Bitesize Battles

Our second episode in the English Game of Thrones looks at a battle which has often been overshadowed by events at Hastings just three weeks later. But this was a key moment at Stamford Bridge near York in England, a clash between Viking and Anglo-Saxon without which may have seen an entirely different outcome to the whole game. It’s place in this story is monumental.

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This was one of the most colossal moments in English history. On this, the 954th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, we look at the battle which ended a dynasty and began another.

This was no ordinary battle. It was a titanic struggle between elite units - Anglo-Saxon housecarls vs Norman cavalry. The Anglo-Saxons were exhausted after two forced marches and the battle at Stamford Bridge three weeks earlier. The Normans were in a...

When Edgar Aetheling's northern army fled into Scotland in 1069, William the Conqueror took his frustration out on the civilian population of Northumbria, Yorkshire and the other northern shires of England.

In order to end the seemingly ceaseless rebellions emerging from the region, William ordered every foodstuff, animal and dwelling in northern England to be utterly destroyed, and every armed man killed.

By sword, fire, exposure ...

The English Game of Thrones is nearly at an end.

William the Conqueror had spent the three years since Hastings crushing one rebellion after another, culminating in the terrible Harrying of the North in 1069/70. Through tactical brilliance and sheer brutality, he finally must have sensed that the Kingdom of England was truly his.

But, a last flame of resistance spat into life in the form of a dispossessed English thegn, named Herew...

On this dark Halloween night, meet the real life Dracula, Vlad the Impaler. If you don't like spooky and gruesome tales, turn off now. If you do, listen to be horrified.

Vlad the Impaler was born in Transylvania, and is the inspiration behind the most famous of all vampires - Dracula. With a legendary taste for blood, and for impaling his victims, it's easy to see why.

In this story, Vlad battles the invading Ottoman Empire and use...

When the Goths turned up on the banks of the Roman frontier of the Danube river, they were desperate asylum seekers.

But through some utterly inept Roman policy-making, they were turned into enemies and the Gothic War of 376-382 erupted.

The Battle of Adrianople was the turning point in this war, allowing the Goths more or less free rein to rampage throughout Thrace, the Balkans and Greece - and it was the local Roman population wh...

The moment some Romans started to think the end was nigh.

The Rhine invasion of Gaul in December, 406, was an unprecedented incursion by up to 200,000 men, women and children of the Vandal, Alan and Suevi nations.

As a direct result, Spain was lost, Gaul ransacked and Britain abandoned. Hear about it all here, only @bitesizebattles.

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Britain and Spain were lost, Gaul in the hands of a usurper, and Italy ravaged following the Sack of Rome. The Empire looked doomed.

By then rose Flavius Constantius, a brilliant and experienced Roman commander. Just seven years after Rome's sack, he had put much of the Empire back together and it seemed to be about to embark on a new golden age.

Find out how he did so, against overwhelming odds.

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Now comes the body-blow that would rock the Western Roman Empire on its heels. The Vandals, part of the original Rhine invasion of 406, now surged out of Spain and made a beeline for Roman North Africa.

North Africa was Rome's bread basket and money-maker - any threat to it would create a food and financial crisis from which it would be nearly impossible to recover.

Find out what happened and how the brilliant Roman commander, Flav...

This is the season finale, the climactic finish to this epic story of the Fall of the Roman Empire.

While the West was hanging from a thread after the Vandals had taken North Africa, the Eastern Roman Empire wasn't so quick to let it fade away.

The Eastern Emperor, Leo, spend 100,000 pounds of gold putting together an immense armada, and sent it straight to Vandal Africa.

At the Battle of Cape Bon, the Romans and Vandals would face...

The opening episode of the rollercoaster ride of the Scottish Wars of Independence.

On a pitch-dark night, Scotland's King Alexander III urged his horse to ever-greater speeds, galloping across vales and glens in a wind-driven storm.

He was hurrying to see his young and beautiful Queen, Yolande of Dreux. Alexander was 44, she just 22. It was her birthday the next day, and it's likely that Alexander was rushing to help her, let's sa...

Longshanks seems in control of Scotland - he has the towns and cities, he has the castles, and he even has the King.

But soon to rise would be a Scottish Knight, William Wallace, for whom living under English domination was unbearable. He and other leaders, like Andrew de Moray, roused the country to rebellion and gathered an army with which he fought the English at Stirling Bridge and Falkirk.

This famous freedom fighter would sha...

After Longshanks' used the world's largest ever trebuchet, War Wolf, to batter Stirling Castle into submission, he had captured William Wallace and had him brutally executed in London in 1305. Once again, it seemed that Scotland's destiny as an independent Kingdom was doomed.

But inspired by Wallace's stand and appalled by Longshanks' brutality, there rose a new and even greater leader - Robert the Bruce - who would lead Scotland t...

William Wallace's victory at Stirling Bridge had shattered the English psyche, but Bannockburn was the turning point. Now Scotland had to push a final time to win the independence she had been fighting for, for so long.

But Edward II's England was riven with dissent, and powerful factions were about to rise up and demand firmer action against the Scots.

The die was cast and Scotland's freedom was in the balance. 

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Why do we fight? Why go to war? This series looks at 9 of history's biggest motivations and causes for conflict, and a final episode on the psychology of the individual and what drives people to risk life and limb by going to war.

In this first episode we look at the power of Ego, and how time and again it has propelled leaders, and the men and women who follow them, to cause nations and empires to rise and fall.

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From farmland to gold mines, and spices to oil, competition over resources has been one of the single greatest sources of human conflict for millennia. And it looks set to continue to be.

We'll explore the motivations behind why resources create conflict and some of the empires, wars and tragedies this competition has created.

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