Free Harald Hardrada by John Marsden

The saga has a lavishly detailed account of Olaf’s arms and armour comprising a gold-mounted helmet and a white shield inlaid with a golden cross, his spear (which Snorri had certainly seen beside the altar in Christ Church at Nidaros) and, of course, his keen-edged Neite. Yet the one item of his war-gear specifically confirmed by a quoted verse from Sigvat is his coat of ring-mail. This ‘burnished byrnie’ was probably singled out for the skald’s attention by reason of its extreme rarity, because while iron was plentiful (and plate armour completely unknown) in eleventh-century Scandinavia, the laborious craftsmanship involved in the production of ring-mail made it the most prohibitively expensive item of war-gear and thus available only to the most affluent on the battlefield. It would also have been extremely hot and heavy to wear while fighting on foot, so leather may often have been preferred by those who were fortunate enough to enjoy the luxury of choice.
    Helmets too, although simpler and thus less costly to produce than mail, are thought not to have been so widespread in Scandinavian warfare as is sometimes imagined. The ‘winged’ or ‘horned’ helmet of ‘the Viking’ has long been confidently dismissed as a fantasy, but helmets of the spangenhelm type – a construction of triangular iron plates held together at the base by a circular headband sometimes mounted with a nose-guard – would have represented standard equipment for the professional fighting-men in a lordly or royal retinue. Again, however, neither helmet nor mail-coat would have been likely to be found among the rougher elements in Olaf’s forces, among whom a leather cap and a heavy woollen or leathern coat would have represented the most common protective clothing behind a shield.
    The saga’s customary reference to the enemy host as the ‘bonders’ army’ must not be taken to indicate a seething peasant rabble, especially when the evidence for selected soldiery gifted by the Swedish king allied with vagabonds recruited from the borderland forests suggests Olaf’s forces representing rather greater extremes of warrior type. The ‘bonders’ army’ was evidently recruited across the entire social range of the free and unfree, but was led by prominent chieftains, some of them exalted to the rank of lenderman, accompanied by their own companies of housecarls, while the bonders themselves, although lower in the social order, were still free farmers recognised by a respected modern authority on the subject as ‘yeomen [who] were the staple of society’. 7
    Despite there being nowhere any reference to the inclusion of any foreign element, the possibility of at least some Danish involvement cannot be discounted. When Cnut left his newly acquired Norwegian dominions under the governance of his jarl Hakon, he assigned to him a ‘court-bishop’ in the person of a Danish priest, Sigurd, who is said by the saga to have ‘been long with Cnut’, of whose cause he was assuredly an ardent advocate. This Bishop Sigurd seems to have assumed the roles of principal chaplain and political commissar to the bonders’ army, inciting all possible hostility to Olaf in the speech of exhortation he is said to have delivered to the forces before the battle. It would have been quite unthinkable for any Scandinavian churchman of the time, especially one given such an assignment by the all-powerful Cnut, to have been without his own escort of housecarls. Sigurd himself is described as exceptionally haughty and hot-tempered, so there would be every reason to expect his demanding a formidable warrior retinue which would undoubtedly have been present, to whatever extent it was actively engaged, at Stiklestad.
    On balance, then, there is no reason to imagine this ‘bonders’ army’ as any the worse equipped or accomplished than Olaf’s forces, and yet there is