September 20, 1066 · Northern England Theater

The Norwegian king Harald Hardrada, allied with Harold Godwinson's exiled brother Tostig, landed a great fleet on the Yorkshire coast and advanced on York. The northern earls Edwin and Morcar met them at Fulford, just south of the city. After hard fighting the Viking line held and then crushed the English flank against the river, scattering the northern levies and opening York to the invaders.

September 25, 1066 · Northern England Theater

Harold Godwinson marched north with astonishing speed, covering some 185 miles in a few days, and fell upon the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge while many had left their armor with the ships. By legend a lone Viking held the bridge against the English army until speared from beneath. In the battle that followed, both Harald Hardrada and Tostig were killed and the Norwegian army was annihilated; the survivors needed only a fraction of their fleet to sail home.

October 14, 1066 · Southern England Theater

Harold rushed his weary army south and took position on Senlac Hill, his housecarls forming a shield wall along the ridge. For most of a day William's cavalry and archers failed to break the English line. The Normans turned the tide with feigned retreats that lured the English from their wall, and a hail of arrows; by dusk Harold was dead — by tradition, struck in the eye — and the leaderless English broke. The Bayeux Tapestry would immortalize the day.

December 1066 · Southern England Theater

After Hastings, William did not march straight on London but ravaged the southeast, circling the city to cut it off and burning Southwark. The remaining English leaders had proclaimed the boy Edgar the Ætheling king, but with their armies destroyed and the country devastated, their will collapsed. They submitted to William at Berkhamsted, and on Christmas Day 1066 he was crowned in Westminster Abbey — the ceremony marred when nervous Norman guards, mishearing the crowd's acclamation, set fire to nearby houses.

1068 · Southwest England Theater

The prosperous city of Exeter, a center of southwestern resistance and refuge of Harold's mother Gytha, refused to swear fealty to William or admit a garrison. William marched west and besieged it; after eighteen days the city negotiated a surrender on terms. William built a castle, Rougemont, to dominate it, and Gytha fled abroad.

Winter 1069 – 1070 · Northern England Theater

After repeated northern revolts — backed by Danish fleets and the surviving English nobility — William resolved to end resistance in the north for good. Through the winter of 1069–70 his forces systematically burned villages, slaughtered livestock, destroyed food stores and seed grain, and laid waste a swath of Yorkshire and beyond. Famine and exposure killed far more than the sword; chroniclers describe corpses rotting on the roads and survivors selling themselves into slavery.

1071 · East Anglia (The Fens) Theater

The last serious English resistance gathered in the watery fastness of the Isle of Ely, deep in the Fens, around the outlaw Hereward the Wake and the rebel earl Morcar. The marshes defied direct assault until William's forces built a causeway across them — aided, legend says, by the treachery of the monks of Ely. The stronghold fell; Morcar was imprisoned for life, while Hereward escaped into legend.