Hardrada was defeat
956 years ago today in 1066, Harald Hardrada was defeated and killed by Harold Godwinson on the battlefield at Stamford Bridge, a small village near York in the North of England. This Anglo-Saxon victory, overshadowed by the more famous battle at Hastings three weeks later, is nonetheless significant as it was the last serious attempt by Vikings to conquer England. Born in 1015 in Norway, Harald was exiled in 1030, and spent a dozen years as a mercenary commander, fighting for the Kievan Rus and the Byzantines in places as distant from Norway as modern day Russia, Iraq and Sicily. Harald returned to Norway in 1046, finding Cnut’s old Empire collapsed, with both his sons dead and a Saxon permanently ruling in England for the first time in thirty years. Magnus the Great, King of Norway and Denmark, died childless in 1047, leaving Harald with only Norway, not Denmark. Harald failed in his attempts to conquer Denmark, but when Edward the Confessor died in England in 1066...