3
Many Anglo-Saxon queens survive in sources only as brief mentions – the mother of a particular son, the giver of some gift to the Church. Little else remains to even indicate that these women existed. This obscurity does not extend to all the early queens and some queens were not content to merely remain in the shadows, instead attempting to take a more political role. However for Anglo-Saxon and later writers a queen’s place was in the background and any attempt made to escape from this was generally met with fierce criticism. Queens who attracted notoriety throughout their lifetimes often continued to attract criticism over the centuries and, throughout the medieval period, the idea of a political and autonomous woman was generally frowned upon by the male chroniclers. Two early queens whose reputations have suffered in this way are Judith of France and Aelfgifu of the House of Wessex, both of whose names are associated with the unsavoury practice of incest. Their reputations and the attacks on their characters can be directly linked to their attempts to take control of their own lives in a way previously unheard of for early medieval women.
The life of Judith of France is much better documented than that of the the later Aelfgifu. Judith was born into political importance as a daughter of the greatest royal house in Europe, that of Charles the Bald, king of the Franks, and his wife, Ermentrude.1 She was the couple’s eldest child and would have been born in Francia around a year after their marriage in December 842. Judith was named after her grandmother, the Empress Judith, a woman who had been a particularly powerful and dominant political figure. As a young widow, the Empress Judith had almost singlehandedly secured the throne of Francia for her son Charles and it was as a compliment to her that Charles called his eldest daughter Judith.2 Judith would have been raised on stories of the Empress’s activities and these stories probably caught the young Judith’s imagination as she was growing up. She may also have been aware of her grandmother’s difficult reputation as a powerful and dominant woman, but also as an example of what was not really acceptable for a woman.
For all the stories about her famous grandmother, Judith would have been aware from an early age that her future was unlikely to be anywhere near so eventful. The Carolingian dynasty that ruled Francia jealously guarded its royal blood and princesses were seldom allowed to marry and allow this inheritance to pass out of the immediate family of the king. Instead, the vast majority of Carolingian princesses were consecrated as nuns and this would have been the fate that Judith expected. Judith herself would show that she had no predisposition for the religious life and later in life she fought passionately against attempts to ordain her as a nun. It was probably with relief, as well as some apprehension, that Judith received the news, when she was twelve years old, that a very different future had been arranged for her by her father. She resolved to take the opportunity offered to her, whatever the consequences.
Judith was probably not aware, from her place in the royal nursery, of changes that were occurring in her father’s kingdom. The mid-ninth century saw the appearance of the Vikings across Europe and, in the summer of 856, a Viking attack on the Seine heralded six years of fierce attacks on the kingdom of Charles the Bald. Charles probably looked around to neighbouring kingdoms for support and his interest fell on the kingdom of Wessex, ruled by the elderly King Aethelwulf. Aethelwulf also appears to have sought out Charles as an ally and in 855, he passed through Francia on a pilgrimage to Rome.3 He remained at Rome a year before returning to Francia for an extended visit.
King Aethelwulf had become King of Wessex in 839 and by 855 he would have been around fifty years old, several years older than Judith’s own father, Charles the Bald. King Aethelwulf had also been married before, to Osburh, daughter of Oslac, the king’s butler.4 Osburh appears to have been a dutiful wife and bore Aethelwulf several children. However by 856 she was either dead or had been repudiated by her husband, and Aethelwulf was ready to marry again. It seems likely that his choice quickly fell on Judith as the only daughter of Charles the Bald who was of marriageable age and Charles, desperate for allies against the Vikings, was forced to agree to the match.
Judith would have had no involvement in the arrangements for her marriage to Aethelwulf and the first she knew of the match may well have been when she was summoned to attend her own wedding in September 856. Aethelwulf would have been eager to form an alliance with the prestigious Carolingian dynasty and it is unlikely that he sought a meeting with his bride before he agreed to the match. Judith also would probably have only met her future husband for the first time a few days before the wedding and as a twelve year old girl, Aethelwulf must have seemed impossibly elderly to her. Judith may also have been excited by the prospect of becoming a queen and escaping a nunnery and she appears to have made no protest against marrying a man nearly forty years her senior.
If Judith was excited about becoming a queen, her father, Charles the Bald, was determined that she should become one. Queens of Wessex were typically given only a very low status and denied the title of queen, instead being known as ‘king’s wife’.5 Charles the Bald, perhaps remembering his own mother’s difficulties as a young second wife faced with adult stepsons, apparently insisted that Judith be accorded the full rights of a queen. Judith would have approved of this and probably took an interest in the ceremonies as they were prepared for her wedding. She would have been raised to be familiar with the idea of her all-powerful father and it probably would not have occurred to her that he could be wrong. To her contemporaries in Wessex, however, the prospect of crowning a queen was unappealing.
Aethelwulf and Judith were married on 1 October 856.6 Judith probably felt proud adorned in all her finery to reflect her status as a Carolingian princess, although she must also have felt anxious about marrying the elderly Aethelwulf. She would also have known that she was to be the centre of attention at the lavish marriage ceremony and, once the marriage itself had taken place, the ceremonies changed in order to provide a coronation for Judith in her new role as Queen of Wessex. The rite for the coronation had been devised especially for Judith at her father’s command and a crown was placed on her head by the Bishop of Reims.7 Judith was also anointed with holy oil and prayers were said over her womb, suggesting that any children that she produced would have an enhanced claim to Aethelwulf’s throne.8 It seems possible, from this, that Charles had negotiated with Aethelwulf that any son borne by Judith would succeed in preference to Aethelwulf’s elder sons and Judith would have been aware that her primary duty was to bear Aethelwulf a son. It may also have been reasoned, given the ages of the bride and groom, that divine help was necessary if the couple were going to be capable of producing a child together.9
Judith’s coronation was a clear indication of Charles the Bald’s hopes for the succession to the throne in England and the first known instance of such an event in relation to an English queen. The very fact of her coronation greatly enhanced her status relative to earlier English queens, particularly her predecessor, Aethelwulf’s first wife. This fact would have been apparent to everyone gathered for the wedding as well as Aethelwulf’s elder sons in England. Soon after the wedding, Aethelwulf attempted to return home to England with Judith and discovered just how clear his actions had been to his eldest son, Aethelbald. Aethelbald at first refused to receive his father back in the kingdom, rising in rebellion against him.10 This rebellion caught Aethelwulf by surprise and it must also have been worrying for Judith who had been led to believe that she would be well received in her new home. After much negotiation it was agreed between Aethelwulf and Aethelbald that the kingdom would be divided with Aethelbald taking the richer western part of the kingdom and Aethelwulf the eastern part.11 It was probably a chastened Aethelwulf who finally escorted Judith home to his much diminished kingdom.
Aethelbald’s rebellion had a great effect on the remaining years of Aethelwulf’s reign but it also had an effect on Judith herself, along with her reputation. Up until Aethelbald’s rebellion, Judith appears to have had a good, if bland, reputation and to have been accepted as yet another passive ‘king’s wife’. However, the circumstances of the rebellion and the fact that it was clearly connected with her marriage caused Judith’s reputation to take a turn for the worst. For example according to William of Malmesbury, Aethelbald’s rebellion:
Arose on account of his [Aethelwulf’s] foreign wife, yet he held her in the highest estimation, and used to place her on the throne near himself, contrary to the West Saxon custom, for the people never suffered the king’s consort either to be seated by the king, or to be honoured with the appellation of queen, on account of the depravity of Edburga [Eadburh], daughter of Offa, King of the Mercians.12
Judith appears to have been allotted much of the blame for the rebellion, an unfair position given the fact that she had not yet set foot in her husband’s kingdom or, indeed, had any say in the marriage that had been arranged for her. To William of Malmesbury however, who was writing several centuries after Judith died, and other chroniclers, Judith as a potentially powerful woman would always be suspect. Most of the chroniclers at that time and afterwards were monks who were already cut off from women and suspicious of their motives. In her early career, it was Charles the Bald and Aethelwulf who shaped Judith’s life, but it is always Judith, as a prominent woman and thus under suspicion, who received the lion’s share of the blame. The example of an earlier queen, Eadburh, appears to have been uppermost in the minds of the people of Wessex when Judith arrived as a consecrated queen and Judith attained something of this queen’s sullied reputation. Eadburh survives as a stereotype of a wicked queen against which other women could be compared, as Judith apparently was.
Much of the suspicion and unpopularity that surrounded Judith both during her lifetime and later was due to her position as an anointed queen. Judith, as a foreigner, was unlikely to have understood the hostility directed towards her but Aethelwulf must have been fully aware of the situation. However he made no attempt to make this situation any easier for his young bride and appears to have kept to the terms of his agreement with Charles until the end of his life, insisting that Judith be given a throne beside him as his queen.13 Judith, raised to be fully aware of her status as a descendant of Charlemagne, would probably not have expected anything different and may not have been aware of how damaging her adoption of the trappings of queenship was to her reputation. Certainly, she seems to have enjoyed her position as a queen and sought to extend her role even after Aethelwulf’s death.
Aethelwulf’s spirit was probably greatly affected by his son’s rebellion and his health may have begun to decline. In spite of Charles the Bald’s and probably Aethelwulf’s hopes, no child was forthcoming from the marriage and it is possible that Aethelwulf unfairly came to view Judith as the cause of his misfortune. He had little time to dwell on his demotion to the eastern part of his kingdom, however, and he died only two years after the wedding in 858.14 The death appears to have been expected. Aethelwulf made a will several months before his death, although no mention was made of Judith.15 Aethelwulf probably assumed that his young widow would simply return to her father in Francia – but Judith herself had other ideas.
Until the death of Aethelwulf, sources mentioning Judith tended to be lukewarm and sometimes critical in their attitude to her, but following Aethelwulf’s death they became overtly hostile. Judith would not have been shocked at Aethelwulf’s death and his will suggests that he endured a long illness. During that time, she had probably taken stock of her own position regarding the death of her husband and may well have made plans for her own future. Judith would have been well aware that her father expected her to enter a nunnery and the prospect of returning to Francia with its life of seclusion may not have been appealing, especially since she had gained a taste for politics from her time as queen. In 858, Judith apparently decided to take action on her own behalf and either approached, or was approached by, her stepson, Aethelbald, with a view to making a second marriage and retaining her position as queen.
No details survive of the arrangements for Judith’s second marriage but it seems likely that Judith took the initiative and her family in Francia were in no way involved. She would have realised that, like everyone in England, her family would be shocked at the news that she had married her own stepson and, although there was no blood relationship between the couple, it was well understood in England at the time that such a match was incestuous. Today also it is difficult to escape the view that such a marriage was distinctly unsavoury and it was something that would not have been sanctioned by the Church or the people of England or Francia. Both Judith and Aethelbald would have been well aware of this view before their marriage and must have made a conscious decision to defy conventional viewpoints.
The Anglo-Saxons clearly viewed a marriage between a stepmother and her stepson as immoral and irreligious, as can be seen in the reference to an earlier marriage in Kent that was recorded by the Venerable Bede:
The death of Ethelbert and the accession of his son Eadbald proved to be a severe setback to the growth of the young Church; for not only did he refuse to accept the Faith of Christ, but he was also guilty of such fornication as the Apostle Paul mentions as being unheard of even among the heathen, in that he took his father’s [second] wife as his own. His immorality was an incentive to those who, either out of fear or favour of the king his father, had submitted to the discipline of faith and chastity, to revert to their former uncleanness.16
According to Bede, a marriage between a stepmother and her stepson ushered in a wave of immorality and damaged the very fabric of the Church in England. He clearly considered such a marriage to be disgusting beyond words and something that even non-Christians would not deign to indulge in – harsh criticism indeed from the pious Bede. That such a view was still current is clear from the words of Judith’s own contemporary, Asser, in his description of her second marriage:
Once King Aethelwulf was dead, Aethelbald, his son, against God’s prohibition and Christian dignity, and also contrary to the practice of all pagans, took over his father’s marriage-bed and married Judith, daughter of Charles, king of the Franks, incurring great disgrace from all who heard of it; and he controlled the government of the kingdom of the West Saxons for two and a half lawless years after his father.17
Asser was clearly deliberately attempting to draw parallels with the much earlier reign of Eadbald of Kent in his description of the marriage and it once again shows the hostility with which this incestuous marriage was viewed. By carrying out incest, both Aethelbald and Judith were seen as ushering in a period of lawlessness and anarchy in England that was a direct result of their own immorality. Later chroniclers saw the marriage in the same light, with the twelfth-century historian, William of Malmesbury, for example, writing that ‘Ethelbald, base and perfidious, defiled the bed of his father by marrying, after his [Aethelwulf’s] decease, Judith his step-mother’.18 Clearly, Judith’s second marriage was not one that improved her already shady reputation in England.
Before their marriage Judith and Aethelbald would both have been aware that they would be heavily criticised for their actions. Both would have been raised to view such a marriage as incestuous and it seems likely that only higher political considerations enabled them to so subvert the morals of society. Both would have been uncomfortably aware that, according to the rules of the Church and society, Judith was every bit Aethelbald’s mother as if she had given birth to him herself, despite the fact that she must have been several years his junior. However they would also have been aware, from the earlier example of Eadbald of Kent, that such a marriage could yield great political benefits and it is possible that the Church viewed the marriage more severely than secular members of their court. Once again, for Judith, the chroniclers both of her time and later were mostly celibate churchmen and Judith, as a woman drawn into sexual immorality by political considerations, would always be considered notorious.
Aethelbald was described by his contemporary, Asser, as ‘grasping’19. This suggests that he was highly ambitious and, on his father’s death, wanted to ensure that he gained possession of the kingdom of Wessex without sharing it with his brothers. He appears to have become quickly established as Aethelwulf’s successor but, given that there was no established law of inheritance in England at that time, he would have been eager to ensure that the throne was also secured for his sons on the event of his own death. Aethelbald’s rebellion demonstrates that he keenly appreciated the additional eligibility that Judith’s coronation would confer on her sons and it seems likely that it was Judith’s additional status as an anointed queen that made her a desirable bride, in spite of the obvious difficulties incurred in the match. Aethelbald almost certainly hoped that his own sons, as children of a consecrated mother, would have a more legitimate claim to the throne than the children of his younger brothers.20 He may also have hoped to secure an alliance with Charles the Bald through the marriage although this was probably a secondary consideration.
For Aethelbald, therefore, the marriage had sound political advantages that outweighed the disadvantages of its incestuous nature. For Judith too there were advantages in a marriage to her stepson. Judith had already spent two years as the anointed Queen of Wessex and she is unlikely to have relished any return to Francia and removal to a nunnery. She appears to have gained a taste for political power and she would have been only too aware that a marriage to Aethelbald, her husband’s successor, was her only hope of retaining her status as queen in England. Little evidence survives from Aethelbald’s brief reign but Judith certainly appears to have been politically prominent. For example one charter specifies Judith as Queen, second only to her husband, Aethelbald, and his brother, Aethelberht, Underking of Kent.21 In this document, Judith was given a prominence unusual even to later Anglo-Saxon queens and she witnessed above all the attendant bishops and noblemen. In spite of its incestuous nature, Judith’s second marriage brought her tangible benefits, allowing her to maintain her status and prominence as a queen and a political figure.
In spite of the advantages conferred on both parties by the marriage, Judith’s second marriage proved to be no more lasting than her first and, in 860, Aethelbald died, leaving Judith once again as a childless widow.22 This second marriage had been, like her first, a political match and it is unlikely that Judith was unduly affected personally by the death. However, it may have been sudden and Judith does not appear to have had time to make plans for herself as she had done on Aethelwulf’s death. Aethelbald’s successor, Aethelberht, does not appear to have considered making a marriage with his stepmother and Judith must have known that she had no further role to play in England. Soon after Aethelbald’s death she returned home to her father, bowing to the inevitable at last.
Interest in Judith by English chroniclers ended with her return to Francia as a childless, and still teenaged, widow. Her reputation in England had been irretrievably blackened by her incestuous second marriage and her conduct after her return to Francia would only have served to further enhance this opinion of her. Upon her return to Francia, Judith was sent to Senlis nunnery by her father.23 Once again, however, Judith showed an independent spirit that shocked her contemporaries. After only a short time in her convent she made contact with Count Baldwin of Flanders and the pair eloped, marrying quickly without the consent of her father. The couple then fled to the court of Pope Nicholas I and enlisted his support, in spite of the fact that the Church expressly censured the remarriage of widows.24 The couple’s quick thinking presented Charles the Bald with a fait accompli and, in spite of his objections, he was forced eventually to accept the marriage.25 Judith of France disappears from history after her third marriage but she appears to have created a life for herself that brought her happiness and, at the very least, allowed her to escape from the unwelcome nunnery. Certainly, this marriage proved more lasting than her English marriages and she bore Baldwin children.
Judith of France is remembered for her notorious marriage to Aethelbald and appears in the chronicles only as a source of scandalous behaviour. There is no doubt that the behaviour of Judith, as an independent woman, was considered shocking to the church chroniclers of her era and later and also a dangerous example of female autonomy to male patriarchs for centuries to come. Not many people, men or women, defied Charles the Bald, the most powerful ruler in Europe, but Judith did, as a teenaged and powerless widow and her actions would inevitably provoke outrage. In spite of the disapproval she received throughout her lifetime, she was able to shape her own life in a way which was unusual for early medieval women and she appears to have been able to secure happiness for herself. Judith was probably aware of her unfavourable reputation but chose to ignore it, seeking personal satisfaction over the good opinion of her contemporaries. This was also a path taken by her much later queenly successor, Aelfgifu of the House of Wessex. Despite the similarities in the stories of the two women, Aelfgifu’s life turned out very differently to that of Judith.
Aelfgifu of the House of Wessex is also remembered as a queen who was involved in incest, and like Judith of France, it is on this that her reputation rests. The story of Aelfgifu of the House of Wessex leaves her open to two charges of incest and, although neither would have been considered as horrifying to contemporaries as Judith of France’s conduct, both proved to be useful tools with which Aelfgifu could be criticised and, finally, politically neutralised. Unlike Judith, for Aelfgifu these charges are unlikely to be true but, for medieval women, accusations were not easily forgotten and nothing destroyed a woman’s reputation so well as allegations of sexual impropriety.
Aelfgifu of the House of Wessex was the wife of Eadwig, who rose to the throne in 955 at the young age of fifteen. According to the Chronicle of Aethelweard, Eadwig ‘for his great beauty got the nick-name “All-Fair” from the common people. He held the kingdom continuously for four years and deserved to be loved’.26 This implies a positive view of Eadwig’s reign but it is the only favourable source and Eadwig was almost universally derided by contemporaries, as was Aelfgifu. Eadwig had succeeded to the throne in a contested succession and many of the leading churchmen of the day, including Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury, favoured the accession of Eadwig’s younger brother, Edgar. This led to a hostile portrayal in the sources of both Eadwig and his wife.
Aelfgifu of the House of Wessex never appears to have attained the prominence in England of Judith of France and she was certainly never crowned. Hostile portrayals of her in sources such as the Life of St Dunstan also deny that she was Eadwig’s wife and in the most famous incident surrounding her, Aelfgifu appears in the guise of an immoral courtesan. According to the Life of St Dunstan, Eadwig slipped away from his coronation feast. When his absence was noticed, Abbot Dunstan and his kinsman, Bishop Cynesige, were sent to fetch the king back.27 Everyone in attendance at the feast suspected that the king had left in order to enjoy the company of a mother and her daughter, both of whom hoped to entice him into marriage. According to the Life:
When in accordance with their superior’s orders they had entered, they found the royal crown, which was bound with wondrous metal, gold and silver and gems, and shone with many-coloured lustre, carelessly thrown on the floor, far from his [Eadwig’s] head, and he himself repeatedly wallowing between the two of them [the mother and daughter] in evil fashion, as if in a vile sty. They said: “Our nobles sent us to ask you to come as quickly as possible to your proper seat, and not to scorn to be present at the joyful banquet of your chief men”. But when he did not wish to rise, Dunstan, after first rebuking the folly of the women, replaced the crown, and brought him with him to the royal assembly, though dragged from the women by force.28
The Life of St Dunstan gives the lurid details of this encounter and, through its depiction of what can only be described as a ‘threesome’ between the king and the two women, it effectively damned the reputations of the three people involved for all later historians. There is also something distinctly unsavoury about the participation of Aelfgifu and her mother, Aethelgifu, in the seduction of the king and it is hard to resist the implications of incest that the participation of a mother and daughter implies. The Life of St Dunstanportrays Aethelgifu as a ruthless procuress, determined to win the king at all costs, and Aelfgifu as a willing participant.
That the Life of St Dunstan does not tell the whole truth about Aelfgifu is clear from other scattered sources. Aelfgifu is known to have been from a wealthy noble family and both she and her mother were also of royal descent – clearly not the common whores that the Life suggests.29 She was also the king’s wife, rather than a concubine and it is likely that the marriage helped provide Eadwig with a power base in southern England.30 Although Aethelgifu, as Aelfgifu’s mother, may well have helped arrange her daughter’s marriage to the king, in reality it seems impossible that she would have gone quite as far as the Life suggests in order to ensure the king’s compliance. It is also worth looking at the Life itself, the earliest source for the coronation incident. St Dunstan, who always strove to be the current king’s chief counsellor, was not well disposed towards queens. One of Aelfgifu’s successors as queen, Aelfthryth, would also have difficulty with the powerful Dunstan. He recognised the potential influence a queen could have over a king and, always uneasy with powerful women, he sought to keep them in the background by any means possible. In Aelfgifu’s case he denied that she was even the king’s wife, depicting her as a concubine and, in the process, he utterly destroyed her reputation. Aelfgifu and Aethelgifu will always be associated with their supposed ménage a trois with the king and the unsavoury image of a mother and daughter both participating in the seduction of the dissolute king. This view of Aelfgifu was certainly the one held by the twelfth-century historian, William of Malmesbury who wrote ‘Eadwig was led astray by the enticements of one courtesan, and when Dunstan rebuked him most severely for his folly, he expelled Dunstan from England’.31 William of Malmesbury also refers to Aelfgifu as a ‘harlot’ and a ‘strumpet’, hardly the usual descriptions given to a long-dead former queen.32
Aelfgifu’s reputation, like that of Eadwig himself, rides firmly on the fact that both were members of a faction that ultimately failed to triumph at court. Whilst Dunstan and Archbishop Oda supported Edgar, Aelfgifu and her family were behind Eadwig. In the first years of Eadwig’s reign, Eadwig’s supporters clearly had the upper hand and he was able to politically disable several of his opponents, through methods including the exile of Dunstan to the continent and the denial to his grandmother, the powerful Queen Eadgifu, of her lands.33 Much of the opposition to his rule that Eadwig faced was due to his marriage and the threat that this posed to the more established members of his court.34 Like Judith one hundred years before her, Aelfgifu was certainly unfairly blamed for the political changes that her marriage allowed and Aelfgifu struggled to establish her position as queen in the face of this opposition. She is recognised as the king’s legitimate wife in only one charter from his reign which, once again, shows the deep hostility of leading churchmen, who would have been responsible for drawing up and storing the charters.35
The depiction of Aelfgifu in the Life of St Dunstan was not the only attack on her marriage and character that she sustained during Eadwig’s reign. Opposition to the marriage was directly connected to a rebellion in favour of Eadwig’s brother, Edgar, in 957.36According to several sources, Eadwig ruled England so badly that, in 957, all of England north of the Thames deserted him and chose Edgar as king.37 This must have been a major blow for both Aelfgifu and Eadwig and it seems likely that it was only the support of Aelfgifu’s powerful family that helped secure the south for the king. Both the king and queen must have been concerned for the future as their position grew steadily worse over the next year.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 958 states, blandly, that ‘here in this year Archbishop Oda divorced King Eadwig and Aelfgifu because they were related’.38 This entry once again suggests that a charge of incest was being used against Aelfgifu to discredit her. The pretext used for the divorce was probably used to demonstrate further the king’s supposed immorality and a number of sources refer to Aelfgifu and Eadwig being ‘near of kin’.39 As with the marriage of Judith of France and Aethelbald, incest appears to have been associated with bad governance. It seems likely that consanguity was deliberately chosen as the reason for the divorce in order to highlight Eadwig’s unsuitability as a ruler. The fact that the couple only appear to have been related through shared great-great-grandparents does not seem to have been mentioned so prominently. It is clear that the intention was to portray the couple as much more closely related. That this was used as a pretext on which to separate Eadwig from his influential wife as is demonstrated by the fact that at least one more inbred Anglo-Saxon marriage had remained unchallenged: that of Eadwig’s grandfather, Edward the Elder, to his cousin’s daughter, Aelfflaed. Like the earlier suggestions of incest regarding Aelfgifu and her mother, however, this charge achieved what Eadwig’s opponents intended and Aelfgifu’s name is irrevocably associated with incest.
Aelfgifu was exiled from England following her forced divorce and she probably spent several years wandering on the continent.40 If she had entertained any hopes of a reconciliation with Eadwig, she was to be disappointed. According to William of Malmesbury, Eadwig died of shock at seeing all the calamities that had beset him, dying on 10 October 959.41 Although few details survive of Aelfgifu and Eadwig’s relationship it can, perhaps, be inferred that they were close and Aelfgifu never married again. At some point during the reign of Edgar, Eadwig’s successor Aelfgifu returned to England and she seems to have lived the life of a wealthy widow. Eadwig was buried in the New Minster at Winchester and around twenty years after his death he was joined there by Aelfgifu, who requested burial there in her own will. Perhaps she chose this site for her own burial in order to be with her husband in death in a way that she had not been able to be with him in life.
Aelfgifu of the House of Wessex backed the wrong faction at court and she paid for this both with her happiness and her reputation. Much less deserving of the smear of incest than her predecessor Judith of France, Aelfgifu’s existence is still only remembered for the story surrounding Eadwig’s coronation and both her and her mother’s harlotry. By marrying the king, Aelfgifu provided Eadwig with the powerful support of her family and, as such, she was always seen as a threat to the king’s more established counsellors. Unfortunately for Aelfgifu, these disgruntled counsellors were often churchmen and it was the Church who controlled what was written down, at least in the early medieval period. It was very easy for them to attack her with stories of incest and since she was female, these labels remained. Eadwig, although remembered as a weak king is not so damned for his own alleged incestuous behaviour with Aelfgifu. Sexual indecency was always less damaging to men. By contrast Aelfgifu, being a woman, was always regarded with suspicion by the chronicler monks and consequently suffered, despite the lack of truth behind the rumours.
Both Judith of France and Aelfgifu of the House of Wessex are notorious for the lives they are supposed to have led and, in particular, the charges of incest that have been laid against them. Both had very different characters, however, and responded in different ways to the charges laid against them. Judith of France appears to have actively rejected her lot and sought personal happiness over the preservation of her reputation. Aelfgifu, on the other hand, lost both. Both queens were attacked with claims of sexual impropriety and this was always a powerful way of nullifying a political queen. Despite their denouncement however, Judith of France and Aelfgifu in some ways endured a mild fate. Other Anglo-Saxon queens are remembered for even more villainous crimes such as murder and adultery.