She Wolves (4 page)
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 Dunstan
portrays 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.
36
According 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.