unpredictable was that they were contested by three effective military commanders who would all have made strong kings of England. Writing in the 12th century, Orderic Vitalis reflected on this extraordinary year by observing that: “Changeable fortune often brings a hard and bitter fate to mortal men on Earth, for some climb from the dust to the height of power, others are dashed from great prosperity to groan in the depths of despair.”

Vitalis was right. As the dust settled on the contest for the throne, two kings lay dead. Another was crowned as the most powerful man in England.

1066: The battle for England

Member exclusive | The year 1066 is the most famous in English history, but there's a lot more to the story than one bloody battle at Hastings. In this four-part series, medievalist Marc Morris talks David Musgrove through the full story of the Norman Conquest.

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Caitlin Ellis is associate professor of Nordic medieval history at the University of Oslo

This article is published in the October issue of BBC History Magazine