Harold gained a great victory over the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada and his own estranged brother Tostig Godwinson at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

Modern historians have characterised Godwin and his family as among the most famous in English history (David Bates) and one of the greatest noble houses in England in the first half of the 11th century (Frank Barlow).

[10] He first appears in history as an adherent of Æthelstan Ætheling, the eldest son of Æthelred the Unready, and when that prince died in 1014 he left Godwin an estate.

Sweyn is usually accounted Godwin's eldest son, though the monk Hemming reported him as believing his real father had been Cnut; in 1043 he was given an earldom consisting of Somerset, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire.

[15] By contrast, Edward's personal estate, though very large, was probably smaller than that held by his ancestors, and was scattered between various earldoms, meaning that he had no local power base; moreover he had only recently returned to England as a half-Norman stranger with no experience of English politics or of any kind of leadership.

He first allied himself with Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, king of Gwynedd and Powys, who might be considered a natural enemy of the English, and launched with him a joint expedition into south Wales.

He and his sons gathered an army, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria assembled their men in defence of the king, and the result was a stalemate in which neither side wanted to attack the other.

Godwin, his wife, and their sons Sweyn, Tostig and Gyrth fled to Bruges in Flanders, and Harold and his brother Leofwine to Ireland, while their sister queen Edith was sent to a nunnery.

The following year, 1052, Godwin and Harold both launched small fleets, joined up off the south-west coast of England, then recruited support from the ports of Sussex and Kent.

In the following century chroniclers embroidered the story with details suggesting that this was divine retribution; in the fullest form of the legend he takes a mouthful of bread, praying that he may not be allowed to swallow it if he was guilty of murdering the king's brother Alfred, then chokes and dies.

[24] The Godwin family thus held the whole of England apart from Mercia under the kingship of Edward the Confessor, who was by now largely content to leave effective rule to his earls.

He returned to the attack the same year along with his brother Tostig in a joint invasion of Wales, using both land and naval forces, which wreaked such destruction that Gruffydd's own men killed him and sent his head to Harold.

[25] Not long afterwards, probably in 1064, Harold is thought to have set out on a voyage in the English Channel and been blown by a storm onto the coast of Ponthieu, whose count delivered him into the hands of William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy.

Norman writers later alleged that he had been sent by king Edward to confirm William as heir to the English throne and to swear fealty to him, but his biographer Ian W. Walker considers the most likely possibilities to be, firstly, that he was seeking a marriage alliance between his family and William's; secondly, that he wanted to negotiate the release of his youngest brother Wulfnoth and Sweyn's son Hakon, who had long been held hostage in Normandy; and thirdly, that he was bound elsewhere for reasons unknown.

In external affairs he was rather successful, forming a friendship with the king of Scotland which largely prevented trouble on his northern border, and leading a legation to Rome on Edward's behalf.

Harold, unwilling to provoke a civil war, refused to invade Northumbria to reinstate him, and king Edward reluctantly acceded to the rebels' demands and exiled Tostig.

[20] Harold faced threats from the duke of Normandy, from the king of Norway, and from possible Welsh raiders, but the first to act was his own brother Tostig, who in the spring of 1066 launched raids on the Isle of Wight and various points on the east coast of England before suffering a severe defeat in Lincolnshire and taking refuge in Scotland.

[20][28] Harold, expecting an invasion by William of Normandy, moved to the south coast to prepare his defences, but on 8 September, unable to provision his forces any longer, he was compelled to disband them.

[29] The same month, Harald Hardrada set out from Norway on his attempt to take the English crown, sailing via Shetland and Orkney and joining up with Tostig at the river Tyne, where the latter took service under him as one of his earls.

Harold, accompanied by his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine, commanded an army that was now badly overtired and proved unable to withstand the repeated Norman attacks.

[34] Her niece Gunhild, daughter of Harold Godwinson, was an inmate of the nunnery in Wilton until 1093, when she was abducted by Alan the Red, a Breton who held the lordship of Richmond.

[36] In the aftermath of the battle of Hastings Godwin's widow, Gytha, by then in her sixties, withdrew to the south-west of England, where she held vast estates and where resistance to the Conquest was mounting.

[37][38][39] Harold's young sons Godwin and Edmund, and possibly also their brother Magnus, may have been at the siege of Exeter; certainly they made their way to the court of king Diarmait of Leinster in Ireland, from where they launched two unsuccessful raids against south-west England.

His descendants may be the many men named Godwin who appear in historical sources from the 13th century onwards across Eastern Norway, including Gudine Geig, a hirdmann of Duke Skule mentioned in Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar.

[50] Extensively described in Egil's Saga,[51] the older House of Torgar begins with Bjǫrgúlfr, the father of Brynjúlfr, semi-sovereign chieftains who also had the privilege to tax the Sámi (cf.

[52] Before the battle, Bárðr had bequeathed his wife Sigrid of Sandnes and the Torgar estate to his friend Þórúlfr Kveldúlfsson, a son of Kveldúlfr Bjálfason and Salbjǫrg Káradóttir of Berle, likewise a brother of Skalla-Grímr.

After some time, however, Þórúlfr fell from grace with King Harald I of Norway, who first expelled him from Torgar and confiscated the estate, and whose men eventually killed him at his wife's ancestral seat of Sandnes.

His grandson William II of Torgar, military commander (sveithøvding) under King Magnus V, was killed in the Battle of Fimreite in 1184, according to Sverris Saga.

He is mentioned several places in Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, which claims that in the 1239 Battle of Oslo, the wounded William III refused Ivar Dyre's offer to accept grið (mercy).

Having been one of Norway's leading aristocratic dynasties for around 250 years, the House of Torgar's political influence started to decline in the early 14th century, as the Norwegian throne was inherited by foreign princes.