According to local tradition, the Battle of Stamford Bridge was fought east of the Derwent River in a meadow referred to as Battle Flats. The commonly accepted narrative has the battle beginning in a meadow west of the Derwent River, progressing across Stamford Bridge, where a lone Norwegian defender reportedly held up the entire English army before being killed, and ending at Battle Flats. The dearth of reliable archaeological information has forced scholars to rely primarily on original written sources for reconstructions of the battle. Original sources, however, do not reference the actual location of the battlefield. Rather, as DeVries notes, they are “vague on the topography of the battlefield, indicating only the prominence of the Derwent River, a tributary of the Ouse River, running through the battlefield with a narrow wooden bridge running over it.”

The general acceptance of Battle Flats as the location of the battle appears to have been based on a single line in Manuscript C of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. According to the chronicler, “Then Harold, king of the English, moved against them by surprise beyond the bridge, and they clashed together there and were fighting very hard long into the day.” However, this passage may possibly have been misconstrued. As Plummer explains, the phrase “beyond the bridge” must be viewed “from the point of view of the enemy.