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The battle was a gallant attempt to face down the superior Norse army that had come to reclaim Britain as a Nordic nation. Everybody in England had been on an invasion alert during 1066. The Anglo-Saxon leaders, the Northern Earls Edwin and Morcar, knew that King Harold had just sent the army home to their farms after a summer waiting on the South Coast for William to invade from Normandy.
Nevertheless, this army attempted to stop an army that outnumbered them 4 to 1 by blocking the way to York at Fulford. The little written evidence can be studied. It does not allow the detailed location or course of the battle to be plotted. However, using the ground and the information from Nordic sagas, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and others a reconstruction is possible.
We need your help to save the battle site from construction work. There are many alternative routes to the site.
Archaeological investigations undertaken on a part of the site in 1996 produced no evidence of a battlefield. This is not surprising.
Regular flooding will have buried, rotted or carried away what little was not cleared up after the battle. Sensitive geophysical investigations and deeper trenches might be more revealing both along the Beck within the proposed area and downstream towards the Ouse. But ancient battlefields are notoriously difficult to identify through contemporary artifacts.