Harold Godwinson - Last Saxon King of England Documentary

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:01]On the 6th of January 1066, Harold Godwinson, the head of England's most powerful noble family, was crowned at Westminster Abbey. King Harold II was the first English ruler ever to be crowned at Westminster. His coronation was unusual in other ways. It took place only one day after the death of King Edward the Confessor. It also marked the beginning of one of the shortest reigns in English royal history, one that ended 9 months later at the Battle of Hastings.

[00:00:41]Why was Harold in such a rush to be crowned king in January 1066?

[00:00:48]And on what basis did he claim the throne in the first place? This is the story of Harold Godwinson and the Norman conquest of England.

[00:01:12]The man known to history as Harold Godwinson or King Harold II of England is understood to have been born either in the year 1022 or 1023.

[00:01:27]This was most likely in the Wessix region of southern England, perhaps at Winchester, but this is conjectural, and there is no definitive document or account stating where and when he was born. Harold's father, unsurprisingly, given Harold's surname, Godwinson, was Godwin of Wessix. Godwin's father was quite possibly Wolfn North Shield, a thing or local lord of Sussex in southern England.

[00:02:03]Wolfnouth was not a powerful national figure, but he did carve out a position of importance in the English Channel in the early 11th century by controlling a small fleet here that engaged regularly in piracy. Although he was an Anglo-Saxon lord, Godwin rose in the years before Harold was born through service to King Canute, a Danish king of England. Godwin became Earl of Wessix around four or 5 years before Harold was born. Over time, he rose to become the most powerful lord in the kingdom of England. A development which would pave the way for Harold to become king himself one day. Godwin married Githther Thordier.

[00:02:53]She was a Danish noble woman from an esteemed family. Her brother was Ulf Thorgson, a Danish earl who married Estrred Svenata, a sister of Canut the Great, the man who eventually rose to become king of England, Denmark, and Norway. Thus, Harold, who was half Anglo-Saxon and half Danish, rose in large part because of his father's advantageous marriage into the Danish nobility.

[00:03:24]Githa and Godwin had numerous other children. Amongst these were three different sons and a daughter who would all play prominent parts in Harold's life and career. Three of his brothers, Swain, Tostig, and Girth, would all violently oppose him at different times, though Girth would ultimately die fighting alongside his brother at Hastings in 1066.

[00:03:54]Harold's sister, Edith, would marry Edward the Confessor and was Queen Consort of England for 21 years before Harold secured the throne in January 1066.

[00:04:10]The kingdom that Harold was born into was at the center of an oddly cosmopolitan world. For centuries in the early Middle Ages, large parts of Europe had very little contact with places just a few hundred kilometers away. The various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of 7th century England, for instance, did not have extensive connections with the kingdom of the Franks in France or the Visigoththic kingdom in Spain. That all changed with the rise of the Norse people in the late 8th century and their conquest and settlement of lands as desperate as Iceland, Ireland, Orne, Northern England, Normandy in France and large parts of Eastern Europe. A new interconnected Europe was created, one in which the North Sea and the English Channel became highways rather than obstacles.

[00:05:11]The arrival of the Danes also spurred on the unification of England in the late 9th and early 10th centuries.

[00:05:19]These new webs of politics and genealogy all around Northern Europe meant that Danes and Norwegians were heavily involved in England during Harold's time. In 1013, Swain Forkbeard, the king of Denmark and Norway, had conquered [music] England.

[00:05:39]Although the House of Wessix was briefly reestablished in 1014, in 1016 King Canut, a Dne had seized the English throne. He would ruled under his death in 1035, eventually becoming the ruler of a North Sea Empire that covered England, Denmark, and Norway. This meant that England was a kingdom split between old Anglo-Saxon families and more recent Danish noble lines.

[00:06:12]These families had intermarried with Danes and Northmen elsewhere in places like Ireland and Normandy in Northern France.

[00:06:20]All of these disperate ties and interconnected politics would have a bearing over Harold's life and his brief reign as king of England.

[00:06:35]Compared with English lords and rulers of the early middle ages, there are quite a lot of sources available for studying the life of Harold Godwinson.

[00:06:46]For instance, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a large analistic history that covers hundreds of years of England's medieval history and which was added to over time, provides accounts of events in the 11th century. Numerous histories of the era were written by church scholars during the late 11th and 12th centuries, notably William of Marsbury and William of Poier. Harold is one of the central figures of the famous Bayer tapestry depicting the events leading up to, during, and following the Norman conquest of England. A visual source that sheds great light on his life and role in these events. However, all of these sources are biased, and they usually present a resoundingly negative picture of Harold. Nearly all of the information that has come down to us was written from the perspective of the Normans who viewed Harold as having tried to seize the crown that rightfully belonged to William of Normandy. Hence, Harold's actions were not presented in an objective manner. Even the Doomsday Book, a record of land ownership across England produced 20 years after Harold's time, contains a fundamental bias against Godwinson, as the compilers of it tried to fundamentally disavow the idea that he had ever ruled as king of England, however brief his reign might have been. There he was referred to as Haraldus Kase, Count Harold, though the sheer number of references to his former landholdings made it evident that he had not been any normal lord. This sustained hostility to Harold and the written record needs to be kept in mind while evaluating his life and reign.

[00:08:50]The details of Harold's early life on a personal level are limited. This is typical of the time. Chronicers weren't interested in describing the childhood education of kings or nobles, and these could often be limited in any event in the 11th century. For instance, William the Conqueror was famously illiterate.

[00:09:14]While we know virtually nothing about Harold's childhood, it is utterly clear that his fortunes were dictated by his father's actions and how the family was promoted to immense power. King Kenut died in 1035.

[00:09:32]A power struggle followed in which Godwin supported the claim of Hakanut, a son of Canut. When he finally secured the throne in 1040, it meant that Godwin and his family were promoted to become one of the most powerful families in England.

[00:09:51]This was then compounded when Harold's sister Edith married King Edward the Confessor, the ruler of England from 1042 onwards.

[00:10:02]Godwin paved the way for Edward, who had been living in exile in Normandy and northern France, to return to England and secure the throne in 1042.

[00:10:13]Pursuant from these developments, Edith became Queen Consort of England.

[00:10:18]Harold's older brother, Spain, became Earl of the Southwest Midlands in 1043.

[00:10:24]His younger brother, Tostig, became Earl of North Umbrea in 1055.

[00:10:30]and two of his other brothers, Leafwin and Girth, would each acquire Eldoms in due course. Godwin had clearly reached the point where he was the most powerful lord of the realm as father-in-law of King Edward the Confessor. Not only did he manage to form a marriage alliance with Edward by marrying his daughter to him, he became the real power behind the throne in England. While Edward was viewed as an extremely pious and well-intentioned ruler, he was ultimately dominated by Godwin throughout his reign. This was the backdrop against which Harold would rise in the kingdom's politics and eventually briefly become king of England in 1066.

[00:11:23]Harold was promoted along with his brothers. Around 1045 he was made Earl of East Anglia with lands stretching across what is now East Anglia, Essex, Cambridge and Huntingtonshire.

[00:11:38]This followed the banishing of the previous earl of East Anglia, a Dne named Osgod Kluffer, who had been a prominent figure during the reigns of several kings going back to the time of King Kenut, and who had served as Stala, the master of the royal stables. He was forced out under mysterious circumstances around 1045 and sent into exile, where he conspired against King Edward. Harold at only around 23 years of age took his position as the most powerful lord in East Anglia. As well as forming strong ties from early in his 20s with the foremost political and ecclesiastical figures in East Anglia, Harold took as his concubine at this time a woman named Edith Swanik or Swann's hulls. She came from a very prominent family and may have been a granddaughter of Ethel the unready, the king of England between 978 and the civil wars of the mid 1010s.

[00:12:46]Her father was Thor the Tall, a prominent Danish lord in England in earlier times.

[00:12:53]They would have five children together.

[00:12:56]They do not appear to have ever married, though concubine relationships of this kind were common in the 10th and 11th centuries.

[00:13:06]More broadly, the relationship reflected Harold's attempts to form close ties to some of the most powerful Danish aristocratic lineages in England. For instance, he also formed an alliance with Stigand, the bishop of Elm, a cleric of mixed Anglo-Saxon and Danish ancestry.

[00:13:27]Edith brought Harold additional land and power, too. She had inherited extensive lands in Eastern England and was known euphemistically as the rich on account of her inheritance.

[00:13:45]While Harold had already risen to become a powerful lord in East Anglia and nationally by the mid 1040s, his position was augmented further from 1046 onwards.

[00:13:59]This came about owing to internal family disputes and the sheer lack of political judgment displayed by his older brother Swain. Had the latter been willing to b his time and build his power, he could have become the most powerful noble of the realm in future years once his father had passed away. Instead, he was overly anxious to acquire a great position within England's affairs and committed a series of highly inflammatory acts in his attempt to expand his influence.

[00:14:34]This included kidnapping the abbis of the powerful convent of Lemster. A year later, after committing several other indiscretions, he was banished from England and fled into exile in the Low Countries before finally heading to Denmark. His extensive erdom was then divided up between Harold, a Danish lord and a cousin of the house of Godwin named Bon Estrson and a lord from Normandy, Richard of Mont. Swain returned to England before too long to try to reclaim his position and ended up murdering Bayon, a crime which led to him being banished yet again. Although he miraculously managed to acquire a second pardon in 1050 and was allowed to return home once again, Swain never reacquired his father's favor. Henceforth, Godwin placed his hopes for the future on Harold and viewed him as the son who would succeed him politically as the preeeminent aristocrat in England.

[00:15:51]Godwin's growing reliance on Harold as a stable son who could support the family's political ambitions became doubly necessary around 1050.

[00:16:03]Despite the marriage of Edward to Harold's sister, King Edward's relationship with Godwin had cooled and he was in danger of losing his status as the power behind the throne. The main point of contention was over the appointment of a new archbishop of Canterbury, the premier ecclesiastical office in England. Godwin and Harold along with a large proportion of the monks of the Abbey of Canterbury favored the candidacy of Etheldrich, a kinsman of Godwin's and also a monk of the local abbey. The king instead favored the appointment of Robert of Jumierge, the bishop of London since 1044.

[00:16:47]Edward had spent his youth in Normandy, and Robert was a Norman who he had known for over a decade before he returned to England to become king. Robert was hugely opposed to the power of Godwin and his family, viewing the Earl, Harold, Queen Edith, and the rest of the family as having acquired a near monopoly on power across England. In the midst of the dispute over the succession to the Archbishop Rick in 1051, Eustace, Counter Bologno, a French lord who was married to King Edward's sister, arrived at southern England and ended up in an armed altercation with Godwin's retainers near Dover. When Godwin was ordered by the king to inflict punishment on the local burgesses for their actions, he refused, leading Edward to banish Godwin and the rest of the family. While his father and most of his family left England for Fllanders in the low countries, Harold and his brother Lewin headed to Ireland where he formed an alliance with Dimma's Makme Namo, the king of Lster. Swain, the brother who had created so much unrest over the past years, headed off on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He died on the return trip. Thus, as 1051 came to an end, it appeared that the House of Godwin's fortunes were at a low eb and that Harold and his father and siblings could well live out their days in exile.

[00:18:28]Even Harold's sister, Edith, the Queen of England, had been temporarily forced into a convent in England by her husband.

[00:18:40]The temporary fall of Earl Godwin and his family was very short-lived.

[00:18:47]Godwin and his sons in the Low Countries, with the support of his wife's Danish relatives, organized support from around the North Sea world, while Harold acquired aid from Ireland.

[00:19:01]They then converged on England in 1052.

[00:19:05]there. Their English allies rose in support of them as well. It was clear immediately to King Edward that he could not resist Godwin and his family. He relented and restored Godwin, Harold, and his brothers to theirs.

[00:19:24]Edith was released from her confinement and resumed her position as queen.

[00:19:30]Edward would never again try to challenge the preeeminent position of the House of Godwin within England. Only a year later, Harold was the head of that house. His father died on the 15th of April 1053, possibly from a stroke.

[00:19:49]With this, Harold, at 30 or 31 years of age, succeeded as Earl of Wessix and became the most powerful lord of the realm.

[00:19:59]Moreover, this occurred just as the family was reaching the peak of its power. With Edward's resistance to their influence broken in 1052, Harold and his family continued to amass unparalleled power, land, and wealth in the mid to late 1050s.

[00:20:19]By the end of the decade, in addition to holding that stretched across southern and eastern England, the family had also acquired lands in Mercia in the Midlands and the West and even north into Yorkshire. Their estates generated an annual income of £8,500, an enormous sum in the 11th century. By comparison, King Edward's own estates generated £2,500.

[00:20:52]Edward the Confessor was king of England, but power and wealth lay in the hands of Harold Godwinson and his family members.

[00:21:06]Harold's position as England's preeeminent noble translated into becoming a major patron of the church in East Anglia, Wessix and beyond.

[00:21:17]Amongst the religious houses that he provided funding and support for was Peterborough Abbey. The abbot there, Leferick, would later fight alongside him at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

[00:21:32]Harold also developed ties to Elely Abbey and provided the house with relics as a token of his aristocratic patronage.

[00:21:41]However, the religious house that he gave the greatest support to was Waltham Holy Cross Abbey in Essex.

[00:21:50]Here he organized the construction of a new church for the religious community and a large stone cross there. His patronage was based around a distinct cult of the cross that existed in the Anglo Scandinavian North Sea world in the 10th and 11th centuries. One which saw life-sized stone crosses erected within many church grounds and abbies.

[00:22:15]He also patronized the creation of a series of beautiful manuscripts that filled Wolam's library. While his own literacy levels are unclear, Harold evidently had an interest in manuscripts which were as much picture books as written texts during the high middle ages. It is known, for instance, that he owned an elaborate book on the subject of falconry. He need not have been literate to appreciate this. The text could have been read to him.

[00:22:53]Harold's patronage of Waltham involved providing the institution with saints relics. These included an alleged piece of St. Peter's chain and a piece of his beard. Relics of this kind were common throughout medieval Europe. It was not unheard of for there to be five or six examples of the same saints hands at various monasteries, churches, convents, and cathedrals across the continent.

[00:23:24]What was unusual at Waltham is that some of these relics have been brought directly to the religious house by its lay patron. Harold went on pilgrimage to Rome around the year 1057 or 1058.

[00:23:41]This was very typical of the era. There was a surge in religious sentiment across Europe in the 11th century, fueled by the turn of the millennium when concerns about the potential end of days around the year 1000 receded and a new religious fervor emerged culminating in the crusades in Iberia, Northern Europe and the Levant. This resulted in many rulers making the pilgrimage to Rome, notably King McBth of Scotland, the king on whose rule William Shakespeare's play was loosely based.

[00:24:21]McBth had made his pilgrimage to Rome seven or eight years before Harold. In addition to visiting the standard pilgrimage sites within and around the eternal city, Harold most likely petitioned for an audience with the pope in relation to disputes that had arisen over ecclesiastical and secular lands in southern England following the appointment of the powerful Stigand as Robert of Jumier's successor as Archbishop of Canterbury. This could have been with any one of three different popes. Victor II, Steven the 9th, or Nicholas II, as there was a rapid turnover of heads of the Roman Catholic Church between 1057 and 1059.

[00:25:12]What the outcome was if he did petition against Stigans is unclear. The cleric remained as Archbishop of Canterbury for the remainder of Harold's lifetime.

[00:25:27]Harold's pilgrimage to Rome was part of a much wider expedition around Europe between 1056 and 1058.

[00:25:37]It is concretely known that he traveled to Fllanders in what is now Belgium in the autumn of 1056.

[00:25:46]He traveled onwards to Germany afterwards, possibly on his way to Rome, though this is not known for certain.

[00:25:54]Historians of Harold's reign and 11th century England tend to agree that his continental adventure was connected with the presence of Edward the exile in central Europe at that time. This Edward was a son of Edmund Ironside who was briefly king of England for 7 months in 1016 before Canut claimed the throne.

[00:26:20]Edward was an infant upon Canut's succession and the new Danish king sent him out of England to prevent him becoming a source of conspiracy against his rule in future years. Edward's subsequent life trajectory is debated.

[00:26:37]He was first in Scandinavia and then may have spent time in the Kievan Rous in Eastern Europe before ending up in Hungary for many years. News of his presence there had reached England and Harold was quite possibly on the continent in 1056 to facilitate Edward's return to England to become the acknowledged heir to Edward the Confessor. In doing so, he would have hoped to gain influence over the future king and become the power behind the throne in a subsequent reign. The plan did not succeed. While Edward the exile did return to England early in 1057, he died within days of meeting with the king and having his status as the new heir recognized.

[00:27:31]The timing of Harold's travel to Europe and Edward's return to England seems far too coincidental for him not to have played a role in Edward's arrival back in Britain.

[00:27:48]This was possibly not Harold's only foray to the continent. In 1064, he is also believed to have made the short trip over the English Channel to Normandy to visit the court of Duke William of Normandy. This was highly significant.

[00:28:08]Harold's brother-in-law, King Edward, did not have an heir. Historians have never been able to agree on whether Edward's lack of an heir was because his extreme religious piety, which earned him the subriay the confessor, meant that he remained celibate, or simply because he and Edith were unable to have children. Whatever the cause of it, we know that Edward did not have an heir, and there was no obvious relative to succeed him after the death of Edward the exile following his return to England years earlier. The story spread by the Normans after the Norman conquest was that Edward preempted a succession crisis by acknowledging William of Normandy as his designated heir as early as 1051.

[00:29:03]By 1064, it was clear that Edward would never produce an heir. Thus, a number of records state that Harold was sent to Normandy in 1064 to confirm to William that he was to succeed Edward when he died. The only issue is that the sources that make these claims were produced by Norman writers in the years after the Norman conquest of 1066.

[00:29:34]Therefore, it is possible that Harold made no such visit to the Norman court at Ru in Normandy in 1064 and that this was later invented to bolster William of Normandyy's claim to the English throne.

[00:29:52]Harold had been the head of the House of Godwin since his father's death in 1053.

[00:29:59]Additionally, his older brother Swain, who had been the troublesome member of the family, had died the previous year.

[00:30:08]On the face of it, this had reduced the problem of fractious members of the family. But in 1065, his younger brother, Tostig, the Earl of North Umbrea since 1055 and the family's most important figure in the north of England, ended up mired in controversy. The local lords there rebelled against him and tried to install Mora, a grandson of an old Mercian earl named Leick as the new ruler of the north. Their argument was that Tostig was acting above his station and was trying to build up a base of support in the north to challenge both Harold and the king. Dostig was driven out by these lords and went into exile.

[00:30:59]Harold did not try to save his brother.

[00:31:03]Instead, aware that Edward was ill and that a contested succession was pending, he allied with the northern lords and married a prominent Mercian noble woman named Elgif.

[00:31:19]By the time the lords of the north rebelled against Tostig's influence there and moved to expel him, the king's health was declining. After Harold's brother went into exile and as he moved to marryith, it became evident that Edward was going to die. This was clear when Westminster Abbey was consecrated on the 29th of December 1065.

[00:31:47]There had been a Benedicting abbey here since the 10th century, but Edward had made it part of his life's work to have a great new abbey built at the site outside London. Thus, when it was announced that he would not be able to attend the consecration of the abbey that he had spent so much of his reign working on, no one was in any doubt that something was gravely wrong with him. He died a week later. The usual date given for his death is the 5th of January 1066, though it may have been on the night of the fourth. The claim subsequently went out around the country that Edward had named Harold as his successor on his deathbed.

[00:32:36]Then with unseammly haste, Edward was buried on the 6th of January, and Harold was crowned the very same day at Westminster Abbey, becoming the first king to have his coronation at the New Abbey. The suspicion has always been that Harold moved to hold his coronation as quickly as he did because he knew his claim to the throne was weak and he wanted to cement it as quickly as possible. In this manner, Harold Godwinson became King Harold II of England and the 282 day long donastic reign of the House of Godwin commenced.

[00:33:25]The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle remarked in an understated way about Harold's time as king that he met little quiet in it as long as he ruled the realm. This was an understatement to say the least.

[00:33:41]Harold's accession was challenged by two other men. One of these was William of Normandy, whom Edward had potentially earmarked as his designated heir, and whom several admittedly biased Norman chronicers would later claim that Harold had gone to Normandy to acknowledge as the heir. In 1064, a second claimment emerged from across the North Sea, and he was the rival that Harold would have to see off a challenge from first. His name was Harald Hadrada.

[00:34:17]Harold was the son of a local king in Norway, Sigur Seir. As a teenager, he fled from Scandinavia after a power struggle and spent the entirety of the 1030s and early 1040s as a mercenary in the Kievan Ruths in Eastern Europe and within the Baantine Empire. He eventually returned to his homeland in Scandinavia and claimed the crown of Norway. When Edward died in January 1066, [music] Tostig Harold's brother, who had recently been ousted from his position of power in the north of England, encouraged him to try to claim the English throne. In early September, his plans were advanced enough that he sailed across the North Sea and met up with Tostig's forces in northern England. Harold responded energetically and marched north to confront his rival and his brother. They met on the field of battle at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire on the 25th of September. This was a large battle by 11th century English standards involving upwards of 20,000 men in all. The Norse Chronicles later claimed that Harold sent a messenger to Tostig offering to pardon him and grant him an elder again if he withdrew his support for Hadrada. His brother refused and in the resulting clash, Tostig was killed along with Hadrada as Harold managed to defeat his first challenger.

[00:36:01]Under normal circumstances, the Battle of Stamford Bridge would have been a great feat of arms for an English king that secured the throne. Harold, though, was entirely unlucky to face two different invasions of England at exactly the same time. 3 days after Harold defeated Hadrada and Tostig's combined forces at Stamford Bridge in the north, William of Normandy landed with his own army at Pevency in Sussex on the southern coast of England. He was now much closer to London than Harold was. News reached Godwinson of Williams invasion of England on the 1st of October 1066.

[00:36:49]As a result, Harold had to march south with his army at speed without fully recovering from the Battle of Stamford Bridge. This was a distance of nearly 250 mi traversed in 12 days or approximately 20 m per day. For an army in the 11th century, that was an extremely swift pace, carrying heavy weaponry and armor. And the march following so soon after a forced march northwards and a battle against Hadrada's army tired out Harold's men even further. At the end of the rapid southward journey, his forces had little time to rest before confronting Williams Norman host near Hastings in Sussex in the south of England on the 14th of October 1066.

[00:37:48]Although it should be noted that more recently a claim has been made by academic professor Tom Lance that Harold's forces actually arrived by sea and that his forces arrived fresh and rested. A substantial departure from the largely accepted version of events.

[00:38:11]Modern estimates suggest both armies most likely ranged between about 6,000 and 9,000 men. The clash would decide the fate of England and Harold Godwinson.

[00:38:29]A unique account of the Battle of Hastings survives from the Bayer Tapestry, the rich visual depiction of the events leading up to and throughout the Norman conquest of England. At dawn, on the morning of the battle, Harold prepared his forces on an elevated ridge where Battle Abbey stands today, a religious establishment later built by the Normans to commemorate the scene of their most famous victory. Here, Harold's forces formed a shield wall that probably stretched a half a kilometer long and which in tandem with their elevated position was designed to stop any Norman cavalry charge. While this line of infantry was the core of Harold's army, the Normans relied to a great extent on their cavalry, the elite shock troops of Europe during the high middle ages.

[00:39:27]While both sides had archers available, an issue for Harold's forces, which quite possibly contributed to his defeat, was a lack of arrows. The Anglo Danish army had simply expended a large number of arrows at Stamford Bridge and didn't have time to replenish their stores before clashing with the Normans at Hastings.

[00:39:52]What followed was a battle in which the Normans were the aggressor, constantly launching charges to try to break the Anglo Danish lines. The fighting went on all day, according to accounts, only finally concluding as the light was fading over the battlefield.

[00:40:12]The cause of the eventual victory was the killing of Harold. There are differing accounts. One suggests that he was isolated by the Normans and killed by several of William's followers.

[00:40:27]Another describes an arrow striking him in the eye underneath the rim of his helmet. A version of events which corresponds with the Bayer tapestry. As he fell, the resolve of his followers collapsed and the Normans won the field.

[00:40:45]Two of Harold's younger brothers, Girth and Lewin, both fell fighting as well at Hastings.

[00:40:56]It is not entirely certain what happened to Harold's body after the Battle of Hastings. An account written from a Norman perspective claimed that he was buried near the battlefield.

[00:41:10]It is more probable though that his remains were taken to Waltham Holy Cross Abbey and laid to rest at the religious site that he had patronized so greatly in life. A tradition even holds that his first wife or concubine Edith showed up to Hastings after the fighting and organized the transport of his body to Waltham. While the arrival of his recently spurned concubine to oversee the retrieval of his body from the battlefield is possibly too colorful a story to be believed. It is nonetheless almost certainly the case that Harold's body was taken to Walam and laid to rest there. His body was moved three times over the next 110 years as the site was redeveloped. And despite his status as the ruler who had opposed the Norman conquerors, a local cult seems to have developed at Waltham around his remains in the late 11th and 12th centuries. a sign of the residual support for the House of Godwin and the old Anglo-Saxon aristocracy for decades after the Norman conquest. His remains were demoted as a scene of residual royal worship in 1177 when King Henry II reformed Walam Abbey and refounded it as an Augustinian priaryy of the cannon's regular as part of his efforts to reform the church and religious houses throughout England.

[00:42:49]An alternative legend developed not long after Harold's death which claimed that he had not actually died at all at the battle of Hastings.

[00:43:00]This account is found in the Vita Haraldi or life of Harold, an anonymous Latin text which was copied out by a scribe at Wolam around the year 125.

[00:43:13]Though the text is based on an early tradition, this claimed that Harold was wounded at Hastings but did not die.

[00:43:23]Instead, his supporters spirited him away to Winchester, the ancestral capital of the kings of the House of Wessix. He spent 2 years in secret there, recovering from the injuries he had sustained in the battle. Then with the Normans in control of England, he made his escape from the kingdom he had once briefly ruled. According to the Vita, he spent several years traveling around as a pilgrim on the continent in Germany and adjoining lands.

[00:43:57]Eventually he returned to England and went by the name of Christian. There he spent a 10-year long period living as a hermit near Dover in a cave before traversing the country to the town of Chester. It was here that he spent the last part of his life, finally admitting to a confessor before his death that he was old King Harold II and had survived his famous showdown with William the Conqueror at Hastings.

[00:44:30]The Vita Haroldi provides a colorful alternative ending to the battle of Hastings, but there is no reason to believe that anything written in it was anything other than fantasy.

[00:44:47]Of course, Harold's death at Hastings did not bring the Norman conquest of England to an end. Harold's cause had many supporters still, and there were other Anglo-Saxon and Danish lords of England who were viewed as more favorable candidates to become king of England rather than allowing a foreign interloper from France to seize the throne through brute force. For instance, in the immediate aftermath of the defeat at Hastings, Edgar Athling, a young grandson of King Edmund Ironside, who had briefly ruled England half a century earlier in 1016, and a son of Edward the exile, was elected as king of the English by a Witten council, albeit he submitted to William within weeks when the new king reached London. The fighting in parts of England continued for many years. William and his Norman companions unleashed a devastating campaign of violence and scorched earth across England and the borderlands with Wales in order to secure their control over the country. And by the start of the 1070s, they were more firmly in control of England. The same doomsday book which tried to suggest that Harold was never anything greater than an earl provides a window into how dramatic the scale of the change in landholding across England was by the mid 1080s.

[00:46:24]William didn't just defeat Harold and conquer the country. He introduced an entirely new ruling class, one which spoke a different language, governed using different laws and systems, and which had a fundamentally different culture. England's language, law, customs, and political system would not be what they are today if William had not defeated Harold at Hastings.

[00:46:55]Moreover, because England's systems and culture were exported to almost every corner of the world at the height of Britain's empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Battle of Hastings had an unusually large bearing on the course of world history.

[00:47:17]Not everyone was willing to accept the new dispensation.

[00:47:22]Several of Harold's sons continued their opposition to William and the Normans in the years that followed. At first, they withdrew to the West Country and used this as a base from which they coordinated their movements against the invaders.

[00:47:39]Later, as Williams control over England grew, they fled from the country altogether and settled in Ireland. From Dublin, Harold's son, Godwin, obtained the patronage of Diamud, the king of Lster, and a claimant to the high kingship of Ireland. From there, we are led to believe from numerous Irish and Angloorman chronicles that they launched several major raids against England in the late 1060s, one involving dozens of ships that sailed up the seven estury towards Bristol. Ultimately, these attacks were unsuccessful.

[00:48:21]Harold's many children eventually ended up dispersing far and wide across Europe, marrying into royal and noble households in Scandinavia and even as far away as Ruthenia around modern-day Lithuania and Bellarus.

[00:48:42]While most medieval accounts of Harold, barring legendary ones like that found in the Vita Haraldi were uniform in trying to present an image of an illegitimate king who was defeated and killed by the rightful successor to the throne. Popular views of Harold changed in the 19th century. For instance, in 1876, Alfred Lord Tennyson produced a play entitled Harold. It departed from the stereotypical depiction of Harold and instead portrayed him as a heroic, though ultimately doomed ruler of England. 28 years earlier in 1848, Edward Bullwitten had published Harold, the last of the Saxon kings, a similarly nuanced work of historical fiction in which Harold appears as an ultimately righteous ruler whose morality is compromised by the challenges to his rule. These literary works were augmented by EA Freeman's history of the Norman conquest of England, published as a multi volume study in the 1870s.

[00:49:56]Here, Harold was also depicted as a misunderstood hero of England's medieval history. These works were the product of the deep sense of romantic nationalism that pervaded Europe in the middle of the 19th century. They show how the life story of a ruler like Harold could be bent from being a piece of negative propaganda as presented by the Normans in the high middle ages to become an entirely new piece of mythology suited to the politics of the 19th century.

[00:50:34]History is filled with stories of winners and losers. those who claimed power and those who lost it. William the Conqueror is amongst the most famous victors in human history. A man who conquered a kingdom, changed its language, laws, and culture and in doing so altered the fabric of world history.

[00:50:58]Harold Godwinson is the counterpoint to William. where William conquered, Harold lost his life and kingdom in 1066.

[00:51:09]His story is one of defeat. At least that is what it looks like when there is nothing but a narrow focus on the events of October 1066 and when the overwhelmingly hostile source material is accepted at face value. There was more to Harold Godwinson than this, though. He came from the most powerful noble family in 11th century England and had an important career for more than 20 years before he ever became king. This included his rise to dominate the East Anglia region politically and culturally and then his emergence as a noble in the 1050s who was more powerful than King Edward the Confessor. His extended career allowed him to build up support for his claim to the throne. And when Edward died in January 1066, Harold became the first monarch to be crowned at Westminster Abbey a day later. Had Harold faced a single challenger, he might well have been able to secure the throne and establish a secure dynasty.

[00:52:23]In the end, the House of Godwin only lasted n and a half months. While Harold defeated Harold Hadrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in September, his supposedly depleted and worn out forces could not repeat the victory at the Battle of Hastings 3 weeks later.

[00:52:44]Harold's reign was consequently one of the shortest in English royal history.

[00:52:50]But Harold was not a trivial individual.

[00:52:55]He was unlucky more so than incompetent.

[00:53:02]What do you think of Harold Godwinson?

[00:53:05]Was he the legitimate king of England who was overthrown by an upstart conqueror from France? Or was Harold the real upstart who tried to claim the throne that Edward had promised to [music] William of Normandy years earlier? Please let us know in the comment section. And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.

[00:54:24]Heat. Heat.

[00:54:29]Heat. Heat.

[00:55:17]Heat. Heat.