Stepmothers? And Cinderella thought she had it bad!
Putting the ‘sex’ back into Wessex — meet the original Wicked Stepmother
I have a morbid fascination with Dark Age English history so let me tell you the tale of King Edgar the Peaceable (reigned 959–975) and his dark secret that would subsequently have disastrous consequences for the Kingdom of England.
Edgar, in common with most Saxon kings, practised what we’d now call serial monogamy. Kings would only have one wife or mistress/concubine at a time but they would be discarded — the consanguinity rules (or oops, did I really marry my cousin/sister) were a popular way of ending no longer convenient marriages — and sent to a nunnery when the monarch took a fancy to another woman.
So, for example, Edgar had a relationship with a woman called Aethelflaed by whom he had a son Eadweard (Edward). Then he had a relationship with Wulfthryth (Wifrida) by whom he had a daughter Eadgyth (Edith). And then along came Aelfthryth (Elfrida) by who he had two more sons: Edmund, who died while still an infant, and Aethelraed.
Edgar’s dark secret relates to how he first met and wooed Aelfthryth. The king had heard that an ealdorman called Ordgar, in what is now Devon, had a beautiful daughter whose mother was a member of the royal family of Wessex. As he was looking for a queen, Edgar commissioned an East Anglian thegn called Aethelwold to visit her and offer her a royal marriage if she really was as beautiful as everyone said.
Apparently she really was as beautiful as everyone said but, concealing his true mission from both her and her parents, Aethelwold wooed and married the girl himself, reporting back to Edgar that Aelfthryth was a “vulgar and common-looking” and “unworthy of a royal marriage”.
Initially Edgar accepted this explanation but as he continued to hear reports of her beauty, he decided to visit the happy couple himself. News of the pending royal visit threw Aethelwold into a panic and, while begging Aelfthryth to make herself as unattractive as possible and wear her plainest clothes, he inadvertently revealed how he had deceived both her and the king.
As all contemporary reports suggest Aelfthryth was an ambitious woman, the realisation she had missed out on becoming queen did not go down at all well. Repaying Aethelwold’s deceit in kind although she agreed to appear dowdy but actually went full ‘The Only Way is Wessex’ (or Jersey Shore) and was presented to the king wearing the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of hair extensions, spray tan, and a gown that was slashed to the waist and split to the thigh.
It was lust at first sight and the couple quickly came to an understanding they would marry, regardless of the fact Aelfthryth already had a husband and Edgar had a wife. This issued was resolved when, shortly after their meeting, Aethelwold was invited to go on a royal hunting expedition and Edgar accidentally speared him with a javelin and killed him. Royal hunting expeditions in this era were notoriously and conveniently lethal.
Soon afterwards Edgar divorced his wife Wulfthryth on the grounds of consanguinity and married Aelfthryth. A few years later still, during the elaborate coronation ceremony (it was actually a second coronation for Edgar) devised by Archbishop Dunstan, Aelfthryth was anointed with holy oil and crowned queen, giving her a higher status than almost all the Wessex queens of that era.
And then they all lived happily ever after.
Except they didn’t as Edgar unexpectedly died in 975 (of natural causes) just a couple of years after his coronation and while he was still in his early thirties.
Edgar’s death immediately prompted a succession crisis between his two surviving sons. Eadweard was the older, aged about 12 or 13 years, but there were doubts over his legitimacy, while Aethelraed was legitimate but just nine years old. A further complication was the royal court was split, almost to the point of breaking out into a civil war, between nobles who supported the late King Edgar’s religious policy, which included generous grants of land and properties to the Benedictine abbeys, and the anti-monastic reactionaries who wanted to reverse these policies so they could claim or (in the case of those nobles who had been dispossessed by the grants) reclaim the religious estates for themselves.
Not surprisingly the ambitious Dowager Queen Aelfthryth was a vociferous supporter of her own son’s claim to the throne. But, in the event, the pro-Eadweard camp, championed by Archbishop Dunstan, was victorious and Eadweard took the throne.
However then came that fateful day in March 978 when the young king was out hunting and, late in the afternoon, visited Queen Aelfthryth at her home at what would later become Corfe Castle in Dorset.
While still mounted on his horse, King Eadweard accepted a welcoming flagon of mead from Aelfthryth’s own hands but then, as he was drinking from the cup (and, according to one version, while “allured by her female blandishments” — she would still have only been 33 at the time) her attendants and retainers fatally stabbed him in the back with their daggers.
There are various theories explaining the killing and all raise as many questions as they seek to answer:
* Were the murderers in Aethelraed’s service seeking to place their master on the throne?
* Were the murderers acting on behalf of a member of the Wessex nobility who was concerned the king was becoming too independently minded?
* Was the murder motivated by a personal quarrel with Eadweard who, according to many accounts, did have a spiteful temper?
* Was the murder part of a plot personally devised by Aelfthryth to propel her son to the throne, as was suggested by the chronicler John of Worcester?
* Did Aelfthryth herself actually plunge a knife into King Eadweard, as the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon later (over a century later as it happens) wrote?
* And, even if she didn’t actively participate in the murder, is Aelfthryth still implicated in the regicide for allowing the killers to go free and unpunished?
Whatever the actual cause, the effect was the same: a change of monarch with Aethelraed being crowned a fortnight later on March 31st although because of his youth (he was only 12 at the time of his coronation) his mother Queen Aelfthryth ruled as regent for the next six years.
One of the few things we can be certain of is Aethelraed not only had no involvement in the murder of Eadweard but was also unaware of any plots. In fact in a story reminiscent of the incident in the book Mommie Dearest about the actress Joan Crawford traumatising her daughter by beating her with a wire coat-hanger, it is claimed Queen Aelfthryth beat Aethelraed with a candlestick on seeing him mourn for the half-brother who had blocked his path to the throne. The memory of this beating apparently stayed with Aethelraed for the rest of his life, giving him a terror of candlelight.
Aethelraed’s coronation was the last state event in which Archbishop Dunstan took part. When the young king took the usual oath to govern well, Dunstan addressed him with a solemn warning, criticising the violent act whereby he became king and prophesying it would result in misfortune befalling the kingdom.
We can assume Dowager Queen Aelfthryth dismissed these warnings as merely sour grapes by a bad loser whose influence at court was now dwindling but Dunstan turned out to be correct in his predictions. Ruling as King Aethelraed II Unraed, better known to history as Ethelred the Unready, Aelfthryth’s son would prove to be one of England’s most disastrous monarchs.
Bones of contention
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, after his murder Eadweard was buried at Wareham “without any royal honours” adding…
“No worse deed for the English race was done than this was, since they first sought out the land of Britain. Men murdered him, but God exalted him. In life he was an earthly king; after death he is now a heavenly saint. His earthly relatives would not avenge him, but his Heavenly Father has much avenged him.”
A couple of years later his body — which was found to be incorrupt (always a sure sign of holiness and a fast-track for getting made a saint) was disinterred and moved to Shaftesbury Abbey, where it as given a lavish reburial. Subsequently, with the assistance of grants on land by King Ethelred, his body was moved to an even more prominent shrine within the abbey as the cult of ‘St Edward the Martyr’ began to grow in the early 11th century.
The very process of ‘translating’ (transferring) his body from Warham to Shaftesbury in 981 is credited with healing cripples and restoring sight to the blind. Although Edward was never formally canonized, he is recognised as a saint by the Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches.
Following King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, during the English Reformation in the 16th century, many holy places were demolished however the nuns at Shaftesbury managed to hide StEdward’s relics and save them from desecration. Unfortunately they were so well hidden they were not recovered until an archeological dig in 1931 and it would be a further 40 years before an osteologist confirmed them as belonging to Edward.
However the story does not end there as a dispute erupted between the archaeologist who found the remains and his brother, with one wanting the relics to go to the Orthodox Church and the other wanting them returning to Shaftesbury Abbey. The dispute was finally resolved in 1984 when the relics were placed in what is now the St Edward the Martyr Orthodox Church at Brookwood Cemetery in Woking, where they are cared for by the St Edward Brotherhood of monks under the jurisdiction of a traditionalist branch of the Greek Orthodox church.
Lovers of irony will appreciate the fact that during the decades long dispute over the fate of the relics of St Edward, who was killed by being stabbed in the back with a knife, his bones were stored in a cutlery box in a bank vault at the Woking branch of Midland Bank.
But what about his alleged murderess, the Dowager Queen Aelfthryth?
As is the way with many of these notorious Saxon queens, in widowhood Aelfthryth became pious, devout and noble of character, founding an abbey at Wherwell, Hampshire, close to site of her first husband’s murder, as a Benedictine nunnery. Later in life she retired there — supposedly to seek forgiveness for her crimes — before dying in November 1000 or 1001.
The church chroniclers of the time remained unconvinced of her piety, one recording in the Historia Eliensis that a certain Abbot Byrhtnoth, while travelling through the New Forest, spotted Aelfthryth preparing magic potions that transformed her into a mare “so that she might satisfy the unrestrainable excess of her burning lust, running and leaping hither and thither with horses and showing herself shamelessly to them, regardless of the fear of God and the honour of the royal dignity”.
This account goes on to claim Aelfthryth later attempted to seduce the Abbot to ensure his silence and when he refused “desperate not to be unmasked as a witch and an adulteress, Aelfthryth summoned her ladies and, together they heated up sword thongs on the fire and murdered the Abbot by inserting them into his bowels”.
Aelfthryth’s treatment by the church is in mark contrast to the rest of Edgar’s family. Eadweard would go on to be revered as St Edward the Martyr. Edgar’s second wife Wulfthryth became venerated as St Wifrida of Wilton (there is a suggestion King Edgar originally abducted her from the nunnery at Wilton Abbey and then returned her when he was tired of her) while their daughter Eadgyth became venerated as St Edith of Wilton.
Incidentally, at Harewood Forest in Hampshire is a 19th century stone monument called Dead Man’s Plack which commemorates the killing of Aethelwold by King Edgar. The inscription reads…
About the year of our Lord DCCCCLXIII upon this spot beyond the time of memory called Deadman’s Plack, tradition reports that Edgar, surnamed the peaceable, King of England, in the ardour of youth love and indignation, slew with his own hand his treacherous and ungrateful favourite, owner of this forest of Harewood, in resentment of the Earl’s having basely betrayed and perfidiously married his intended bride and beauteous Elfrida, daughter of Ordgar, Earl of Devonshire, afterwards wife of King Edgar, and by him mother of King Ethelred II. Queen Elfrida, after Edgar’s death, murdered his eldest son, King Edward the Martyr, and founded the Nunnery of Worwell.
