Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Scandinavian Britain - II. The Danelaw - 6. The Downfall of the Danelaw
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Harald fell, his daughter Mary died" in the Orkneys :
"it is said they had but one life," adds the saga.
Two miles from Riccall, where the ships and all
their gear were laid, a curious relic exists, which must
surely in some way be a monument of the battle. On
the ancient door of the church at Stillingfleet are
figures wrought in iron after the fashion of early Norse
work ; interlaced plaits in thick wire, dragons, and a
swastika of barbed spear-points (a design to be seen
also at Versaas in Vestrgötland) with two quaint men
and a dragon-headed Viking boat with its rudder
shipped, but mastless and oarless, and its forepart
broken away. It almost seems intended as a symbol
of the wreck of this enterprise, the last great adventure
of the Vikings in England.
Compared with Harald Hardrádi’s invasion the
landing of troops from Denmark two years later was
of little importance, except as part of a disastrous
movement, the history of which must be sketched
because it leads to the ravaging of Northumbria and
the ultimate rearrangement of population in the north
of England. In 1068, William had not as yet conquered
more than the south, though in so doing he
destroyed the centralising machinery which was the
only connexion between the Scandinavian north and
the old realm of Ælfred’s family. He had appointed
Gospatric as earl of Bernicia, and Merlesvein as sheriff
of Yorkshire, but even this concession to local feeling
—and even the fact that Normans had once been
Northmen, which has sometimes been erroneously
imagined to have had weight with both parties—could
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