The royal women of 10th-century England

Apart from two well-known women, Æthelflæd and Elfrida (Ælfthryth), there’s a lack of information in books about the royal women of 10th-century England, says MJ Porter. So MJ decided to write a book about them. Here are some of the women it covers, including the impressive Eadgifu.

In recent years, I’ve set about fictionalising the lives of the royal women of the 10th century. Ælfwynn, Æthelflæd’s daughter, the daughters of Edward the Elder, his third wife, Eadgifu, and Elfrida, England’s first crowned queen, and her contemporaries.

It’s not been an easy process at all. Eventually, frustrated with the lack of a cohesive non-fiction book dedicated to them (other than for Elfrida), I determined to write my own.

So, who were these royal women? It can never be denied that Æthelflæd, the Lady of Mercia, is the most well-known of the women of the 10th century, even more so than Elfrida, England’s first crowned queen. Elfrida was tarnished with the charge of regicide almost within her lifetime. But these are just two of many.

Indeed, in researching the period, I uncovered just over 20 named royal women and an additional 40 women who were either associated with the royal family or involved in the law in some way, and for which a record, either a will or a charter naming them, has survived.

This is somewhat remarkable and also a little depressing. For many of them, little more than their names have survived, and for some of them, not even their names. For some, what happened to them when they left England (Edward the Elder’s daughters) was unknown only 40 or so years later. They left little mark on the historical record.

Only three are named in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Eahlswith, the wife of King Alfred under the year 901, Ælfwynn under 918, Æthelflæd repeatedly from 911–918. Two are alluded to in alternate entries for 925 in the various recensions (Athelstan’s full sister, who married Sihtric of York, and his half-sister Eadgyth, who married into the East Frankish ruling family). Two abbesses are later mentioned in the chronicle, as is the grandson of Eadgyth (982).

Of them all, there is one noteworthy woman who, the more I study her, the more remarkable she becomes, Eadgifu (c902–966), the third wife of Edward the Elder (899–924). Perhaps not even 20 when she married the ageing king, she produced two sons and at least one daughter before his death and outlived him by over 40 years.

As stepmother to King Athelstan (924–939), her presence at the royal court is difficult to find, although there is a distinct lack of surviving charters which might mask this. But as mother to the king to her sons, Edmund (939–946) and Eadred (946–955), Eadgifu’s influence is impossible to ignore.

Edmund, no more than 18 when he became king, needed his mother’s support as he battled the repercussions of Athelstan’s victory at Brunanburh, and indeed, when he was himself murdered in 946, she was there to ensure her second son became England’s king as well, the fourth of Edward the Elder’s son to be named as a king.

But enduring the murder of one son was not to be the end of Eadgifu’s tribulations. Eadred was a young man when he died in 955, and his nephew, Eadwig, became king after him. Here, we encounter Eadgifu as the king’s grandmother, perhaps little loved by her grandson, finding opposition to her vast influence.

In a charter dating to 959, and presumably after Eadwig’s death, we are told that ‘When Eadred died… Eadgifu was deprived of all her property’ (S1211)¹. The four-year reign of Eadwig was unsettled and not just for Eadgifu, but it was short. Eadwig’s death at no more than 19 or 20 again saw her oversee the succession of a young man to the kingship, her youngest grandson, Edgar (959-975).

She and Edgar were to enjoy a much closer relationship, and until Elfrida, Edgar’s third wife, was crowned and acknowledged as England’s first queen, it must be presumed that Eadgifu fulfilled much of this role. Indeed, Elfrida’s position may have been formalised to fill the very void left by Eadgifu’s death.

The years of Eadgifu’s life were marred by war with the Norse (Viking raiders) and by a succession of personal tragedies, which may have begun with her father being killed at the hands of the Norse in the rebellion of Æthelwold even before she was born – sometimes we forget to understand the trauma of such on these historical individuals.

Yet it can’t be denied that she was influential in England as it finally beat back the advances of the Norse and assisted in ushering in an era of such peace, her grandson is remembered (when not for his love of women, ravishing nuns and three wives), for bringing ‘peace’ to England.

In one individual, she almost embodies the calm between England’s first and second Viking Age, when England as we would recognise it today was truly ‘born,’ and also between the two best known women of the era, Æthelflæd and Elfrida.

Eadgifu’s part in all this is difficult to unpick, but studying the charters that have survived and to which she assigned her name, I suggest she reached the heights of her influence during the reign of her second son, Eadred.

There are 63 surviving charters from Eadred’s reign (946–955). Over half of these charters (33) were witnessed by Eadgifu. Of these, four are deemed to be spurious. Of the remaining 29, Eadgifu’s name appears second only to her son on 22 charters. She appears after the bishops but before her grandchildren, Eadwig and Edgar. Her grandchildren begin to attest from 953, when they would still have been young children but were already destined to rule after their uncle, who, like King Athelstan before him, never married.

While Eadgifu undoubtedly enjoyed the longest period of influence during the 10th century, she is not alone in shepherding in the kingdom of England. The kingship was never secure. Not one but two kings would be murdered, others would die at a young age, a child would be named as king on four occasions, and there would be some very complicated marriages for husbands and wives to negotiate.

This then was a perilous time for the lives of these royal men, and that is not even factoring in the raging warfare that sporadically cropped up with the Norse invaders. It is pure happenstance that the ruling family of Wessex survived the long 10th century.

This is where the royal women of the 10th century should take precedence, despite the absence of information regarding them in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other near-contemporary surviving sources.