Battle of Fulford

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Battle of Fulford
date September 20, 1066
place Fulford (southern part of York )
output Norwegian victory
Parties to the conflict

Kingdom of Norway and allies

Kingdom of England

Commander

Harald III.
Tostig Godwinson

Morcar, Earl of Northumbria
Edwin, Earl of Mercia

Troop strength
approx. 9,000 (estimate) approx. 5,000 (estimate)
losses

unknown

unknown, but very difficult

The Battle of Fulford took place on September 20, 1066 near the village of Fulford near York . It is the first of three battles in the battle for the English throne after the death of King Edward the Confessor . The Norwegian King Harald , known as Hardråde ( Eng: "the hard one"), and his Anglo-Saxon ally Tostig Godwinson , a brother of the English King Harold Godwinson , landed in the north of England in the first half of September 1066 with an estimated 9,000 fighters. You stood Morcar , the Earl of Northumbria , and his brother Edwin , the Earl of Mercia , with its line-up counter. After what the sources say was a very bloody battle, the Norwegians remained victorious.

Starting position

After Edward the Confessor died on January 5, 1066 without a legitimate heir, Harold Godwinson, the Earl of Wessex , was elected King of England. The Norwegian king himself made a claim to the English royal crown, allied himself with Harold's brother Tostig, who had been in exile since the end of 1065 , and left Norway with allegedly 300 ships. After the crossing, the Norwegians landed in Riccall (now part of the Selby District in North Yorkshire ) and the two brothers Morcar and Edwin opposed them.

The battle

All descriptions of the battle are extremely unclear and contradict each other in terms of their details. No less unclear are the circumstances that led to the battle at Fulford at all. Due to the lack of sources, one can at best speculate about it, which is why researchers often avoided this question. It was believed that Edwin and Morcar from an unknown location outside York managed to intercept the Norwegian army before they could reach York. Conversely, it was also assumed that the Norwegians had managed to provide the Anglo-Saxon army before they could set up in York for defense. Another assumption is that Edwin and Morcar, on their own, decided to battle the Norwegians in a carefully chosen location where they could not fully demonstrate their numerical superiority. This attempt is sometimes seen as a kind of desperate act by a hopelessly inferior Anglo-Saxon troop, and in part as a deliberate calculation of two army leaders whose troops were smaller than those of their opponents, but should not be underestimated in terms of their combat strength.

As far as the battle is concerned, modern attempts at reconstruction suggest the following sequence of events: The Norwegian armed forces had tactically positioned themselves on a hill from which Harald Hadrada had a good view of the battlefield . The Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, stood at the foot of this hill and had to fight uphill. Edwin nevertheless started the attack on the weaker part of the Norwegian armed forces and was initially able to push them back into the impassable marshland. However, this success fizzled out when Harald deployed fresh and stronger troops, which pushed the Anglo-Saxons back.

Harald reacted immediately by sending more men to the right flank in order to be able to attack the opposing center as well. The Anglo-Saxons fighting here were cut off from the main force and retreated to a village, where they took up one last position, but this position also fell, as did the center. The Anglo-Saxons were defeated. Morcar and Edwin survived the fight in the center and were able to get to safety.

Meaning and consequences

Fulford, the first of the three great battles fought in 1066, was and is considered the "forgotten battle". According to a common reading, she had already made an initial preliminary decision for the further course of the struggle for the English throne. What is certain is that the battle won gave the Norwegian king York as the basis for his future plans. Ultimately, however, this battle, which was also the last victory of a Scandinavian army on English soil, was only a very short-term success. Just five days later, the Norwegian army was almost completely wiped out at the Battle of Stamford Bridge . The "danger in the north" was thus averted for King Harold Godwinson.

The won battle at Stamford Bridge, in connection with the previous defeat at Fulford, so the reading outlined above, ultimately contributed significantly to the downfall of Harold Godwinson. If, it was argued, the two earls Edwin and Morcar had not attacked the Norwegian invaders without waiting for reinforcements , they would probably have been able to unite with Harold's army approaching from southern England and fight the battle against the Norwegians with him. The possible victory would then have been easier for the allied Anglo-Saxon army to achieve and, in total, with significantly fewer losses. But so the heavy losses of the Anglo-Saxons in the Battle of Fulford actually led to the fact that the army led by Edwin and Morcar in northern England was virtually eliminated as a military factor for the coming decisive battle against William the Conqueror ; and the subsequent battle at Stamford Bridge also weakened the Anglo-Saxon army from the south, led by King Harold, not insignificantly. For William the Conqueror, this turned out to be an advantage that should not be underestimated in the third and final battle of 1066 near Hastings . While Wilhelm's troops could have looked forward to what was to come relatively fresh and rested, Harold's fighters would not only have been physically affected by the forced march north and back , but also somewhat decimated by the previous battle and thus clearly at a disadvantage.

The problem with all analyzes of the Battle of Fulford and its aftermath is that the source base on which they are based is so narrow that they inevitably lead into the realm of speculation. For example, the sources do not contain any tangible data that would allow the respective level of knowledge of the protagonists on the Anglo-Saxon and Norwegian side and the underlying decision-making processes of the protagonists to be reconstructed. It is not known where Edwin and Morcar were at the time the Norwegians landed at Riccall, nor whether they had any knowledge of their approach and what specific plans they then made. In addition, it is not known what plans the Norwegian king and his ally Tostig Godwinson pursued before and after their landing and what information they had about their two opponents. It is also not possible to determine whether there was a realistic chance for Edwin and Morcar on the one hand and King Harold on the other hand to unite their two armies raised in the north and south of England and to confront the Norwegians together, and whether this option at all was ever considered. Because of all these unknowns, it is also not possible to say how the chances of the two Earls of fending off the Norwegians with a chance of success actually stood. The only thing that is certain is that a battle had to come about if they wanted to prevent the Norwegian king from seizing York as the basis for his further action. That would inevitably have meant the loss of their territory.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The basis for all information on the army strength of the Norwegians are the numbers of ships called up in the sources, which range from 200 to over 500, the latter number being considered to be significantly excessive. Most historians assume that between 200 and 300 ships were available to Harald Hardråde for his invasion. The number of these (assumed) ships is then multiplied by an assumed number of crew members per ship. Corresponding data for the crew of a ship from the Viking Age can be derived from the ship finds of Roskilde and Skuldelev . See u. a. Peltzer (2016), pp. 203–206, who assumes that Harald Hardråde “ probably accompanied more than 8000 men to England ” (p. 206) and DeVries (2003), p. 241f. However, a number of mainly popular science authors also assume significantly higher figures for the Norwegian fleet and the crew members per ship. Accordingly, they have a Norwegian army strength of well over 10,000 men. McLynn (1999), p. 196, for example, assumes no fewer than 18,000 Norwegian fighters who are said to have landed in England in 1066.
  2. ↑ On this, see Jones (2011), p. 202, who bases this estimate on the one hand on the number of fighters assumed by the research who were to be recruited by the two earls in their domain , on the other hand on the basis of field surveys, which in his opinion high probability would have led to the discovery of the actual battlefield, it comes to the conclusion that it would have made no military sense to want to maintain the starting position of the Anglo-Saxons chosen for the battle with fewer men.
  3. ↑ A good example of this is the description in Bennett (2001), pp. 27f. and, the battle and its history only the few fairly safe Facts where respect 35 lecture are.
  4. ↑ See Waßenhoven (2016), p. 49f.
  5. ↑ See DeVries (2003), pp. 255–259 and Peltzer (2016), pp. 213–215, where the importance of York as a possible basis for the Norwegian invaders is pointed out.
  6. Jump up to Charles Jones: The forgotten Battle of 1066. Fulford.
  7. ↑ See Frank M. Stenton: Anglo-Saxon England. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1947, p. 528 and Schofield (1966) .
  8. ↑ See UK Battlefields Resource Center: Battle of Fulford . Also the new presentation of the Scandinavian Rudolf Simek : The history of the Normans. From Viking chiefs to kings of Sicily. Verlag Reclam, Ditzingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-15-011174-1 , p. 172, takes this undoubtedly plausible point of view.
  9. ↑ See Peltzer (2016), pp. 212–214 and Waßenhoven (2016), pp. 48–50. On the plans of the Norwegian king and his ally Tostig Godwinson cf. but above all DeVries (2003), pp. 230-255. It should be noted that the conclusions of the medievalist and military historian Kelly DeVries are extremely informative and exciting to read, but are also often highly speculative.
  10. ↑ See Schofield (1966) , who suggests that King Harold Godwinson tried to come to the aid of his two earls in the north as quickly as possible after he had learned more precisely about the strength of the Norwegian army.

Coordinates: 53 ° 55 ′ 52 "  N , 1 ° 4 ′ 12"  W