After making his appeal to Harold Hardrada, Tostig returned to Scotland and began to raise a force of volunteers there on his own account. Early in September the king of Norway set sail from the Sogne Fiord near Bergen, due west to the subject earldom of the Orkneys and Shetlands, where he was joined by Paul and Erling, the two joint earls, and by a large reinforcement of the islanders.[115] From the Orkneys Harold sailed on without recorded incident as far as the Tyne, where he was joined, according to agreement, by Tostig with his Scottish auxiliaries, and then the combined force made for the Yorkshire coast and began offensive operations by a harrying of Cleveland. Passing southward the invaders encountered an ineffectual resistance at Scarborough and along the coast of Holderness, but were able to round Spurn Head without any opposition from the English fleet. The Humber and the inland waters of Yorkshire lay open to Harold, and it would seem that as the Norwegian fleet sailed up the Ouse the English fleet retreated up the Wharfe, for Harold chose to disembark at Riccall, a village some five miles below the confluence of these rivers. Riccall was chosen as the headquarters of the fleet, which could easily block at this point any attempt on the part of the English vessels to break out to the open sea while Harold and his army marched straight on York. At Fulford, two miles from the city, the invaders met the fyrd of Yorkshire under Earls Edwin and Morcar, and the defeat of the local force led to the surrender of York four days afterwards. The city was not put to the sack; hostages[116] were exchanged between Harold and the men of York, and it was very possibly to await the delivery of further sureties from the rest of the shire that the king moved out of his new conquest to the otherwise undistinguished village of Stamfordbridge.
On the following day King Harold of England himself arrived at York. News of what was happening in Yorkshire must have been brought to London with extraordinary rapidity, for the battles of Fulford and Stamfordbridge were fought, as men remarked at the time, within five days of each other. Harold possessed the permanent nucleus of an army in the famous body of “huscarles” who resided at his court, and with them he dashed up the great road from London to York, taking along with him so much of the local militia of the counties through which he passed as happened to fall in with his line of march. At Tadcaster, where the north road crosses the Wharfe, he found and inspected the English “fleet,” and on Monday, the 25th of September, one day after Harold Hardrada had entered the capital of Northumbria, it opened its gates to Harold of England. At this time Harold can have done scarcely more than pass through the city for the same day he covered the ten miles which separate York from Stamfordbridge and fell unexpectedly upon the Norwegian army scattered in utter unpreparedness along either bank of the Derwent. The Norwegians on the right, or York, bank of the Derwent were driven into the river by the English attack, and then occurred a strange incident of which the record, curiously enough, is only preserved in the chronicle of the distant monastery of Abingdon. It was essential for the English to get possession of the bridge which spanned the unfordable river before the Norwegians on the left bank should have time to form up in line of battle, and we are told: