The Monarchs

The Monarchs: Harold Godwinson - The Last King of Anglo-Saxon England

King for nine months, and the man on the losing side of 1066. He destroyed one invading army before turning to face another - and lost the closest of battles at Hastings, ending six centuries of Anglo-Saxon England.

Harold Godwinson was King of England for less than ten months, and he died in the most famous battle in English history, on the most famous date in the English calendar. He is the last Anglo-Saxon king — the man on the losing side of 1066, the king with the arrow in his eye, the ruler whose defeat at Hastings ended six hundred years of English rule and ushered in the Norman world that reshaped the nation forever.

It is a strange kind of fame, resting entirely on a single afternoon of defeat. But Harold deserves better than to be remembered only as the man William beat. He was the most powerful nobleman in England, an experienced and capable soldier and statesman, and in the autumn of 1066 he achieved something almost superhuman — marching the length of England and destroying one invading army before turning to face another. That he lost the second battle, and with it his kingdom and his life, was a matter of the narrowest margins. Had a single arrow flown differently, the whole history of the English-speaking world might have run another way.

Key Facts

Reigned: January 6, 1066 to October 14, 1066 — about nine months
Born: around 1022
Parents: Godwin, Earl of Wessex, and Gytha Thorkelsdóttir
The last crowned Anglo-Saxon King of England
Won the Battle of Stamford Bridge against the Norwegians, September 25, 1066
Killed at the Battle of Hastings, October 14, 1066
Buried: possibly at Waltham Abbey, though the location is uncertain

The House of Godwin

Harold was not of royal blood, and that fact sits at the heart of his story. He was the son of Godwin, Earl of Wessex, the most powerful nobleman in England — a man who had risen from relatively obscure origins under the Danish king Cnut to dominate English politics. The Godwins were, by the 1050s, the greatest family in the kingdom, richer and more powerful than the king himself, and Harold succeeded his father as Earl of Wessex in 1053, becoming the leading man in England under the childless King Edward the Confessor.

Through the last years of Edward's reign, Harold was effectively the king's right hand and the real power in the land, a skilled soldier who subdued the Welsh and an able administrator and diplomat. He was, in all but name, the natural leader of England — but he had no hereditary claim to the throne, which is why the succession, when it came, was so bitterly disputed.

The Disputed Succession

When Edward the Confessor died on January 5, 1066, childless, he left a vacuum that at least three men believed themselves entitled to fill, and Harold's claim rested on the shakiest of foundations and the strongest of realities.

The English sources say that Edward, on his deathbed, named Harold as his successor and commended the kingdom to his protection. The witan — the council of leading Englishmen who chose kings — accepted him, and Harold was crowned the very next day, January 6, 1066, with what was either indecent haste or entirely sensible speed, given the dangers gathering abroad. He was the most powerful and capable man in England, on the spot, and available; the country needed a strong king immediately, and he was it.

But his rivals did not accept it. William, Duke of Normandy, claimed that Edward had promised him the throne years earlier, and — most damagingly — that Harold himself had sworn a solemn oath on holy relics to support William's claim. This oath, made when Harold was shipwrecked in Normandy and effectively in William's power around 1064, is depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, and it gave William's invasion the crucial appearance of a righteous war against an oath-breaker, complete with papal blessing. Whether Harold swore freely, or under duress, or at all as the Normans described, is precisely the point at issue — but in the propaganda war, it mattered enormously. To the Normans, Harold was a perjurer who had stolen a throne he had sworn to another. And there was a third claimant too: Harald Hardrada, the fearsome King of Norway, who pressed a claim of his own and prepared to take England by force.

Harold swears an oath to Duke William, from the Bayeux Tapestry - the oath that gave the Norman invasion its pretext

The Year of Three Battles

What Harold achieved in the autumn of 1066, in the space of a few weeks, is one of the most remarkable feats in English military history, and it is often forgotten in the shadow of his final defeat.

Through the summer, Harold waited on the south coast with his army and fleet, expecting William's invasion. But the Norman fleet was held back by contrary winds, and by early September Harold's men had exhausted their supplies and their term of service and had to be stood down. Almost immediately, disaster struck from an unexpected direction: Harald Hardrada landed in the north with a huge Viking army, aided by Harold's own estranged brother Tostig, and defeated the northern earls.

Harold reacted with astonishing speed and decision. He marched his army from the south of England to Yorkshire — around two hundred miles — in a matter of days, taking the Norwegians completely by surprise. On September 25, 1066, at Stamford Bridge, he won a crushing and total victory. Harald Hardrada was killed, Tostig was killed, and the Viking army was annihilated so completely that of the hundreds of ships that had come, only a handful were needed to carry the survivors home. It was one of the greatest victories in Anglo-Saxon history, and it should have been the making of Harold's reign. It ended, forever, the era of Viking invasions of England that had begun nearly three centuries before.

Three days later, the wind changed, and William landed at Pevensey on the south coast.

Edith and the Family Divided

Harold's story is bound up with two women named Edith and a brother whose betrayal helped bring him down. For some twenty years, Harold lived with Edith the Fair — Edith Swanneck, or Swan-neck — in what the English recognized as a valid, if not formally church-blessed, marriage, and she bore him several children. When he became king, political necessity led him to make a formal royal marriage to another Edith, the sister of the powerful northern earls Edwin and Morcar, to bind their support to his throne. It is a small window onto how personal and dynastic calculation intertwined in the crisis of 1066.

There is a haunting legend attached to Edith Swanneck and the battle's end. After Hastings, when Harold's body lay stripped and mutilated among the dead, so disfigured that it could not be identified, it was Edith the Fair, so the story goes, who was brought to the field and who alone could identify the body of the king — recognizing him by marks known only to her, on his chest, that she had known in life. Whether true or embroidered, the tale has kept its hold for centuries as an image of love surviving the wreck of a kingdom.

The other family shadow over Harold was his brother Tostig. Once Earl of Northumbria, Tostig had been driven out by a rebellion that Harold, choosing the stability of the realm over family loyalty, had declined to reverse. The embittered Tostig turned traitor, allying with Harald Hardrada of Norway and invading England at his side — and so it was that Harold, at Stamford Bridge, had to fight and kill his own brother to save his kingdom, only weeks before losing it at Hastings. The house of Godwin, which had risen so high, tore itself apart in the very crisis that destroyed it.

Hastings

Harold now had to do it all over again, in reverse. His army, having just fought a savage battle in the north, had to turn around and march the length of England once more to face a fresh, well-prepared enemy in the south. It was an impossible demand, and Harold's decision to meet William quickly rather than wait to gather more men has been debated ever since — but he may have hoped to catch William off guard as he had Hardrada, or to confine the Norman raiding to a small area.

The two armies met on October 14, 1066, on a ridge near Hastings. Harold's army, fighting on foot in the traditional English shield wall along the high ground, faced William's combined force of infantry, archers, and, crucially, cavalry. The battle was long and desperately close — it lasted most of the day, an eternity by medieval standards, and for hours the English shield wall held firm against everything the Normans threw at it. Victory hung in the balance.

The wall broke, according to the Norman accounts, when portions of the English line, believing the Normans to be fleeing, broke ranks to pursue them downhill — a retreat that may have been feigned precisely to draw them out — and were cut apart in the open by the Norman cavalry. Slowly the English were worn down. And toward evening, Harold himself was killed. The Bayeux Tapestry famously shows a figure with an arrow in his eye, and tradition holds that this was how Harold died — though the identification is genuinely ambiguous, and he may have been cut down by Norman knights. Either way, with the king dead and two of his brothers already killed beside him, English resistance collapsed. The battle, and with it Anglo-Saxon England, was over.

The death of Harold at Hastings, from the Bayeux Tapestry - the scene traditionally read as the arrow in the eye

Legacy

Harold's defeat at Hastings is one of the true turning points in the history of the English-speaking world. It ended more than six centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule and brought the Norman Conquest, which transformed England utterly — a new French-speaking ruling class replaced the English aristocracy almost entirely, the language was reshaped, the law and the church and the landscape of castles and cathedrals were remade, and England was bound to the Continent in ways that would shape its history for centuries. Everything that came after — the Plantagenets, the Hundred Years' War, the whole medieval and modern history of the country — flows from the outcome of that single October afternoon.

Harold himself has been claimed by later generations as a symbol of lost English liberty, the last native king before the foreign yoke, a heroic figure who died defending his country against invasion. There is romance in that, and some truth. He was a capable, brave, and legitimate king by the reckoning of his own people, who did nothing wrong except lose the closest of battles at the worst possible moment, exhausted by having just saved his kingdom in the north. His body, according to tradition, was recovered from the field and eventually buried at Waltham Abbey, which he had richly endowed, though the truth of this is uncertain, and one legend even held that he survived to live out his days as a hermit.

The margins were agonizingly narrow. Had the winds not held William back until Harold was forced to disperse his army; had Hardrada not invaded and drawn Harold north; had the shield wall held an hour longer; had a single arrow flown differently — England might have remained Anglo-Saxon, and the whole subsequent history of the world, including the English language in which these words are written, might have been profoundly different. Harold Godwinson lost, and because he lost, everything changed. That is why a king who reigned for nine months and won a forgotten victory is remembered, above all, for the day he fell.

Places Connected to Harold Godwinson

Battle Abbey, East Sussex. Founded by William the Conqueror on the site of the battle, with the high altar reportedly marking the very spot where Harold fell. The battlefield is open to visitors.
The Bayeux Tapestry, Normandy. The Norman account of the whole story — Harold's oath, his coronation, and his death — embroidered within living memory of the events.
Stamford Bridge, East Riding of Yorkshire. Site of Harold's great victory over the Norwegians three days before Hastings; the village commemorates the battle.
Waltham Abbey, Essex. Which Harold richly endowed, and his traditional burial place; a stone marks the supposed site of his grave.
Pevensey, East Sussex. Where William landed on September 28, 1066, occupying the old Roman fort.
Bosham, West Sussex. The Godwin family's home village, depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, from which Harold set sail on the fateful voyage to Normandy.