"Stamford Bridge 1066"

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A king who has spent his life outrunning the end of an age. A skald asked to praise a man he no longer believes in. A priest tending the wounded on the eve of a battle nobody knows is coming. A lone axeman on the bridge, and the Englishman in the water beneath him. A farmer walking the field afterwards, looking for his son. An old earl in a Norman prison twenty years later, still deciding what to tell his gaoler. On 25 September 1066, an army of Norwegians was resting on both banks of the Derwent, seven miles from York. They had beaten one English army five days before and taken the city's surrender. The fighting was done. Most of them had left their mail at the ships. They were not expecting Harold Godwinson. What happened over the next few hours was the last great battle of the Viking age in England, and three weeks later it helped decide a second battle, on a hill near Hastings, that everyone remembers instead. Thirteen writers of historical fiction return to that September and to the people caught in it. The same afternoon is told by a Norwegian king and by an English reeve standing shoulder-deep in the river. A man holds a bridge in one story and is watched from the water in another. Featuring new stories from Giles Kristian, Matthew Harffy, Angus Donald, Justin Hill, Peter Gibbons, MJ Porter, Tim Hodkinson, Theodore Brun, Eric Schumacher and more.