Just as William was preparing to launch an all-out assault on Yorktown, numerous warships appeared on the Yorkshire coastline, with red and white sails puffing out, seemingly without any intention of slowing down, and rushed directly onto a gentle stretch of sand.

If anyone is interested in observing here, they will find that this fleet has at least 700 ships, carrying more than 30,000 Viking warriors to land.

The reason why they were so anxious to land directly on the beach, rather than spending time looking for a safe port to land, was to set foot on English soil as soon as possible.

Most of the Vikings were from Norway, but a few were from Denmark, and they seemed to be desperate for land, and some of them even began to stake their lands despite the orders of Harald the 'Heartless'.

The Vikings, while overlapping in their predatory directions, were largely geographically divided, with the Norwegians in the fjords craving land and colonizing Iceland and attacking Ireland in the south, bypassing the Shetland and Orkney Islands and Scotland.

The Swedes crossed the Baltic to Russia to plunder silver and slaves, built fortresses in the Slavic hinterland, traded and eventually founded Rus'.

The Danes, who were at the southernmost point, coveted the rich lands on both sides of the English Channel, but there were already powerful forces in the area, and their intentions were not easy to achieve.

How could the Vikings, who had already invaded England and thirst for the land of England, be able to contain their excitement when they set foot in Yorkshire, England? Even Harald, the leader of this army, the Heartless, was powerless to stop it, after all, this army was not his own, but a coalition of the armies of the eight great tribes of Norway, and Harald was the most powerful tribal leader among them, and because of this, he became the commander-in-chief of this army.

The first Norwegian invasion of England took place in 793, more than two hundred years ago.

One day in June 793, on the island of Lindisfarne on the coast of the North Sea of England, several other ships came ashore, and a group of blond, blue-eyed and long-haired men rushed ashore, and they attacked the monastery, slaughtered many monks, plundered the rest of the people into slavery, and they robbed all their possessions, especially the glittering things like gold, silver, and jewelry, and the whole Christian world was shocked, and they did not know that this was only the beginning of an era, and such attacks continued to be staged for the next three hundred years, A cloud of terror from the north will cover the entire coast of Europe, and the blonde giants of the north will make all Europeans tremble.

Simon of the English monk Dallamo, three centuries after the catastrophe, described that these pagans from the north had come to Britain by boat, and had spread quickly to every corner like a stinging hornet or a terrible pack of wolves, and they had reached the church in Lindisfarne, where they had destroyed everything in their frenzy.

Their filthy footprints defiled the Holy Land, they dug under the altar and robbed all the treasures of the church, they killed some of the clergy, they kidnapped others, and the faithful they plundered were often forced to be naked and humiliated, and some were drowned in the sea.

"People travel far and wide in search of gold." This epitaph of the Vikings is really straightforward, but they don't just like gold, silver, jewelry, brocade, silk, they like everything that is shiny and gorgeous, the Vikings like gorgeous things very much, whether they are rich or poor, ordinary people's household goods are also as colorful as possible, even small things like reels They have to be impatient to decorate with complicated patterns, they plunder gold and silver are not for spending time and wine, coins, jewelry, crosses will be melted into works of art, Or rather, everything has a practical value, it's just that they look more like works of art.

A typical Viking should look like this: wearing a red tunic with a gray fur cape, a bearskin hat on his head, and his right hand always resting on the hilt of his sword. The hilt of the sword is extraordinary, always gilded with silver and embellished with motifs made of ebony silver in the area divided by silver wire.

The Vikings were not strangers to Europeans, as early as 1500 BC they sailed across the North Sea to Ireland to trade with the locals, including the Etruscans, who hosted these foreign merchants in their northern towns.

These Etruscans, the Romans, opened the door to the Vikings of the rich world outside, and they had the ambition to plunder, but the raging North Sea prevented them from putting their ideas into practice.

Although the Viking pulp boats had long carried them across their own fjords, and were able to occasionally cross the ocean when the sea was calm, this kind of weather was too rare for the North Sea.

By the 8th century, the construction of the Viking longship finally gave them the ability to withstand wind and waves, it was strong, light, shallow draft, resistant to wind and waves, suitable for landing on the coast, and could penetrate deep into inland rivers, making it the best tool for the Vikings to plunder and trade.

The Vikings were not the first pirates, but they were the most famous pirates, because the biggest difference between them and other pirates was that they plundered not ships but land. In the beginning, the pirates were only small groups, they could only attack targets near the coast, and most of them used fast and fast walks, and the harm was not very great, but soon the kings and military leaders of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden began to organize large, well-organized, efficient and powerful pirate teams to expand and demand tribute.

In 830 the Norwegians set their sights on Britain, which was weakened by the division of many small states, and their first target was Ireland, where they controlled most of Ireland and established some towns such as Dublin, followed by the Danes, who fought fiercely with them, and the Norwegian military leader Olaf finally defeated Denmark in 853 and ruled the Kingdom of Dublin until 871.

The Vikings living in Ireland were William's biggest headache, he was dirty and unruly, reckless, often plundering nearby towns, even William's military convoys, and it was for this reason that William gave up his direct rule over Ireland and instead canonized his four nobles as dukes, guarding the four directions of Ireland in four directions.

In England the Danes and Norwegians took turns fighting, some of them were very brutal, such as Ivar the Boneless (Bonebreaker), who, together with Guterran and others, landed in England with a large number of warriors in 866, and they defeated the Kingdom of East Anglo, tying the captive king Aemond to a tree and shooting him with arrows, and some sources say that the king was like a sea urchin at that time, and the Danes skinned the captives of England and nailed them to the church door. It wasn't until the appearance of Alfred the Great (as the English called him) King Wessex that drove the invaders out of southern England and banished them to the north-east of the Danish law districts, Yorkshire and northern Northumbria.

Alfred's previous rulers often paid the Danes a large tribute, called Danish gold, in order to obtain temporary peace, which made the local power more and more impoverished and weak, Alfred was unwilling to do so, he gathered an army to resist the invasion of Wessex de Gutren, and finally forced him to accept the agreement, thus gaining dominance over his own country and neighboring Mercia, and as compensation, the Danes controlled large swaths of northern and eastern England, from the mouth of the Thames to the Irish Sea, diagonally across England, It covers an area of 25,000 square miles.

The Danes were stunned and set their sights on the newly divided Frankish kingdom.

On November 24, 885, the Parisians woke up in the morning to find that the worst nightmare had struck again, the longship full of soldiers was in sight on the Seine, and the French monk Abu of Fulury recorded that more than 40,000 enemy troops, a group of savage enemies, carried by more than 700 ships, choked Paris by the throat from the downstream, so many that the Parisians could not see the river at all, but only a dense mast of masts. These beasts make the blood of fathers, children and mothers splash......

In November 886, a slow-motion Charles finally arrived in Paris with his army, and a great battle ensued, in which Charles's army suffered heavy losses and he was forced to agree to open the river to the upper reaches for the Vikings, and a year of heroic resistance by the Parisians came to naught. At the same time, Charlie had to pay 700 pounds of silver as a farewell fee, and Siegfred made a concession that he would retreat when spring came. Enraged by the Parisians, they could not bear to be buried by this cowardly fellow, so with their support, Charles was deposed, and the Count of Odo of the Capet succeeded him, starting the beginning of the Capetian family's rule over France.

Some of Sigfred's military chieftains embraced Christianity in the Franks, and they switched from Vikings to Normans.

The new West Frankish king Ode. Capet ceded Rollo of Normandy to the Normans, the leader of the Normans who conquered the land, not a Dane, but a Norwegian, and in his country people called him "Rov the Foreman" or "Rov the Walker". He had a large belly, and it was said that "no horse could carry him". Although he was Norwegian, he took part in the expedition of the Danes, which was common among the Vikings, who after all shared the same language and culture, and the idea of a state was still very indifferent, and it was not uncommon for military chiefs to fight under the rulers of another country.

Although Rove has a big belly that cannot be ridden, he is very keen on plundering, and his young mind burns with a thirst for plunder. He defied the king's ban and went out to do a "Strandhegg" - a raid to a distant shore. Harald could not tolerate an offense to his authority, and he called a judicial council declaring that Rove had broken the law, and Rove's mother interceded with the king, begging him to forgive her son and warning Rove that if he did not give in, he would become food for the beasts that the king had raised.

Rove wisely chose to slip away and run away from Harald, where his hobbies could be enjoyed, so he ran to the Franks and joined the Danish army, where he secured for himself a piece of the countydom, known as Normandy.

In 911, Charles the Vulgar became king of the Franks, and he made a concession and gave Normandy to Rove as a fief, the Franks called him Rollo, and as a vassal Rollo also swore allegiance to the Frankish king to resist the invasion of the Franks by Vikings, and at the same time married a Frankish noble woman and naturalized into the Frankish culture.

William had a clear impression of the history of the Vikings, not only because of their fame, but also because the ancestors of William and the Normans were the Vikings of Norway and Denmark, and he had a keen interest in this history.