The House of Wessex

Ælfred the Great

Ælfred the Great penny
Silver penny minted during the reign of Ælfred the Great, struck 875–880. The coin features a diademed bust facing right with ELFRE D REX around.
image posted on wikipedia
Ælfred the Great
Ælfred as depicted in the Genealogical roll of the kings of England (1300-1308) - BL Royal MS 14 B VI
image posted on wikipedia
Birth: 849, in Wantage, Berkshire, Wessex

Asser’s life of King Alfred p1 (ed. Albert S. Cook, 1914)
In the year of our Lord’s incarnation 849, Alfred, King of the Anglo-Saxons, was born at the royal vill of Wantage, in Berkshire

Father: Æthelwulf

Mother: Osburh

Married: Ealhswith in 868

Children Occupation: King of the West-Saxons
Ælfred succeeded to the throne of Wessex on the death of his brother Æthelred, in April 871. He ruled until his death in 924.

Notes:
Dictionary of national biography vol 1 pp153-62 (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1885)
  ÆLFRED (849-901), king of the West-Saxons, is the one great character of our early history whose name still lives in popular memory, and round whose well-known historical career a vast mass of legend has gathered. The name of Ælfred is familiar to many who perhaps do not know the name of any other king or other worthy before the Norman Conquest. And popular belief has made him into a kind of embodiment of the national being; he has become the model English king, indeed the model Englishman. As usual, popular belief has got hold of a half truth. It has picked out for remembrance the man most worthy of remembrance, and, as far as his personal character is concerned, its conception of him has not gone far astray. But his historical position is strangely misconceived. As the one Old-English name that is remembered, Ælfred has drawn to himself the credit that belongs to many men both earlier and later, and often to the nation itself. The king of the West Saxons grows into a king of all England, and he is made the founder of all our institutions. He invents trial by jury, the rude principle of which is as old as the Teutonic race itself, while the first glimmerings of its actual existing shape cannot be seen till ages after Ælfred’s day. So he divides England into shires, hundreds, tithings, and institutes the so-called law of frankpledge. In all this we see the natural growth of legend, always ready to find a personal author for national customs which really grew of themselves. It is by a worse process, by deliberate and interested falsehood, that he has been represented as the founder of the university of Oxford and of one of its colleges.
  Yet even the legendary reputation of Ælfred is hardly too great for his real merits. No man recorded in history seems ever to have united so many great and good qualities. At once captain, lawgiver, saint, and scholar, he devoted himself with a single mind to the welfare of his people in every way. He showed himself alike their deliverer, their ruler, and their teacher. He came to the crown at a moment of extreme national danger; a great part of his reign was taken up with warfare with an enemy who threatened the national being; yet he found means personally to do more for the general enlightenment of his people than any other king in English history. Ælfred is great, not by the special development of some one or two powers or virtues, but by the equal balance of all. Appearing in many characters, he avoids the special vices and temptations of each. In a reign of singular alternations of overthrow and success, he is never cast down by ill luck or puffed up by good. In any case of war or of peace, of good luck or of bad, he is ready to act with a single mind, as the needs of the moment most call upon him to act.
… Ælfred was the fifth and youngest son of Æthelwulf, king of the West Saxons, and of his wife Osburh, daughter of his cup-bearer Oslac, of the old kingly house of the Jutes of Wight (ASSER). He was born at Wantage in Berkshire in 849. In 853 he was sent to Rome by his father, where the pope, Leo IV, took him to his ‘bishopson’ and hallowed him to king. It seems impossible to gainsay this last statement of Asser and the Chronicles, strange as it is; and it may help to explain some things that follow. If we literally follow the words of Asser, we must believe that the child was brought back, and that he went again with his father two years later, when Æthelwulf made his own pilgrimage to Rome in 855. But it is perhaps easier to suppose that he stayed at Rome for three years and came back with his father in 856. He was Æthelwulf’s best-beloved son, and his hallowing at Rome, an act so contrary to all English precedent and English law, no doubt helped with other causes to set the elder sons of Æthelwulf against their father. On his way home Æthelwulf married and brought back with him Judith, the young daughter of Charles the Bald, king of the West Franks, and afterwards emperor. And we are driven, however unwillingly, to suppose that Osburh, the mother of Æthelwulf’s children, was put away to make room for her (see WRIGHT, Biographia Britannica Literaria, Anglo-Saxon Period, p. 385), a step which among the Franks at least, would be in no way wonderful. In no other way can we understand the well-known story told by Asser, how Ælfred’s mother showed him and his brothers a book of poems with a beautiful initial letter, and promised to give it to the one who should first learn to read it. Ælfred found a master, and was soon able to read. This story is placed in Ælfred’s twelfth year, about 861, when the mention of his brothers is in any case a difficulty. But in no case could we put the story before the return of Æthelwulf in 856. It follows therefore that Osburh must have outlived her husband’s second marriage. The notion that by Ælfred’s mother is meant, not his own mother, but the Frankish girl, younger than some of his brothers, whom their father had put in her place, is too wild to be discussed.
  Whatever may have been designed by Ælfred’s childish hallowing at Rome, no attempt was made to set him up as the immediate successor of his father. And when Æthelwulf tried to fix the succession beforehand, by a will confirmed by the Witan, Ælfred was put in the line of succession after those of his brothers who were put in the line of succession at all. We hear nothing of him directly during the reigns of his brothers Æthelbald and Æthelberht; but on the accession of Æthelred in 866 he at once comes into prominence. During Æthelred’s reign Asser gives Ælfred the title of secundarius—possibly equivalent to subregulus—but he seems rather to look on him as a general helper to his brother than as the local under-king of any particular land. He also (871) implies that he had held that title during the time of his elder brothers. This is very puzzling, and might almost seem to suggest that something of special kingship, beyond the common kingliness of the kin, was held to attach to Ælfred from the Roman hallowing. Anyhow, under Æthelred, Ælfred, young as he still was, was clearly the second man in the kingdom. In 868 he married Ealhswith daughter of Æthelred surnamed the Mickle, ealdorman of the Gainas (a people whose name survives in Gainsborough) and his wife Eadburh. In 869 he shared the expedition of his brother to Nottingham for the relief of their brother-in-law Burhred, king of the Mercians, against the Danes who had settled in Northumberland. In 871 the Danes first invaded Wessex, and Ælfred appears as the leading spirit of that great year of battles. He shared in the great victory on Æscesdún (not the place now specially called Ashdown, but the whole long hill with the battle-field on the top) and in the following battles of Basing and Menton. When Æthelred died soon after Easter in that year, Ælfred succeeded to the West-Saxon crown. He succeeded, as Asser assures us and as we certainly have no reason to doubt with the general good will But it is to be noticed that neither Asser nor the Chronicles contain any formal notice of his election and coronation. Neither do they in the case of his brothers or in that of many other kings. But the fulness of the narrative at this point makes the omission in this case more remarkable, and we are again led to think what may have been the effect of the will of Æthelwulf and the hallowing by Pope Leo. But that Ælfred should succeed his brother in preference to his brother’s young sons was only according to the universal custom of the nation then and down to the election of John.
  Ælfred’s accession to the crown came in the very thick of the fighting with the Danes. A month afterwards the new king fought with the Danes at Wilton, the ninth and last battle of the year. It is one of those fights in which we read that the English drove the Danes to flight, and yet that the Danes kept possession of the place of slaughter. In battles between irregular levies and a smaller but better disciplined band of invaders, this result is not so unlikely as it seems at first sight. But in any case the West-Saxon kingdom was so weakened by the warfare of this year that Ælfred was glad to make peace with the Danes, doubtless on the usual terms of payment of money. They then left Wessex, and the immediate kingdom of Ælfred had rest for a season.
  The second invasion of Wessex by the Danes who remained in England is the event which has made Ælfred’s name famous. Some smaller attacks went before the main blow. Thus in 875 the king met and drove away some pirate ships. In 876 the host ‘stole’ into Wessex and attacked Wareham. The king now made peace with them, and they swore on the holy bracelet, their most solemn oath, that they would leave his dominions. The land-force however ‘stole’ away to Exeter; there, in 877, they renewed their oaths, and left Wessex for Gloucester. It was in the next year, 878, just after Christmas, that the whole Danish power burst upon Wessex. They entered the land at Chippenham; of the eastern part of the  kingdom we hear nothing; in Devonshire there was fighting, for a Danish leader was killed, and the banner, the famous Raven, was taken. Somerset seems to have been overrun without a battle, and there is no sign of general resistance till about Easter, when the king, with a small company, raised a fort at Athelney (Æthelinga ige) among the marshes. This acted as a centre for winning back what was lost. The king’s force grew, and seven weeks after Easter he marched to Brixton (Ecgbrihtes stán) on the Wiltshire border. There, at the head of the whole force of Somerset and Wiltshire and part of that of Hampshire, he defeated the Danes in the battle of Ethandún (seemingly Edington in Wiltshire), and took their stronghold. The Danes and their king Guthrum now again agreed, with oaths and hostages, to leave Wessex, and further engaged that the king should receive baptism. Guthrum was accordingly baptized at Aller in Somerset. His ‘chrisom-loosing’ at Wedmore followed, and this last seems to have been the occasion of the peace between Ælfred and Guthrum, which became the model for several later agreements of the same kind.
… By the treaty now made between Ælfred and Guthrum, a frontier, answering in the main to the Watling Street, was drawn between the immediate dominions of the two kings. That is to say, the West-Saxon king kept the whole of his own kingdom and added to it all south-western Mercia, establishing also an overlordship, however nominal, over the land which was yielded to the Danes. By this arrangement, Ælfred, as compared with his predecessors before the Danish invasions, lost as an overlord, but gained as an immediate sovereign. Ecgberht and Æthelwulf had been kings only of the later Wessex and its eastern dependencies, the land south of the Thames, with such supremacy as they might be able to enforce over the other English kingdoms. And this supremacy was undoubtedly more real than any that Ælfred could for some while enforce anywhere beyond his own kingdom. But his own kingdom was greatly enlarged, and that to a considerable extent by lands which had been lost by earlier West-Saxon kings. And this immediate enlargement of the West-Saxon kingdom was not all. Wessex and her king now stood forth as the only English power in Britain, the one which had lived through the Danish inroads and had come out stronger from them. From this time the recovery of the part of England held by the Danes, and the union of the whole into one kingdom, was only a question of time. The English people everywhere now learned to look to the West-Saxon king as their champion and deliverer.
  Ælfred did not however at once bring the recovered part of Mercia under his own immediate government. The Mercian kingdom had come to an end by the flight of its king Burhred, Ælfred’s brother-in-law, and the Danish occupation of the country. The part of Mercia which Ælfred won back he put into the hands of Æthelred, a man of the old kingly house of Mercia, and who held under the West-Saxon king a position more like that of an under-king than of an ordinary ealdorman. To him he gave in marriage his daughter Æthelflæd, the renowned Lady of the Mercians. Æthelred and Æthelflæd proved the most loyal of helpers both to Ælfred and to his successor Eadward.
The division of England
England first divided in Counties, Hundreds and Tythings by Alfred the Great
illustration from A new and complete history of England opp p39 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795)
  The question now suggests itself whether it is not in this extension of the West-Saxon kingdom that we are to look for the origin of the legend which makes Ælfred the author of the division of England into shires and hundreds. As far as regards the hundreds, this notion is as old as William of Malmesbury. It is not at all unlikely that Ælfred may have done in his new dominion what his son Eadward clearly did in the much larger territory which he recovered from the Danes. That territory Eadward clearly mapped out into new shires without regard to the boundaries of the older settlements. It may be that Ælfred had already begun the work in his Mercian acquisitions, and that some of the shires in that quarter may be of his formation.
  In 879 Guthrum and his Danes left Wessex for Cirencester, where they were in the part of Mercia ceded to Ælfred. The next year they altogether left Ælfred’s dominions, and settled in East Anglia. For a few years there was quiet, but in 884 we have the marked entry in the Chronicles that the hosts in East-Anglia broke the peace. This was seemingly by failing to renew their hostages, and by giving help to a Scandinavian host which, after much ravaging on the continent, landed in Kent and attacked Rochester. Ælfred drove them back to their ships, and then sent a fleet against East Anglia which came in for both a victory and a defeat (see the Chronicles, sub an. 884, 885, and Æthelward as explained by Lappenberg). In 886 Ælfred took an important step for the defence of his kingdom by occupying and fortifying London, which he put into the hands of Æthelred of Mercia )see the collation of the authorities in EARLE’S Parallel Chronicles). This seems to have been accompanied by a general submission to Ælfred of the Angles and Saxons throughout Britain, except so far as they were hindered by Danish masters. This is not very clear, as the only separate English state left was that of Bernicia or aBmburgh. Its prince Eadwulf is said in another account (TWYSDEN, Decem Script. 1073) to have been on friendly terms with Ælfred, which most likely implies some measurable overlordship on the side of the greater potentate. Indeed from the language used by the chronicler in recording the events of the year 893 we might be led to think that the Danes themselves, not only in East-Anglia but in Northumberland, had given oaths and hostages at some time before that year. About the same time also as the fortification of London. Ælfred received the submission of several princes of Wales, who agreed to pay to him the same subjection which Æthelred paid in Mercia. Ælfred was thus, in name at least, restored to the position of his grandfather Ecgberht, as overlord of all England, with a much greater immediate dominion than Ecgberht had ever held.
  For several years no warlike acts are recorded. We hear chiefly of Ælfred sending alms to Rome, and of his reception of his British friend and biographer Asser, and of saintly wanderers from Ireland. This was the chief time of his literary work, and most likely of his legislation also. When the time of strife came again, it began with an attack from the continent. In 893 the Northmen who had been defeated by King Arnulf of Germany crossed to England, and landed on the borders of Kent and Sussex, while the famous wiking Hasting sailed up the Thames. Ælfred now exacted fresh oaths and hostages from the Danes in England, both in East-Anglia and in Northumberland; but they presently broke their oaths, and joined the invaders. The campaigns which followed in 894 and following years to 897 are told with great detail in the Chronicles. They are remarkable for the great extent of country which they cover. The war begins in south-eastern England, but it presently spreads into the distant west. While the king goes to defend Exeter, attacked by sea by the Danes from Northumberland and East-Anglia, Ealdorman Æthelred has to follow the other army along both the Thames and the Severn. Defeated at Buttington, they go back to Essex; then, with new forces from Northumberland and East-Anglia, they cross the island again, and winter in the Wirrall in Cheshire, within the forsaken walls of the city which had been Deva and which was before long to be Chester. The two next years there is fighting in nearly every part of England. The king, the men of London, and the South-Saxons, show themselves vigorous in resistance, and the war goes on as far north as York. In 897 the invaders seem to have been tired out. Some withdrew to the continent, some to East-Anglia and Northumberland. Warfare by land comes to an end; and by improvements in the build of his ships, Ælfred is able to put down the small parties of wikings which still infest the channel. We do not read of any renewed peace, of any more oaths or hostages; perhaps Ælfred had learned how little they went for. But the war clearly came to an end, as for three years more the Chronicles have nothing to record.
  Two personal notices of Ælfred during this war are worth noticing. At some early stage of it, the details of which are not easy to settle, Hasting himself swore oaths to Ælfred, and consented to the baptism of his two children, Ælfred being godfather to one and Æthelred to the other. At a later stage, when Hasting had broken his oaths, the two boys and their mother fell into the king’s hands, and Ælfred gave them back to Hasting. On the other hand, at the very end of the war, Ælfred hanged the crews of the captured Danish ships. After their repeated oath breakings and harryings, there was nothing wonderful in this; but it may be noticed as the only act of Ælfred which looks at all like harshness.
  In the fourth year after the end of the last Danish war, 28 Oct. 901, Ælfred died in his fifty-third year, and was buried in the New Minster, afterwards Hyde Abbey, at Winchester. By his wife Ealhswith, who survived him till 902 or 905, he left five children—two sons, his successor Eadward, who succeeded him, and Æthelward, and three daughters, Æthelflæd, the Lady of the Mercians, Ælfthryth, married to Baldwin, Count of Flanders, and Æthelgifu, Abbess of Shaftesbury.
  The general outward result of the reign of Ælfred is thus perfectly plain. When the Scandinavian invasions threatened the utter overthrow of England, and especially of English Christianity, he saved his own kingdom from the general wreck, and made it the centre for the deliverance and union of the whole country. The Danish invasions did more than any other one cause to bring about the unity of England; but that they did so was only because Ælfred was able to use them to that end. The Danes, by breaking to pieces the other kingdoms and leaving one, gave that one an altogether new position. Ecgberht brought all England under his supremacy as a conqueror. Ælfred and his successors were able to win back that supremacy as deliverers. Ælfred did not form a single kingdom of England, but he took the first steps towards its formation by his son and grandsons. His royal style is remarkable. Besides the obvious title of ‘West Saxonum rex,’ he very often calls himself ‘Rex Saxonum,’ a title unknown before, and not common afterwards. No other style so exactly expressed the extent of Ælfred’s dominion. It took in all, or nearly all, of the Saxon part of England, and not much besides.
… The personal character of Ælfred, as set forth by his biographer Asser, certainly comes as near to perfection as that of any recorded man. He gives us not only a picture of a man thoroughly devoted to his work, faithfully discharging the acknowledged duties of his office, but the further picture of one who, as a king, the father of his people, sought for every opportunity of doing good to his people in every way. Many of the details have become household words. His careful economy of time, by which he found means to carry on his studies without interfering with the cares of government, his deep devotion, his constant thought for his people, the various expedients and inventions of a simple age, all stand out in his life as recorded by the admiring stranger. And we must not forget his physical difficulties. The tale of the sickness which beset him on the day of his marriage and at other times of his life seems to have received legendary additions; but the general outline of the story seems to be trustworthy. His bounty was large and systematic. He laboured hard to restore the monastic life which had pretty well died out in his kingdom, by the foundation of his two monasteries, one for women at Shaftesbury, the other for men on the spot which had seen his first resistance to the Danes on Athelney. And besides gifts to the poor and religious foundations at home, he sent alms to Rome and even to India (Chron. sub an. 883).
Alfred jewel
The Alfred Jewel is a piece of Anglo-Saxon goldsmithing made of enamel and quartz enclosed in gold. It was discovered in 1693, in North Petherton, Somerset, and is now exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It has been dated to the late 9th century, in the reign of Alfred the Great, and is inscribed "AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN", meaning "Alfred ordered me made". The jewel was once attached to a rod, probably of wood, at its base. It is believed to have been the handle or terminal for one of the precious "aestels" or staffs that Alfred the Great is recorded as having sent to each bishopric along with a copy of his translation of Pope Gregory the Great's book Pastoral Care. He wrote in his preface to the book:
 "And I will send a copy to every bishop's see in my kingdom, and in each book there is an aestel of 50 mancusses and I command, in God's name, that no man take the staff from the book, nor the book from the church."
photo by Mkooiman dated 2015 posted on wikipedia
In his many-sided activity, he looked carefully after his builders and gold-workers, his huntsmen and falconers, in a state of things when hunting was no mere sport but a serious business.
  But it is after all the strictly intellectual side of Ælfred’s character which is most specially his own. Any other king would have thought it enough to defend his people with courage, to rule them with justice, to legislate for them with wisdom. Ælfred did all this and more also. He made it his further business to be the spiritual and intellectual teacher of his people. For in all his writings Ælfred is emphatically the teacher. He writes from a sheer sense of duty, to profit his own folk. He undertakes the humble office of a translator, and turns into his native tongue such writings, religious, historical, and scientific, as he thinks will tend to the instruction of his people.
… Ælfred himself, in the preface to the Pastoral of Gregory, sets forth and laments the sad lack of learning, which he found in his own kingdom at the time of his accession. It was one of the dead times of English intellect: the literary eminence of Northumberland had passed away; the continuous literary eminence of Wessex was to begin with himself. His foundation of schools at Oxford—a tale as old as the so-called Brompton—is purely fabulous; but he did all that he could for the advancement of learning by planting the best scholars in the monasteries which were the schools of the time, and by giving some of them high ecclesiastical preferment. To this end he invited men both from other parts of Britain and from lands beyond sea. He brought Archbishop Plegmund and Bishop Werfrith from Mercia; he brought Grimbold and John the Old-Saxon from other Teutonic lands: from the land of the Briton came Asser, while John the Scot, John Scotus Erigena, might be said to come from both Celtic and Teutonic lands at once. But it was not only men of book-learning that he brought from other lands. Strangers from all parts flocked to become his men, and he gladly received all who brought with them any knowledge or any useful art, the seafaring Othhere no less than Grimbold or Asser. And it should be noticed that his reception and encouragement of strangers, forming as it did a marked feature in Ælfred’s character, seems never to have been turned against him as a fault, as it was against some other kings.
  But for us Ælfred’s greatest and most abiding work in his character of promoter of knowledge is that he gave us our unique possession, a history of our own folk in our own tongue from the beginning. The most reasonable belief seems to be that it was at Ælfred’s bidding that the English Chronicles grew into their present shape out of the older local annals of the church of Winchester. We thus have what no other nation of Western Europe has, a continuous national record from our first coming into our present land.
… Of Ælfred’s own writings the chief are his translations of Boetius’s ‘Consolation of Philosophy,’ of the Histories of Bæda and Orosius, and of the ‘Pastoral Care’ of Gregory the Great
… But among the writings of Ælfred we must not forget his will, of which the English text is given by Kemble, Cod. Dipl. ii. 112, and a Latin version in Cod. Dipl. v. 127, where the preface, reciting the will of Æthelwulf, is given at much greater length. In its many special bequests to his children and to other persons, and in its legal and other allusions, especially the account of the minute arrangements made by Æthelwulf for the disposal of his property, it is one of the most instructive documents of the time.
  [Our main authorities for the reign and life of Ælfred are his life by Asser and the English Chronicles during his reign. The genuineness of Asser’s work was called in question by Mr. Thomas Wright, but it has been generally accepted by later scholars. It has no doubt been interpolated as in some of the passages Saint Neot and in the more shameless forgery  about about Grimbold at Oxford. But the original text can be recovered with no great trouble, very much by the help of Florence of Worcester, who has so largely copied Asser. The work of Asser, thus distinguished, bears every mark of genuineness. It seems quite impossible that any forger could have invented the small touches which bespeak the man writing from personal knowledge, and that man no Englishman but a Briton. The constant use of the word ‘Saxon’ where Ælfred himself would have used ‘English’ is of itself proof enough: a later forger might have thought of it, but hardly one so early as to have been mistaken by Florence for the genuine Asser. His notices of York (M. H. B. 474) and of the table-land of Æscesdún (ibid. 477) are evidently, as the writer says of the latter, the result of personal knowledge. It is enough to compare the true Asser with the false Ingulf to see the difference between the two. A few other notices, which seem to come from independent sources, are preserved by Æthelward and William of Malmesbury.
  A list of the earlier modern writers on Ælfred is given by Wright, Biographia Literaria, 384. The best known is the life by Sir John Spelman, son of the better known Sir Henry, which first appeared in 1678. In modern times there has been a life of Ælfred by Dr. Giles (London, 1848) and a German life by Wyss. More important is the youthful work of Dr. Pauli, the English version of which was edited by Mr. Thomas Wright. Mr Wright’s notices of Ælfred's works, in his Biographia Literaria, have been referred to already. Of notices of Ælfred in more general writers of English history, the most valuable narrative is certainly that of Lappenberg in the first volume of his Geschichte von England, in the second volume of the translation by Mr. Thorpe. The constitutional aspect of the reign is treated by Dr. Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 99, 127, 191-7.]      E. A. F.  

Other accounts of Ælfred's life and reign can be found in Asser’s life of King Alfred (ed. Albert S. Cook, 1914), The Anglo-Saxon chronicle pp47-64 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914), William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England pp113-121 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847), The chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon pp153-61 (ed. Thomas  Forester, 1853), The Annals of Roger de Hoveden vol 1 pp40-59 (translated by Henry T. Riley, 1853), A new and complete history of England pp36-41 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795), Biographia Britannica Literaria pp384-405 (Thomas Wright, 1842) and wikipedia (Alfred_the_Great).

Death: 28 October 901

The Anglo-Saxon chronicle p64 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1906)
  A. 901 This year died ALFRED, the son of Ethelwulf, six days before the mass of All Saints. He was king over the whole English nation, except that part which was under the dominion of the Danes; and he held the kingdom one year and a half less than thirty years. And then Edward his son succeeded to the kingdom.

Buried: St Swithun cathedral monastery, and then, after the New Minster at Winchester was built, the remains both of Ælfred and his wife were translated there.

William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England pp121-2 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847)
  Alfred, paying the debt of nature, was buried at Winchester, in the monastery which he had founded; to build the offices of which Edward, his son, purchased a sufficient space of ground from the bishop and canons, giving, for every foot, a mancus of gold of the statute weight. The endurance of the king was astonishing, in suffering such a sum to be extorted from him; but he did not choose to offer a sacrifice to God from the robbery of the poor. These two churches were so contiguous, that, when singing, they heard each others’ voices; on this and other accounts an unhappy jealousy was daily stirring up causes of dissension, which produced frequent injuries on either side. For this reason that monastery was lately removed out of the city, and became a more healthy, as well as a more conspicuous, residence. They report that Alfred was first buried in the cathedral, because his monastery was unfinished, but that afterwards, on account of the folly of the canons, who asserted that the royal spirit, resuming its carcass, wandered nightly through the buildings, Edward, his son and successor, removed the remains of his father, and gave them a quiet resting-place in the new minster.*
  * On its removal called Hyde Abbey.

Liber monasterii de Hyda page xxviii (ed. Edward Edwards, 1866)
  Immediately after the dedication, the remains of Alfred, and those of his wife Ealhswith, were brought in solemn procession from St. Swithun’s. It does not appear that this re-interment—natural as it seems under the circumstances which attended the foundation of New Minster—was originally contemplated. So little foundation is there for the common statement that New Minster was expressly designed to be “a royal cemetery.” In two several passages of the Book of Hyde we are told that the re-interment of Alfred was the result of certain delirious fancies conceived by some canons of the old monastery, that the ghost of the great monarch was wont to revisit the glimpses of the moon; to re-animate its buried tenement; and to roam about their cloisters,—
        “The sepulchre
    Wherein they saw him quietly in-urned,
    Opening its ponderous and marble jaws
    To cast him up again!”

Ælfred's will
A page from Ælfred's will
Add MS 82931, f. 10v posted on British Library: Medieval manuscripts blog
Will:
British Library: Medieval manuscripts blog (July 2013)
Alfred's will, drawn up c. 885, almost 15 years before his death, begins very much like a will today:
    Ic Aelfred cingc mid Godes gife 7 mid geþeahtunge Aeþelredes ercebisceopes 7 ealre Westseaxena witena gewitnesse ...
    I, King Alfred, by the grace of God and with the advice of Archbishop Æthelred, and the cognisance of all the West Saxon council ...
  It describes the past and future succession of his kingdom, and Alfred's relationship with his father, brothers and nephews. In the preamble, the legacy of Alfred's father, Æthelwulf, is summarised, referring to how his four sons each succeeded to the kingdom in turn, and how they each made provisions for their sons. Alfred, the youngest and last to succeed, was keen to establish his right to the property distributed in his will; and so mention is made to a meeting of the West Saxon council, after his brother Æthelred's death, where the thegns upheld Alfred's claims to his brother's inheritance.
  Having dismissed all rival claims to the property, Alfred proceeds to distribute land, first to his elder son Edward, then to the Old Minster at Winchester (where he was buried), to his younger son, daughters, brothers' sons and a kinsman named Osferth. In what appears to be a sentimental gesture, he bequeaths to his wife Ealhswith the places of his birth, Lambourn, and two greatest victories, Wantage and Edington. His treasure is then allocated to his children, his followers, his nephews and to the Church. A total of 2000 silver pounds was distributed, an indication of the great wealth Alfred accumulated during his reign. The king then appealed to all his successors to abide by the conditions of his will, his final gesture being to grant freedom to all the members of the council who had served him.

Ælfred's will, in Old English, is fully transcribed in Codex diplomaticus aevi saxonici vol 2 pp112-7 (ed. John Mitchell Kemble, 1840), and a version in Latin in Codex diplomaticus aevi saxonici vol 5 pp127-33 (ed. John Mitchell Kemble, 1847). It is translated in full in The Will of King Alfred (1788).
  
Sources:

Ælfgifu

Father: Æthelred the Unready

Mother: unknown, possibly named Ælfgifu

Married: Uhtred of Bamburgh

Children Notes:
Dictionary of National Biography vol 58 pp16-17 (Sidney Lee, 1899)
Uhtred, who was a valiant warrior, went to the relief of his father-in-law the bishop, defeated the Scots, and slew a great number of them. Ethelred II (968?-1016) [q.v.], on hearing of Uhtred’s success, gave him his father’s earldom, adding to it the government of Deira. … for as he was of great service to the king in war, Ethelred gave him his daughter Elgiva or Ælfgifu to wife.
… By Ethelred’s daughter Elgiva, Uhtred had a daughter named Aldgyth or Eadgyth,who married Maldred, and became the mother of Gospatric (or Cospatric), earl of Northumberland [q. v.] He also had two other sons—Eadwulf, who succeeded his brother Ealdred as earl in Bernicia and was slain by Siward, and Gospatric.

Sources:

Æthelred the Unready

Gold mancus of Æthelred
Gold mancus of Æthelred, wearing armour, 1003–1006
photo by PHGCOM taken at the British Museum, posted at wikipedia
Æthelred the Unready
Æthelred the Unready, from an illuminated manuscript, Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon
image posted at wikipedia
Æthelred the Unready
Æthelred the Unready, as depicted in the Genealogical roll of the kings of England (1300-1308) - BL Royal MS 14 B VI
image posted at wikipedia
Birth: 968
Æthelred was "scarcely" 7 at his father's death in 975

Father: Edgar

Mother: Ælfthryth

Married (1st): unknown, possibly named Ælfgifu
The history of the Norman conquest of England pp455-7 (Edward A.Freeman, 1873)
The mother of these children, as I have said, is called by Florence Ælfgifu, the daughter of Ealdorman Æthelberht. I cannot however identify any Ealdorman of that name. Æthelred of Rievaux (X Scriptt. 362, 372) calls her the daughter of Earl Thored (see p. 646). William of Malmesbury (ii. 179) professes ignorance of her name, and speaks of her birth as ignoble; “Erat iste Edmundus non ex Emma natus, sed ex quadam alia quam fama obscura recondit.” He then goes on to magnify Eadmund, saying that he was one “qui patris ignaviam, matris ignobilitatem, virtute suâ probe premeret si Parce parcere nôssent.” Roger of Wendover speaks nearly to the same effect in i. 451.
… I am afraid therefore that I must leave the first marriage of Athelred shrouded in some obscurity.

William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England p195 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847)
This Edmund was not born of Emma, but of some other person, whom fame has left in obscurity.

Children Married (2nd): Emma of Normandy in 1002
Emma was the sister of Richard II, Duke of Normandy. After Æthelred's death, Emma married, in 1017, Cnut the Great, who had succeeded Æthelred on the English throne, with whom she had two more children, a son, Harthnacut, and a daughter, Gunhilda.  She died on 6 March 1062, in Winchester, Hampshire, and was buried in the Old Minster, Winchester.

The History Of The Norman Conquest Of England vol 1 pp303-6 (Edward A. Freeman, 1877)
  Whatever was the exact nature of the mutual wrongs now done to each other by Normans and Englishmen, the quarrel did not last long. Æthelred seems now to have been a widower; the peace between the two countries was therefore confirmed by a marriage between him and the Duke’s sister Emma, one of the legitimated children of Richard the Fearless and Gunnor. Her beauty and accomplishments are highly extolled, but her long connexion with England, as the wife of two Kings and the mother of two others, brought with it nothing but present evil, and led to the future overthrow of the English kingdom and nation. The marriage of Æthelred and Emma led directly to the Norman Conquest of England. With that marriage began the settlement of Normans in England, their admission to English offices and estates, their general influence in English affairs, everything, in short, that paved the way for the actual Conquest.
…  It shows the strong insular feeling of the nation, and it curiously illustrates the history of English personal nomenclature, that the foreign Lady had to take an English name. The English stock of personal names, though made out of the same elements as the names used by other Teutonic nations, contained but few which were common to England and to the continent. This Old-English nomenclature, with the exception of a few specially royal and saintly names, has gone so utterly out of use that it sounds strange to us to read that the Lady, to make herself acceptable to the English people, had to lay aside the foreign name of Emma, and to make herself into an Englishwoman as Ælfgifu.

Children Occupation: King of England
Æthelred was crowned at Kingston on 14 April 978 (or perhaps 979, the sources conflict), at a young age, following the assassination of his elder half-brother, King Edward the Martyr. He was king of the English from 978 to 1013, when he fled to Normandy when England was invaded by the Vikings and Swegen was named king, returning after Swegen's death in 1014 and reigning again until his own death just two years later.

Notes:
SIlver penny of Æthelred
Obverse (front) of a silver penny of Æthelred the Unready, dated between 997 and 1003, held at the Yorkshire Museum
photographed by York Museums Trust Staff, posted at wikipedia
Dictionary of national biography vol 18 pp27-33 (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1889)
  ETHELRED or ÆTHELRED II, the UNREADY (968?-1016), king of England, son of Eadgar and Ælfthryth, was born either in 968 or 969, for he was scarcely seven years old when his father died in 975. His defilement of the baptismal font is said to have caused Dunstan to foretell the overthrow of the nation during his reign (HENRY OF HUNTINGDON, p. 748). On the death of his father a strong party was in favour of electing him king instead of his brother Eadward [q. v.] He lived with his mother at Corfe, and Eadward had come to see him when he was slain there. The child wept bitterly at his brother’s death, and it was said that his mother was enraged at his tears, and, not having a scourge at hand, beat him so severely with some candles that in after life he would never have candles carried before him, a story that, foolish as it is, may perhaps imply that he was badly brought up in childhood (Gesta Regum, sec. 164). He succeeded his brother as king, and was crowned by Dunstan at Kingston on 14 April 978 (A.-S. Chron. Abingdon, and FLOR. WIG.; 979, A.-S. Chron. Worcester; on the discrepancy see Mon. Hist. Brit. p. 397 n. b); the archbishop on the day of his coronation is said to have prophesied evil concerning him because he came to the throne through the murder of his brother; it is more certain that Dunstan exacted a pledge of good government from him, and delivered an exhortation on the duties of a christian king (Memorials of Dunstan, p. 355 sq.) Æthelred was good-looking and of graceful manners (FLOR. WIG.); his ‘historical surname,’ the Unready, does not imply that he lacked energy or resource, but rede, or counsel (Norman Conquest, i. 286). He was by no means deficient in ability, nor was he especially slothful (Gesta Regum, sec. 165); indeed, throughout his reign he constantly displayed considerable vigour, but it was generally misdirected, for he was impulsive, passionate, cruel, and apt to lean on favourites, whom he did not choose for any worthy reasons; he had no principles of action, and was guided by motives of temporary expediency. During the first years of his reign there was no change in the government by the great ealdormen. The death of Ælfhere, ealdorman of Mercia, in 983, was probably a considerable loss to the country; he was succeeded by his son Ælfric, who was banished by the king in 985, cruelly it is said (HENRY OF HUNTINGDON). Dunstan, though he still attended the meetings of the witan, evidently took no part in political matters. The system of defence worked out by Eadgar must have perished at this time, which was naturally a period of disorganisation. A worthless favourite named Æthelsine appears to have exercised considerable influence over the young king, and to have led him to commit and to sanction many acts of oppression (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. p. 700). By his advice Æthelred laid claim to an estate belonging to the bishopric of Rochester, some violence ensued, and in 986 Æthelred laid siege to Rochester; he was unable to take it, and ravaged the lands of the see. Dunstan interfered on behalf of the bishop, and, when the king disregarded his commands, paid him a hundred pounds of silver to purchase peace, declaring his contempt for Æthelred’s avarice, and prophesying that evil would shortly come on the nation (FLOR. WIG.; OSBERN). It is probable that by this date Æthelred had been some time married to his first wife, Ælfgifu [see under EDMUND IRONSIDE]. From 980 to 982 several descents were made on different parts of the coast by the Danes and Northmen. Southampton, Thanet, and Cheshire were ravaged; the coasts of Devon and Cornwall suffered severely, and a raid was made on Portland. To these years may perhaps be referred the story that Swend, the future king of Denmark, came over to England as a fugitive, and no doubt as the leader of a viking expedition, that Æthelred treated him as an enemy, and that he was hospitably received by the Scottish king (ADAM BREM. ii. c. 32). These attacks were made simply for the sake of plunder; they ceased for a while after 982, and when they were renewed took a more dangerous form, for the invaders began to settle in the country. In 988 they landed in Somerset, but were beaten off after a sharp struggle. An invasion of a more formidable kind was made in 991 by a Norwegian force under King Olaf Tryggvason, Justin, and Guthmund. Ipswich was plundered, and the ealdorman Brihtnoth [q. v.] was defeated and slain at Maldon in Essex. Then Archbishop Sigeric, Æthelweard [see under ETHELWERD], the ealdorman of the western provinces, and another West-Saxon ealdorman, named Ælfric, offered to purchase peace of the Northmen, and promised to pay them ten thousand pounds of silver. So large a sum could not be raised quickly, and the Northmen threatened to ravage Kent unless they were paid. Sigeric obtained the money to make up the deficiency from Æscwig, bishop of Dorchester, and pledged an estate to him for repayment (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. p. 689). The treaty was accepted by the king and the witan, and was concluded with the Norwegian leaders (Ancient Laws, p. 121). This was the first time that the disastrous policy was adopted of buying off the invaders. Unworthy as the step was, it is sometimes condemned too hastily. It was not taken consciously as an escape from the duty of defending the land; the men who made, and the king and the counsel who ratified, the treaty could not have done so with the expectation that other payments of a like kind would follow, and their action must be judged by itself. It was a moment of supreme danger, for the whole of the south of the country lay open to the enemy, and the three men who bore rule over it may well have thought that as no troops were ready their first duty was to save the people from impending destruction. And the money was not paid with the idea that the Norwegians would in return leave England; the treaty as made by Æthelred distinctly contemplates their remaining; each party, for example, was to refrain from harbouring the Welsh, the thieves, and the foes of the other. In fact, the king, by the advice of the archbishop, and the two West-Saxon ealdormen, bought the alliance of Olaf and his host against all other enemies. War was actually going on with the Welsh, and their prince, Meredydd, was in alliance with the Northmen, whose help he had hired (Brut. ann. 988, 991; Norman Conquest, i 313). And Æthelred can scarcely have failed to take into account the probability of a Danish invasion, and if so, he and his advisers may have flattered themselves with the hope of dividing their foes, and keeping off the Danes by the help of the Northmen (Conquest of England, p. 375). Even allowing that such a hope was certain to fail, time was gained by the treaty, and if it had been used in vigorous and sustained preparations for defence, the advice of the archbishop and the ealdormen might have turned out well. Unfortunately the kingdom was found defenceless again and again, and Æthelred and his nobles, having once got rid of immediate danger by a money payment, bought peace of the Danes on other occasions when they must have been fully aware of the folly of what they were doing. According to William of Malmesbury Æthelred made another treaty this year. He had causes of complaint against the Norman duke Richard the Fearless; the ports of Normandy afforded convenient anchorage to the Scandinavian pirates, and it is not unlikely that they found recruits among the duke’s subjects. War seemed imminent, and Pope John XV under took the office of mediator. A peace was made which provided that neither should receive the enemies of the other, nor even the other’s subjects, without ‘passports from their own sovereign’ (Gesta Regum, secs. 165, 166; this, the only authority for this treaty, is, of course, late; the grounds on which Dr. Freeman accepts the story will be found in Norman Conquest, i. 313, 633; it certainly seems unlikely that any one should have invented the pope’s letter).
  The peace purchased of the Northmen was broken by Æthelred. In 992 he and the witan ‘decreed that all the ships that were worth anything’ should be gathered together at London (A.-S. Chron.) He put the fleet under the command of two bishops and two lay leaders, Thored, possibly his father-in-law, and Ælfric, the Mercian ealdorman he had banished (HENRY OF HUNTINGDON, p. 740). The scheme of taking the Northmen’s fleet by surprise was defeated through the treachery of Ælfric. Nevertheless the English gained a complete victory. Enraged at Elfric’s conduct, the king blinded his son Ælfgar. The Northmen sailed off, and did much damage in Northumbria and Lindsey. In 994 the two kings, Olaf of Norway and Swend of Denmark, invaded the land with nearly a hundred ships; their forces were beaten off from London by the burghers on 8 Sept., but ravaged Essex, Kent, Surrey, and Hampshire, and then ‘took horses and rode whither they would.’ Æthelred and the witan now offered them money and provisions if they would cease their ravages. They took up winter quarters in Southampton, and a tax was levied on Wessex to pay the crews, while a tribute of sixteen thousand pounds was raised from the country generally as the price of peace (it is possible that Æscwig gave the help which was the subject of an arrangement made in a witenagemot of the next year on this occasion; the threat of ravaging Kent, and the fact that Sigeric seems to have been acting on his own responsibility, appear, however, to point to the peace of 991). Æthelred for once used the time thus gained with prudence, for he sent Ælfheah, bishop of Winchester, and the ealdorman Æthelweard on an embassy to Olaf [see under ÆLFHEAH]. The result was that the alliance between the invading kings was broken. Olaf came to Æthelred at Andover, made alliance with him, and, being already baptised, was confirmed by the bishop. Æthelred took him ‘at the bishop’s hands,’ and gifted him royally; he promised that he would invade England no more, and kept his word. Swend sailed off to attack the Isle of Man, and the invasion ended. About two years of peace followed. In 995 Æthelred, probably at a meeting of the witan, acknowledged the faults of his youth, and made a grant to the bishop of Rochester (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. p. 688). The next year he held another meeting at Celchyth (Chelsea), where the ecclesiastical element seems to have predominated (ib. 696). At some earlier date he had published at Woodstock a code regulating the English law of bail and surety, and in 997, at a witenagemot that met at Calne, and was adjourned to Wantage, a code was published on police matters, evidently designed for the Danish districts (Ancient Laws, pp. 119, 124; Codex Dipl. p. 698). At these meetings the king again acknowledged the sins of his youth, and restored some land he had unjustly taken from the church of Winchester. In this year the ravages of the Danes began again, though for about two years they were not especially serious, being chiefly confined first to the western coasts and then to the coast of Sussex. During the winter of 998, however, they took up quar ters in the Isle of Wight, and forced the people of Hampshire and Sussex to send them provisions. This fresh trouble drove Æthelred to a renewed attempt to pacify heaven; he made a fresh and detailed acknowledgment of his youthful errors, especially in the Rochester matter, laid the blame chiefly on Æthelsine, whom he had deprived of his rank and wealth, and made full restitution to the bishop (Codex Dipl. p. 700). At the same time he was giving his confidence to another favourite as unworthy as Æthelsine, one Leofsige, whom in 994 he had made ealdorman of the East-Saxons (ib. p. 687). Kent was ravaged in 999, and Æthelred made another effort to defend his land. He commanded that the Danes should be attacked both by a fleet and an army, but the whole administration was hopelessly disorganised, and ‘when the ships were ready they delayed from day to day, and wore out the poor men that were on board, and the more forward things should have been the backwarder they were time after time. And in the end the expedition by sea and land effected nothing except troubling the people, wasting money, and emboldening their foes’ (A.-S. Chron. an. 999; for the causes of this inefficiency see LAPPENBERG, ii. 160; Norman Conquest, i. 324).
  After the ravaging of Kent the Danes sailed off to Normandy in the summer of 1000, probably to sell their booty. Æthelred took advantage of their absence and of the preparations of the previous year to strike at the viking settlements close at hand; he led an army in person into Cumberland, which was a stronghold of the Danes, and ravaged the country, while his fleet wasted the Isle of Man (A.-S. Chron.; HENRY OF HUNTINGDON, p. 750; for another view of these proceedings see Norman Conquest, i. 328). To this year also is perhaps to be referred Æthelred’s invasion of the Cotentin, for it was probably closely connected with the visit of the Danish fleet to Normandy. William of Jumièges (v. 4) says that Æthelred expected that his ships would bring him the Norman duke, Richard II, with his hands tied behind his back, but that they were utterly defeated. This expedition, if it ever took place, must have led to the marriage of Æthelred and the duke’s sister Emma. While the Danish fleet was wasting the coasts of Devonshire the next year it was joined by Pallig, the husband of Gunhild, Swend’s sister, who had been entertained by Æthelred and had received large gifts from him. The renewal of the war again stirred up the king to endeavour to get heaven on his side. In a charter of this year, granted with consent of the witan, the troubles of the country are set forth, and the king gives, in honour of Christ, and of his brother, the holy martyr Eadward, the monastery of Bradford to the nuns of Shaftesbury, where Eadward was buried, to be a place of refuge for them (Codex Dipl. p. 706). Early in 1002 he and the witan decreed that peace should again be bought of the Danish fleet, and he sent Leofsige to the fleet to learn what terms would be accepted. Leofsige agreed with the Danes that they should receive provisions and a tribute of 24,000l. Some change in the politics of the court seems to be indicated by Æthelred’s promotion of his high reeve, Æfic, above all his other officers (ib. p. 719). The terms in which this promotion is described have been interpreted as conferring a distinct office, that of ‘chief of the high-reeves,’ an office that has further been taken as a ‘foreshadowing of the coming justiciary’ (Conquest of England, p. 394). This theory, however, is not warranted by any recorded evidence. In the south of England, at least, the high-reeve held an office that was analogous to that of the shire-reeve. The political tendency of the period was towards a division of the kingdom into large districts; ealdormen, instead of being simply officers each with his own shire, were appointed over provinces containing different shires, and in the same way the other shire-officer, the reeve, became the high-reeve of a wider district. There is no evidence that Æfic held any administrative office other than, or superior to, that of other high-reeves; the words of Æthelred’s charter seem to refer to nothing more than a title of honour, which may indeed scarcely have been recognised as a formal title at all. Æfic’s promotion excited the jealousy of the king’s favourite, Leofsige, and while on this mission to the Danes he slew the new favourite in his own house, an act for which he was banished by the king and the witan (A.-S. Chron,; Codex Dipl. p. 719). In Lent Emma came over from Normandy; her marriage with Æthelred was evidently not a happy one, and in spite of her great beauty he said to have been unfaithful to her (Gesta Regum, sec. 165). The king now attempted to rid himself of his foes by treachery, and on the ground that the Danes were plotting to slay him and afterwards all his witan, gave orders that ‘all the Danish-men that were in England should be slain.’ Secret instructions were sent in letters from the king to every town, arranging that this massacre should take place everywhere on the same day, 13 Nov. As there was at this time peace between the English and the Danes, the foreign settlers were taken by surprise. Women as well as men were certainly massacred (FLOR. WIG.), and among them there is no reason to doubt Swend’s sister, Gunhild, the wife of the traitor Pallig, who was put to death after having seen her husband and her son slain before her eyes (Gesta Regum, sec. 177). The massacre could not of course have extended to all parts of England, for in East Anglia and in some of the Northumbrian districts the Danes must have outnumbered the English. Still, not only in the purely English country, but also in many districts where the Danes, though dominant, were few in number, there must have been a great slaughter. Nor can the guilt of this act be extenuated by declaring that every man among the Danes was a ‘pirate’ (Norman Conquest, i. 344). It is fairly certain that many had settled down in towns and were living in security. A curious notice exists of the slaughter of those who were living in Oxford; it is in a charter of Æthelred, and the king there speaks of the Danes as having ‘sprung up in this island as tares among wheat,’ an expression that indicates that men of both races were living side by side (Early Hist. of Oxford, p. 320). In this charter, which bears date 1004, Æthelred speaks of this event as a ‘most just slaughter,’ which he had decreed with the counsel of his witan.
  The only result of the massacre was that the invasions were renewed with more system and determination. Swend himself came with the fleet in 1003. That year the storm fell on the west; Exeter was betrayed to the foe; an attempt made by the local forces of Hampshire and Wiltshire to come to a pitched battle failed, and Wilton and Salisbury were sacked and burnt. On his return the next year Swend attacked East Anglia, burnt Norwich and Thetford, but met with a gallant resistance from the ealdorman Ulfcytel, the husband of one of the king’s daughters. In 1005 there was a famine, so the fleet sailed back for a while to Denmark. During these years of misery nothing is known of Æthelred save that he made some grants to monasteries and to his thegns. Early the next year, however, one of those domestic revolutions took place which expose the thoroughly bad state of his court. For some years a thegn named Wulfgeat had stood far higher than any one else in the king’s favour and had enjoyed considerable power of oppression (FLOR. WIG.; Wulfgeat appears in 987, Codex Dipl. p. 658). All his possessions were now confiscated, probably by the sentence of the witan, as a punishment for the unjust judgments he had given, and because he had abetted the king’s enemies. Moreover, while Æthelred was at Shrewsbury, where he seems to have been holding his court, Ælfhelm, the earl of part of Northumbria, evidently of Deira (Yorkshire), was treacherously slain, under circumstances that, as far as we know them [see under EADRIC, STREONA], point to the king as the instigator of the deed. Shortly afterwards Ælfhelm’s two sons were blinded by Æthelred’s orders. It is probable that the murder of Ælfhelm, and possible that the treason of Wulfgeat, may in some way have been connected with a raid of Malcolm, king of Scots, that took place at this time; it was checked by Uhtred, son of Earl Waltheof, and the king made him earl over both the Northumbrian earldoms, and soon after gave him his daughter Ælfgifu to wife. The fall of Wulfgeat made way for the rise of another unworthy favourite, Eadric, called Streona [q. v.] whom the king shortly afterwards made ealdorman of the Mercians, and who married another of Æthelred’s daughters. Later in the year the ‘great fleet’ came back again from Denmark, and the ravages began again. Æthelred made an other attempt to withstand the invaders, and called out the levies of Wessex and Mercia. All harvest-time they were under arms, but no good came of it; the Danes marched, plundered, and destroyed as they would, and then retired to their ‘frith-stool,’ the Isle of Wight. About midwinter they began their work of destruction afresh, and Æthelred held a meeting of the witan to consult how the land might be saved from utter ruin. It was again decided to purchase peace, and this time the sum that was wrung from the people to buy off the invaders was 36,000l. After receiving this enormous sum the Danes left the land in peace for about two years.
  The year 1008 is the date of a series of laws put forth by Æthelred with the counsel of the witan (Ancient Laws, p. 129). They contain several good resolutions, repeat some older enactments, deal with ecclesiastical as well as secular matters, and forcibly express a sense of the pressing need of patriotic unity. Provision was made for national defence; a fleet was to be raised and to assemble each year after Easter, and desertion from the land-force was to be punished by a fine of 120s. (a re-enactment of Ine’s law of ‘fyrdwite’), and when the king was in the field the life and property of the deserter were to be at his mercy. The laws published at a witenagemot held at Enham (ib. p. 133) seem to belong to about the same date, and are of much the same character. Probably by mere chance, they do not mention the presence and action of the king. The fleet was raised by an assessment on every shire, inland well as on the coast. The hundred was taken as the basis of the assessment, which was in ships and armour, not in money. Every three hundred hides furnished a ship, every ten a boat, every eight a helmet and breastplate (EARLE, Saxon Chron. pp. 336, 337; Constitutional Hist. i. 105; on the difficulties as regards the assessment, see also Norman Conquest, i. 368; it does not seem clear why it should be supposed that any part of the levy affected private landowners, except as contributors to the quota of their shire). Æthelred’s assessment was quoted by St. John and Lyttelton acting for the crown in Hampden’s case in 1637 (Tryal of John Hambden, pp. 53, 91). The fleet met at Sandwich about Easter 1009, and Æthelred himself went aboard. An accusation was brought against Wulfnoth, the ‘Child’ of the South-Saxons; he sailed off with twenty ships and began plundering the coast. Æthelred sent his accuser, Brihtric, a brother of Eadric Streona, after him with eighty ships. Some of Brihtric’s ships were wrecked and others were burnt by Wulfnoth. When the king heard this he went home, each crew took its ship to London, and the great effort that had been made came to nothing. Then a fleet came over under the jarl Thurcytel (or Thurkill), and soon after another under two other leaders; Canterbury and Kent purchased peace, and the Danes sailed to the Isle of Wight and thence devastated the southern shires. Æthelred now ordered ‘the whole nation’ to be called out; he took the command of a large army, and he and his people are said to have been prepared to conquer or die (FLOR. WIG.) Once he intercepted the enemy, but no attack was made, owing, it is said, to the bad advice of Eadric. The ravages continued unhindered, and early in 1010 Oxford was burnt. Later in the year East Anglia was attacked, and after a gallant though unsuccessful resistance by Ulfcytel, was thoroughly harried. A series ravages followed that seem to have crushed all hope of further resistance. By the beginning of 1011 sixteen shires had been overrun (A.-S. Chron,) Then Æthelred and the witan again offered tribute, and 48,000l. was demanded. During the truce Thurcytel’s fleet sacked Canterbury, took Archbishop Ælfheah [q. v.], and, after keeping him captivity for seven months, slew him on 13 April 1012. Meanwhile an expedition was made against the Welsh who had probably taken advantage of the state of the country to make raids on Mercia [see under EADRIC]. The tribute was paid at last, and the ‘great fleet’ dispersed, Thurcytel, with forty-five ships, taking service under Æthelred, who promised to supply him and his men with food and clothing, and gave him an estate in East Anglia in return for his oath to defend the country against all invaders (A.-S. Chron.; Encomium Emmæ, i. 2; Gesta Regum, sec. 176). In the summer of 1013 Swend came over with a splendid fleet and received the submission of all northern England. Æthelred shut himself up in London, and when the Danish army, after pillaging Mercia and marching westward to Winchester, turned eastward, and appeared before the city, a vigorous defence was made, in which the king is said to have borne a foremost part, and the army again marched into the west. Swend was formally chosen as king, and Æthelred took shelter on Thurcytel’s ships, which lay in the Thames. Emma went over to Normandy to her brother, the king sent the two sons he had by her to join her there, sailed to the Isle of Wight, stayed there over Christmas, and early in January 1014 crossed over to Normandy. He is said to have taken over treasure with him from Winchester, and though the city was then in the hands of Swend, it is not impossible that his voyage to Thurcytel’s station, the Isle of Wight, may have been made in order to meet some keeper of the royal ‘hoard.’ He was hospitably received by Duke Richard, and resided at Rouen (WILL OF JUMIÈGES, v. 7).
  When Swend died in February the ‘fleet’ chose his son Cnut as king, but all the witan, clergy, and laity determined to send after Æthelred. Accordingly he received messengers from the assembly who told him that ‘no lord was dearer to them than their lord by birth, if he would rule them rightlier than he had done before.’ Then he sent messengers to the witan, and with them his son Eadward [see EDWARD THE CONFESSOR], promising that he would for the future be a good lord to them, and would be guided by their will in all things. A favourable answer was sent back, and as Olaf (afterwards St. Olaf, king of Norway) happened to be in some Norman port with his ships, he brought Æthelred back to England in Lent (OTHERE, Corpus Poeticum Boreale, ii. 153). He was joyfully received, and a witenagemot was held in which some laws were published containing more good resolutions, and a declaration that ecclesiastical and secular matters ought to be dealt with in the same assemblies. At the head of a large force he marched into Lindsey, drove Cnut out, ravaged the district and slaughtered the people, evidently as a punishment for the help they had given to his enemies. The satisfaction that was at his return was lessened by his ordering that 21,000l. (A.-S. Chron.) or 30,000l. (FLOR. WIG.) should be paid to Thurcytel’s fleet. The next year he held a great gemot at Oxford, and during its session he, and probably the witan also, must have agreed to the treacherous murder of Sigeferth and Morkere, chief thegns in the Seven Boroughs, by Eadric. He confiscated their property and ordered Sigeferth’s widow to be kept at Malmesbury. Contrary to his wish his son Eadmund married her. When Cnut returned to England in September, Æthelred lay sick at Corsham in Wiltshire. He was in London early the next year, and when Eadmund gathered an army to oppose Cnut, his troops refused to follow him unless the king and the Londoners joined them, but Æthelred was probably too ill to do so. A little later he joined the ætheling. When he had done so he was told that there was a plot against his life, and he thereupon went back to London again. Cnut was preparing to lay siege to the city when Æthelred died there on St George’s day, 23 April, 1016. He was buried in St Paul’s. By his first wife, Ælfgifu, he had seven sons, Æthelstan, who died 1016; Ecgberht, who died about 1005; Eadmund, who succeeded him, Eadred; Eadwig, a young man of noble character and great popularity (FLOR. WIG. an. 1016; Gesta Regum, sec. 180) who was banished by Cnut and was slain by his order in 1017; Eadgar; and Eadward (Codex Dipl. p. 714); and apparently three daughters, Wulfhild, married to Ulfcytel, ealdorman of East Anglia; Eadgyth, married to Eadric Streona, and Ælfgifu, married to Earl Uhtred; the Æthelstan who fell in battle with the Danes in 1010 and is called the king’s son-in-law (A.-S. Chron.; FLOR. WIG.), was probably Æthelred’s sister’s son (HENRY OF HUNTINGDON). By his second wife, Emma, he had two sons, Eadward, who came to the throne; and Ælfred [q. v.], who was slain in 1036; and a daughter, Godgifu, who married, first, Drogo, count of Mantes; and, afterwards, Eustace, count of Boulogne.
  [Little can be added to Dr. Freeman’s account of Æthelred in his Norman Conquest, i. 285-417; Green’s notices (Conquest of England) are chiefly valuable when they bear on the intrigues of the court, but some of his statements appear fanciful; Lappenberg’s Anglo-Saxon Kings, trans. Thorpe, ii. 150 sq.; Anglo-Saxon Chron.; Florence of Worcester; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum; Kemble’s Codex Dipl. vol. iii. (all Engl. Hist. Soc.); Henry of Huntingdon, Mon. Hist. Brit.; Adam of Bremen; Encomium Emmæ, both Rer. Germ. Scriptt., Pertz; William of Jumièges, Duchesne; Parker’s Early Hist. of Oxford (Oxford Hist. Soc.); Vigfusson and Powell’s Corpus Poet. Boreale; Tryal of John Hambden, Esq., 1719; Stubbs’s Constitutional Hist.]     W. H.

Other accounts of Æthelred's life and reign can be found at The Anglo-Saxon chronicle pp85-105 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914), William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England pp186-93 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847), The chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon pp177-93 (ed. Thomas  Forester, 1853), A new and complete history of England pp53-9 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795), The history of the Norman conquest of England pp179-256 (Edward A.Freeman, 1873) and wikipedia (Æthelred the Unready).

Death: 23 April 1016, in London, England

Buried: St. Paul's cathedral, London, England
The tomb and his monument in the quire at Old St Paul's Cathedral were destroyed along with the cathedral in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Sources:

Æthelwulf

Æthelwulf penny
Silver penny minted during the reign of Æthelwulf, struck c. 850. The coin is inscribed EĐELVVLF REX ("King Æthelwulf") on the obverse and MAHNA MONETA ("[Minted by] Mahna the Moneyer") on the reverse.
image from A Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Series vol 2, Plate III.4 ( Herbert A. Grueber and Charles Francis Keary, 1893) posted on wikipedia
Æthelwulf
Æthelwulf as depicted in the Genealogical roll of the kings of England (1300-1308) - BL Royal MS 14 B VI
image posted on wikipedia
Father: Ecgberht

Married (1st): Osburh

Children: Married (2nd): Judith on 1 October 856, Verberie on the Oise, France, by Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims.

Judith was the daughter of Charles the Bald, king of the West-Franks. Judith was at most thirteen at the time of her marriage. After the death of Æthelwulf, Judith married his son, Æthelbald "contrary to God's prohibition and the dignity of a Christian, contrary also to the custom of all the heathen". Æthelbald died just two years later, in 860, after which, Judith sold her possessions and returned to her father in France. Two years later she eloped with Baldwin, Count of Flanders. In the 890s their son, also called Baldwin, married Ælfred's daughter, Ælfthryth.

Dictionary of national biography vol 18 p42 (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1889)
After staying a year in Rome [Æthelwulf] returned to France, and in July 856 betrothed himself to Judith the daughter of Charles. The marriage took place on 1 Oct. at Verberie on the Oise, though, as the bride’s parents were married on 14 Dec 842 (NITHARD, iv. c. 6), she could not have been more than thirteen; and there is reason to believe that Æthelwulf’s English wife, Osburh, was still living [see under ÆLFRED]. … Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, married them, and after the marriage placed a crown upon the bride’s head and blessed her as queen, though it was contrary to West-Saxon custom that the king’s wife should be crowned or be called queen (Ann. Bertin. sub an. 856), … The form used for the marriage and coronation of Judith is still extant (Capitularia C. Calvi, BOUQUET, vii. 620).

Asser’s life of King Alfred p11 (ed. Albert S. Cook, 1914)
  17. Æthelbald marries Judith. — But when King Æthelwulf was dead <and buried at Winchester>, his son Æthelbald, contrary to God’s prohibition and the dignity of a Christian, contrary also to the custom of all the heathen, ascended his father’s bed, and married Judith, daughter of Charles, King of the Franks, incurring much infamy from all who heard of it.

Occupation: King of the West-Saxons
In 828, Æthelwulf was installed by his father, Ecgberht, as under-king of the Kentish territories. Æthelwulf succeeded to the throne of Wessex on the death of his father, Ecgberht in 839. In 856 his son, Æthelbald, who had ruled Wessex during Æthelwulf's year-long sohourn in Rome, refused to surrender the throne, and rather than war with his son, Æthelwulf gave up the Wessex kingdom to Æthelbald, retaining only the under-kingdom of Kent, where he remained popular, for the two and half years left in his life.

Notes:
Æthelwulf's ring
Æthelwulf's ring, produced 828-858, probably as a gift by the king to a faithful retainer, was found in a cart rut in Laverstock in Wiltshire in about August 1780 by William Petty, who sold it to a silversmith in Salisbury. The silversmith sold it to the Earl of Radnor, and the earl's son, William, donated it to the British Museum in 1829. The ring is inscribed "Æthelwulf Rex", firmly associating it with the King, and the inscription forms part of the design, so it cannot have been added later.
The museum description is: Gold finger-ring, the Æthelwulf ring, the hoop flat and rising in front to a high mitre-shaped bezel. In the triangular portion a conventional 'tree', dividing the field into two halves, is flanked by two peacocks, all reserved in the metal upon a ground of niello; in the two lower corners are panels with foliage in relief without niello. The two disks with rosettes, which form part of the central 'tree', are treated in the same manner. Round the hoop is the nielloed inscription: preceded by a cross. The back of the hoop has a circle containing a rosette upon a nielloed ground, flanked by foliate designs, one of which is interlaced.
photo posted by The British Museum
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
Dictionary of national biography vol 18 pp40-3 (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1889)
  ETHELWULF, ÆTHELWULF, ADELWLF, or ATHULF (d. 858), king of the West-Saxons and Kentishmen, the son of Ecgberht, is said to have been sent by his father to be brought up at Winchester by Swithun, afterwards bishop of that see (FLORENCE, i. 68), to have received subdeacon’s orders there (Vita S. Swithuni), and even, according to one legend, to have been bishop of Winchester (HENRY OF HUNTINGDON, p. 787); it is probable that he was educated at Winchester, but this is all that can be said. After the battle of Ellandune in 825 his father sent him with Ealhstan, bishop of Sherborne, and the ealdorman Wulfheard, to gain him the kingdom of Kent. The West-Saxons chased Baldred [q. v.] across the Thames; Kent, Surrey, and Sussex submitted to Ecgberht, and probably in 828 he committed these countries to Æthelwulf, who certainly had a share in the kingship in that year (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. p. 223). In 838 he joined with his father in the compact the kings made with Archbishop Ceolnoth at Kingston, and in the compact with the church of Winchester, if that ever took place, and either the same or the next year confirmed the Canterbury agreement at a witenagemot at Wilton, over which he presided alone, though there is some reason to doubt whether Ecgberht was then dead (Eccles, Documents, iii, 617-20; for some of these events see more fully under EGBERT). He succeeded to the kingship of Wessex on the death of his father in 839, a date arrived at by adding the length of Ecgberht’s reign to the date of his accession, 802, while in a charter of 839 Æthelwulf declares that year to be the first after his father’s death (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. p, 240, i, 321; the chronology of the Chronicle is incorrect at this period). He was married to Osburh, daughter of Oslac, the royal cup-bearer, a descendant of the ancient princely line of the Jutes of Wight, and gave his eldest son, Æthelstan, charge of the Kentish kingdom with the title of king, putting him in the position that he had held during the later years of his father’s life (ib. p. 241; A.-S. Chron. sub an. 836). … According to William of Malmesbury Æthelwulf was slothful, loved quiet, and was only stirred to active exertion by the influence of his ministers, Swithun and Ealhstan, Swithun giving him advice on ecclesiastical and Ealhstan on secular matters, the one managing the treasury, the other the army (Gesta Regum, ii. sec. 108). While this description is no doubt somewhat coloured by the legend of the king’s admission to clerical orders, there is probably some truth in it. Æthelwulf seems only occasionally to have taken a personal part in resisting the invasions of the Danes; he was roused now and again to great and successful efforts, and then returned to his usual quiet life, and left the work of meeting the constantly repeated attacks to the leaders of local forces. He was extremely religious, and his religion was not more enlightened than that of his people generally, and he was lavish in his gifts to the church.
… In the first year of the reign the Danes landed at Southampton, and were defeated by the ealdorman Wulfheard, one of Ecgberht’s most trusted officers, who evidently met the invaders with the forces of his shire. On the other hand, another party of invaders defeated the Dorset men at Portland, and slew their ealdorman. During the next year Lindsey, East Anglia, and Kent suffered severely. Then successful raids were made on London, Canterbury, and Rochester. Meanwhile Æthelwulf appears personally to have remained inactive until, perhaps in 842 (A.-S. Chron. an. 840), he met the crews of thirty-five ships at Charmouth and was defeated. During the next nine years all that is known of Æthelwulf seems to be that he made sundry grants, and the history of the reign is a blank save for the notice of a brilliant victory gained over the invaders at the mouth of the Parret by the fyrds of Somerset and Dorset, under the command of the ealdormen of the two shires and of Bishop Ealhstan. In 851 the invaders were defeated in the west by the ealdorman of Devonshire. More serious invasions were, however, made the same year on the east coast. When the Danish fleet came off Sandwich, King Æthelstan and the ealdorman of Kent put out to sea and gained a naval victory, taking ten prizes and putting the rest of the ships to flight. Nevertheless the Danes for the first time wintered in Thanet. Meanwhile a fleet of three (or two, ASSER) hundred and fifty ships, coming probably from the viking settlements that had lately been formed on the islands between the mouths of the Scheldt and the Meuse, sailed into the mouth of the Thames; the crews landed, took Canterbury and London by storm, put the Mercian king Beorhtwulf to flight, and crossed the Thames into Surrey. Roused by the danger that threatened him, Æthelwulf and his second son, Æthelbald, gathered a large force, met the invaders at Ockley, and after a stubborn fight completely routed them, slaying a larger number of them than had ever before fallen in England (A.-S. Chron.; ASSER). Æthelstan, the king’s eldest son, probably died in the following year, and his third son, Æthelberht, was made king in his place (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. p. 269), the kingship of Wessex being destined for Æthelbald. The invasions of the Northmen encouraged the Welsh to rise against their conquerors, and in 853 Burhred [q. v.] of Mercia, the successor of Beohrtwulf, sent to his West-Saxon overlord to come and help him against them. Æthelwulf accordingly marched into Wales and brought the Welsh to submission. On his return from this expedition he gave his daughter Æthelswith (ib. p. 278) in marriage Burhred at Chippenham. This marriage was a step towards the extinction of the existence of Mercia as a separate kingdom. Ecgberht had conquered Mercia, deposed its king, and restored him as an under-king to himself, and now Æthelwulf governed it by his son-in-law as king. A further step in the ssitie direction was taken bv Ælfred when he married his daughter Æthelflæd [see ETHELFLEDA] to the Mercian ealdorman. In this year also he sent his youngest and best loved son Alfred, or Ælfred [q. v.], to Rome to Leo IV. Although the victory of Ockley checked the invasions of the pirates, they still held Thanet, and a vigorous attempt that was made by the forces of Kent and Surrey to dislodge them ended in failure. Still the country was, on the whole, at peace, and Æthelwulf determined to make a pilgrimage to Rome. … He left England probably early in 855, and proceeded to the court of Charles the Bald, king of the West-Franks. The Frankish king had, equally with Æthelwulf, to contend with Scandinavian invaders; but the intercourse between the English and the Franks was already so frequent that it seems going too far to imagine that Æthelwulf’s visit and subsequent marriage suggest the formation of ‘a common plan of operations,’ or show that his policy was ‘in advance of his age’ (GREEN). Charles received him with much honour, and conducted him in kingly state through his dominions (Ann. Bertin.) At Rome he is said to have been received by Leo IV, who died 17 July. His visit no doubt really belongs to the pontificate of Benedict III. He made a large number of offerings of pure gold of great weight and magnificence (ANASTASIUS), rebuilt the English school or hospital for English pilgrims, and perhaps promised a yearly payment to the holy see, which is said to have been the origin of Peter's pence (Gesta Regum, i. 152). After staying a year in Rome he returned to France, and in July 856 betrothed himself to Judith the daughter of Charles. The marriage took place on 1 Oct. at Verberie on the Oise, though, as the bride’s parents were married on 14 Dec 842 (NITHARD, iv. c. 6), she could not have been more than thirteen; and there is reason to believe that Æthelwulf’s English wife, Osburh, was still living [see under ÆLFRED]. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, married them, and after the marriage placed a crown upon the bride’s head and blessed her as queen, though it was contrary to West-Saxon custom that the king’s wife should be crowned or be called queen (Ann. Bertin. sub an. 856), a custom which King Ælfred told Asser was to be traced to the general abhorrence of the crimes of Eadburh, queen of Beorhtric [q. v.] The form used for the marriage and coronation of Judith is still extant (Capitularia C. Calvi, BOUQUET, vii. 620). Æthelwulf then returned to England with his bride, but according to Asser’s story found Wessex in revolt. During his absence his son, Æthelbald, Bishop Ealhstan, and Eanwulf, ealdorman of Somerset, conspired to keep him out of the land, and held a meeting of their adherents in the forest of Selwood. The marriage with Judith, which was probably considered as likely to lead to a change in the succession to the injury of Æthelbald, and the other West Saxon æthelings, was the primary cause of the conspiracy, though the king is said to have given other causes of offence. Æthelwulf was joyfully received in Kent, and the Kentishmen urged him to let them do battle with his son. He shrank from such a war, and at a meeting of the witan gave up the kingdom of the West-Saxons to Æthelbald, and kept only the under-kingdom of Kent for himself. In this kingdom he set his queen Judith beside him on a royal throne without exciting any anger. Neither the ‘Chronicle’ nor Æthelweard mentions this revolt; Florence of Worcester copies it from Asser, and it must therefore stand on Asser’s authority, which seems indisputable. Æthelwulf lived for two years, or perhaps two years and a half, after he returned from France (two years A.-S. Chron. sub an. 855; ASSER), and it is certain that in the period of five years assigned in the ‘Chronicle’ as the duration of Æthelbald’s reign two years and a half must belong to the time during which his father was alive. This would not, however, have any decisive bearing on the story of the partition of the kingdom. Before Æthelwulf died he made a will with the consent of the witan, perhaps at the witenagemot which gave Wessex to his son. The kingdom of Wessex was to go first to Æthelbald and Kent to his next brother Æthelberht and on Æthelbald’s death he was to be succeeded in Wessex not by Æthelberht who was to remain in Kent but by the younger Æthelred. The king also disposed of his property among his sons, his daughter, and his kinsmen, charging every ten hides with the support of a poor man, and ordering that a yearly payment of three hundred mancuses should be made to the pope. He died in 858 (Ann. Bertin.), on 13 Jan. (FLORENCE) or (according to the Lambeth MS.) 13 June, after a reign of eighteen years and a half (A.-S. Chron.) which, reckoning from the middle of 839, would agree with the earlier date while the statement of the length of Æthelbald’s reign would imply the later. (Eccles, Documents, iii. 612). He was buried at Winchester.
  [Anglo-Saxon Chron.; Florence of Worcester; Asser, Mon. Hist. Brit.; Henry of Huntingdon, Mon. Hist. Brit.; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Gesta Pontificum (Rolls Ser.) Kemble’s Codex Dipl. (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Haddan and Stubbs’s Councils and Eccles. Documents, vol. iii.; Annales Bertiniani, Prudentius, SS. Rerum Germ. Waitz, 1883; Nithard, SS. Rerum Germ., Pertz; Capitula Caroli Calvi, Bouquet, vii. 621; Anastasius, Bibliothec. de Vitis Roman. Pontiff., Rerum Ital, Scriptt. iii. 251; Kemble’s Saxons in England, ii. 481 sq.; Green’s Conquest of England.]      W. H.

Other accounts of Æthelwulf's life and reign can be found in Asser’s life of King Alfred pp1-11 (ed. Albert S. Cook, 1914), The Anglo-Saxon chronicle pp45-8 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914), William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England pp97-110 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847), The chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon pp148-51 (ed. Thomas  Forester, 1853), The Annals of Roger de Hoveden vol 1 pp32-43 (translated by Henry T. Riley, 1853), A new and complete history of England pp34-5 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795) and wikipedia (Æthelwulf,_King_of_Wessex).

Death: 858

Buried: at Winchester, Hampshire
 - according to most sources, although The chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon p151 states that Æthelwulf was buried at Sherborne.

Will:
Asser’s life of King Alfred pp10-11 (ed. Albert S. Cook, 1914)
  16. Æthelwulf’s Will. — Now King Æthelwulf lived two years after his return from Rome; during which, among many other good deeds of this present life, reflecting on his departure according to the way of all flesh, that his sons might not quarrel unreasonably after their father’s death, he ordered a will or letter of instructions to be written, in which he commanded that his kingdom should be duly divided between his two eldest sons; his private heritage between his sons, his daughter, and his relatives; and the money which he should leave behind him between his soul and his sons and nobles. Of this prudent policy I have thought fit to record a few instances out of many for posterity to imitate, namely, such as are understood to belong principally to the needs of the soul; for the others, which relate only to human stewardship, it is not necessary to insert in this little work, lest prolixity should create disgust in those who read or wish to hear. For the benefit of his soul, then, which he studied to promote in all things from the first flower of his youth, he directed that, through all his hereditary land, one poor man to every ten hides,1 either native or foreigner, should be supplied with food, drink, and clothing by his successors unto the final Day of Judgment; on condition, however, that that land should still be inhabited both by men and cattle, and should not become deserted. He commanded also a large sum of money, namely, three hundred mancuses,2 to be carried annually to Rome for the good of his soul, to be there distributed in the following manner: a hundred mancuses in honor of St. Peter, especially to buy oil for the lights of that apostolic church on Easter Eve, and also at cockcrow; a hundred mancuses in honor of St. Paul, for the same purpose of buying oil for the church of St. Paul the apostle, to fill the lamps for Easter Eve and cockcrow; and a hundred mancuses for the universal apostolic Pope.
  1 Lat. manentibus.
  2 A mancus was thirty pence, one-eighth of a pound.

The will of Æthelwulf's son Ælfred containing a preamble reciting parts of Æthelwulf's will, is transcribed, in Latin, in Codex diplomaticus aevi saxonici vol 5 pp127-33 (ed. John Mitchell Kemble, 1847).
  
Sources:

Agatha

Married: Edward the Exile

Children Notes:
Agatha's parentage is undetermined, with various medieval sources making vague and conflicting claims. This conflicting information and older and modern interpretations and hypotheses are laid out in detail in The Henry Project: The Ancestors of King Henry II of England(Agatha) and wikipedia(Agatha (wife of Edward the Exile)). Agatha came to England from Hungary with her husband, Edward the Exile, and children in 1057, but was widowed shortly after her arrival. Following the Norman Conquest, in 1067 she fled with her children to Scotland, finding refuge under her future son-in-law Malcolm III. Simeon of Durham makes what appears to be the last reference to her in 1070.

Dictionary of national biography vol 36 p132 (ed. Sidney Lee, 1893)
  MARGARET, ST. (d. 1093), queen of Scotland, was daughter of Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside [q. v.], by Agatha, usually described as a kinswoman of Gisela, the sister of Henry II the Emperor, and wife of St. Stephen of Hungary. Her father and his brother Edmund, when yet infants, are said to have been sent by Canute to Sweden or to Russia, and afterwards to have passed to Hungary before 1038, when Stephen died. No trace of the exiles has, however, been found in the histories of Hungary examined by Mr. Freeman or by the present writer, who made inquiries on the subject at Buda-Pesth. Still, the constant tradition in England and Scotland is too strong to be set aside, and possibly deserves confirmation from the Hungarian descent claimed by certain Scottish families, as the Drummonds.

Sources:

Eadgifu

Father: Edward the Elder

Mother: Ælflæd

Married (1st): Charles III "the Simple"

Children Married (2nd): Heribert in 951

Flodoardi annales in Monumenta Germaniæ Historica SS 3 p401 (ed. G. H. Pertz, 1839)
  Anno 951 …
Ottogeba regina, mater Ludowici regis, egressa Lauduno, conducentibus se quibusdam tam Heriberti quam Adalberti fratris ipsius hominibus, ad Heribertum proficiscitur; qui suscipiens eam, ducit in coniugem. Unde rex Ludowicus iratus, abbatiam sanctae Mariae, quam ipsa Lauduni tenebat, recepit, et Gerbergae uxori suae dedit; fiscum quoque Atoniacam suo dominio subdidit. 
This roughly translates as:
   In the year 951 …
Queen Ottogeba, mother of king Louis, having left Laudun, accompanied by some men of Heribert and his brother Adalbert, went to Heribert; who, receiving her, married her. Whereupon King Louis, angry, took back the abbey of St. Mary, which she held at Laudun, and gave it to his wife Gerberga; he also subjected the treasury of Atonia to his dominion.

Heribert was the son of the Heribert, count of Vermandois, who had deceived, captured and imprisoned Eadgifu's first husband, king Charles "the Simple" in 923. Historians surmise that this defection to her son's enemies was a result of tension between Eadgifu and her daughter-in-law, Gerberga. Under the division of territories organised after his father's death in 943, Heribert became Comte d'Omois and received the fortress of Château-Thierry as well as the abbey of Saint-Médard, Soissons.  King Lothaire appointed him count of the palace (comte palatin). He succeeded his brother Robert as Comte de Meaux et de Troyes in 967.

Occupation: Queen of the West Franks, and later abbess of St Mary Laon, until 951.

Notes:
After the capture  and dethronement of Charles the Simple in 923, following his defeat at the Battle of Soissons, queen Eadgifu and her infant son took refuge in England at the court of her father king Edward, and after Edward's death, of her brother King Æthelstan. Charles died in prison in 929, making Louis the heir, but the French throne was still held by a rival royal line. Eadgifu returned to France when king Rudolph died in 936 and her son Louis, still a teenager, was called back to France, a country he had never known, to be crowned king. When Louis married in 939, Eadgifu retired to the nunnery of St Mary Laon, until her second marriage in 951.

Death: 26 December, year unknown

Burial: in the underground crypt of the monastery of St. Medard at Soissons, in a small chapel called the Sepulchre.
Her epitaph is printed in:
Vetera analecta pp377-8 (ed. G. H. Pertz, 1723)
EPITAPHIA PRINCIPUM ET ILLUSTRIUM PERSONARUM.
        IV.
    ETHGIVÆ REGINÆ
    Caroli Simplicis uxoris.
Quæ fueram quondam titulis generoſa ſuperbis,
Quæ Ducibus Regni regimen memorabile Francis:
Hic ETHGIVA premor, terræ ſub pulvere pulvis,
Quod quilquis cernis, caſus reminiſcere mortis,
Orans ut requies detur mihi carne ſolutæ.
          VII KAL. JAN.
… ADNOTATIONES IN EPITAPHIA.
… IN EPITAPHIUM IV,
  ETHGIVÆ epitaphium fugientibus litteris jam pæne obliteratum eruimus ex crypia ſubterranea Monaſterii ſan i Medardi apud Suiſſiones, ubi jacet in ſacello, quod Sepulcri diciour. Nupta fuit primùm Carole Simplici; tum eo intercepio ab amulis, in patrium, id est in Britanniam inſulum, una cum filio Ludovice fuga elapſa: ac demum ſecundis nuptiis coniunƈta cum Heriberto Comite Viromanduorum. Hæc ab aliis vocatur Eadgiva, Otgive, corruptè Ogina.
This roughly translates as:
EPITAPHS OF PRINCIPAL AND ILLUSTRIOUS PERSONS.
        IV.
    QUEEN ETHGIVA
    Wife of Charles the Simple.
Which I had once been generous with proud titles,
Which the Dukes of the Kingdom remembered for their rule by the French:
Here ETHGIVA I am pressed, beneath the dust of the earth,
Which any one sees, remembers the case of death,
Praying that rest may be given to me in sound flesh.
          VII KALENDS OF JANUARY.
… NOTES ON EPITAPH.
… ON EPITAPH IV,
We have recovered the epitaph of ETHGIVÆ, now almost obliterated by fleeing letters, from the underground crypt of the Monastery of St. Medard at Suisiones, where it lies in a small chapel called the Sepulchre. She was first married to Charles the Simple; then, having escaped from her husband, to her fatherland, that is, to the island of Britain, she escaped with her son Louis: and finally, after a second marriage, she was united with Herbert, Count of the Mandurians. She is called by others Eadgiva, Otgive, corruptedly Ogina.

Sources:

Ealdgyth

Married (1st): Sigeferth

Sigeferth was the son of Earngrim. He was one of the chief thegns in the boroughs of the Danelaw. Sigeferth was murdered by Eadric Streona, probably on the order of king Æthelred, at Oxford in 1015.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicle p104 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914)
  A. 1015. In this year was the great council at Oxford; and there Edric the ealdorman betrayed Sigeferth and Morcar, the chief thanes in the Seven Boroughs. He allured them into his chamber, and there within they were cruelly slain. And the king then took all their possessions, and ordered Sigeferth’s relict to be taken, and to be brought to Malmesbury.

William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England p191 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847)
  The year following [1015] a grand council of Danes and English was assembled at Oxford, where the king commanded two of the noblest Danes, Sigeferth, and Morcar, accused of treachery to him by the impeachment of the traitor Edric, to be put to death. He had lured them, by his soothing expressions, into a chamber, and deprived them, when drunk to excess, of their lives, by his attendants who had been prepared for that purpose. The cause of their murder was said to be, his unjustifiable desire for their property. Their dependants, attempting to revenge the death of their lords by arms, were worsted, and driven into the tower of St. Frideswide’s church at Oxford, where, as they could not be dislodged, they were consumed by fire: however, shortly after, the foul stain was wiped out by the king’s penitence, and the sacred place repaired. I have read the history of this transaction, which is deposited in the archives of that church.

Dictionary of national biography vol 16 p416 (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1888)
At the meeting of the ‘witan’ in Oxford in 1015, Eadric invited Sigeferth and Morkere, the chief thegns of the Danish confederacy of the ‘Seven Boroughs,’ into his chamber, and there had them treacherously slain (A.-S. Chron.; FLOR. WIG., and later writers); the story told by William of Malmesbury (Gesta Regum, ii. 179) of the burning of the thegns’ followers in the tower of St. Frideswide’s is due to a confusion between this incident and an actual occurrence which took place during the massacre of 1002 (PARKER, 146, 154). The guilt of the assassination must rest on others as well as Eadric; the king evidently approved of it, and it is probable that the ‘witan’ did so. We do not know whether the thegns were held to be concerned in any conspiracy; if so, there was nothing strange in their punishment by what we should consider an act of private violence rather than by a judicial execution. At the same time Eadric’s treachery, and his disregard of the obligations of hospitality, evidently shocked the feelings of the age.

Married (2nd): Edmund Ironside

Children Notes:
Liber monasterii de Hyda p264 (ed. Edward Edwards, 1866)
Habuit rex quoque Edmundus er uxore Aldgiva, foemina genere praeclara, duos fihios, Edwardum et Edmundum
This roughly translates as:
King Edmund also had by his wife Aldgiva, a woman of illustrious lineage, two sons, Edward and Edmund.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicle p104 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914)
  A. 1015. In this year was the great council at Oxford; and there Edric the ealdorman betrayed Sigeferth and Morcar, the chief thanes in the Seven Boroughs. He allured them into his chamber, and there within they were cruelly slain. And the king then took all their possessions, and ordered Sigeferth’s relict to be taken, and to be brought to Malmesbury. Then, after a little space, Edmund the etheling went there and took the woman, contrary to the king’s will, and had her for his wife. Then, before the Nativity of St. Mary, the etheling went thence, from the west, north to the Five Boroughs, and soon took possession of all Sigeferth’s property, and Morcar’s; and the people all submitted to him.

William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England pp191-2 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847)
  The wife of Sigeferth, a woman remarkable for her rank and beauty, was carried prisoner to Malmesbury; on which account, Edmund, the king’s son, dissembling his intention, took a journey into those parts. Seeing her, he became enamoured; and becoming enamoured, he made her his wife; cautiously keeping their union secret from his father, who was as much an object of contempt to his family as to strangers. … Soon after, at the instigation of his wife, he asked of his father the possessions of Sigeferth, which were of large extent among the Northumbrians, but could not obtain them; by his own exertions, however, he procured them at last, the inhabitants of that province willingly submitting to his power.

A new and complete history of England pp58-9 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795)
Algitha, widow to Sigefert, who was a woman of ſinguiar beauty and merit, was ſhut up in a monaſtery, to which confinement ſhe was indebted for her after-greatneſs. Edmund, the king’s eldeſt ſon, paſſing by that way ſome time after, had an inclination to ſee a lady ſo renowned for her beauty: but he who went to the convent merely to gratify his curioſity, was ſo overcome by her engaging converſation, her pleaſing and unaffected manner, together with her exquiſite beauty, that he departed from the place with reluctance, became deeply enamoured of her, in a few days releaſed her from her confinement, and married her even againſt the conſent of his father.

Dictionary of national biography vol 16 p403 (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1888)
In 1015 Eadmund desired to marry Ealdgyth, the widow of the Danish earl Sigeferth, who, along with his fellow earl Morkere, had that year been slain at Oxford by Eadric Streona [see under EDRIC]. Æthelred, who had seized on the possessions of the earls, and had sent Ealdgyth to Malmesbury, was not willing that his son should make this marriage. Nevertheless Eadmund took Ealdgyth from Malmesbury, married her, and then went to the Five (or Seven) Boroughs of the Danish confederacy, where the murdered earls had ruled, and received the submission of the people.
… Meanwhile Eadmund, ‘who was yclept Ironside for his bravery’ (A.-S. Chron. sub ann. 1057), rode through the western shires, received their submission, and raised an army from them. His troops are said to have been British or Welsh (‘Britanni,’ THIETMAR), and it is suggested that they came from the ‘shires of the old Wealhcyn’ (Norman Conquest, i. 701); in the twelfth century it was believed that they were natives of Wales, for Gaimar (l. 4222) says that Eadmund’s wife was the sister of a Welsh king, and that this gained him the help of her countrymen, and though Ealdgyth had an English name, it does not follow that she was an Englishwoman any more than Ælfgifu, as the English called Emma, the Norman wife of Æthelred.

The Henry Project: The Ancestors of King Henry II of England
Ealdgyth (Aldgitha)
Wife of Eadmund Ironside, king of England.
  In 1015, the ealdorman Eadric Streona invited to his quarters two thegns of the Seven Boroughs, Sigeferth and Morkere, sons of Earngrim, and caused them to be murdered there. King Æthelred took possession of their property, and had Aldgitha, Sigeferth's widow, taken to the town of Malmesbury. while she was held there, Eadmund the aetheling came and married her against his father's will ["Hoc anno, cum apud Oxenafordam magnam haberetur placitum, perfidus dux Edricus Streona digniores et potentiores ministros ex Seovenburhgensibus, Sigeferthum et Morkerum, filios Earngrimi, in cameram suam dolose suscepit, et occulte eos ibi necari jussit; quorum facultates rex Ægelredus accepit, et derelictam Sigeferthi, Aldgitham, ad Maidulfi Urbem deduci præcepit: quæ cum ibi custodiretur, venit illuc Eadmundus clito, et, contra voluntatem sui patris, illam sibi uxorem accepit, ..." John Worc. s.a. 1015 (1: 170); ASC(E) s.a. 1015; Wm. Malmes., c. 179 (1: 213); only John of Worcester gives the name of Sigeferth's widow].
… In his genealogical appendix, John of Worcester refers to her as a certain woman of noble descent ["... Eadmundus successit, qui duos filios, Eadmundum et Eadwardum, ex quadam nobilis prosapiæ foemina habuit; ..." John Worc., 1: 275].  
Bibliography
ASC = Charles Plummer, Two of the Saxon Chronicles parallel, based on the earlier edition by John Earle, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1892-9). ASC(A) indicates the "A" manuscript of the chronicle, and similarly for the other manuscripts.
Freeman (1870-9) = Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England (5 vols. + index vol., Oxford, 1870-9)
Gaimar = Thomas Duffus Hardy & Charles Trice Martin, ed. & trans., Lestorie des Engles solum la translacion Maistre Geffrei Gaimar, 2 vols. (London 1888-9).
John Worc. = Benjamin Thorpe, ed., Florentii Wigorniensis monachi chronicon ex chronicis, 2 vols., (London, 1848-9). (The work formerly attributed to Florence of Worcester is now generally attributed to John of Worcester.)
Robertson (1872) = E. William Robertson, Historical Essays in connection with the Land, the Church, &c." (Edinburgh, 1872).
Ronay (1984) = Gabriel Ronay, "Edward Aetheling, Anglo-Saxon England's Last Hope", History Today 34.1 (Jan. 1984): 43-51.
Ronay (1989) = Gabriel Ronay, The Lost King of England: The East European Adventures of Edward the Exile (Woodbridge, 1989).
Sawyer (1979) = P. H. Sawyer, Charters of Burton Abbey (Anglo-Saxon Charters 2, Oxford, 1979).
Swanton (2000) = Michael Swanton, ed. & trans., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (London, 2000).
Wm. Malmes., Gesta Regum = William Stubbs, ed., Willelmi Malmesbiriensis Monachi De gestis regum Anglorum. libri quinque; Historiæ Novellæ libri tres, 2 vols. (Rolls series 90, 1887-9).

Sources:

Ecgberht

Ecgberht
Ecgberht, as depicted in the Genealogical chronicle of the English Kings (1275-1300) - BL Royal MS 14 B V
image posted on wikipedia
Children Occupation: King of the West Saxons, and eventually overlord of Mercia, Kent and Northumbria.
Ecgberht was of royal lineage, perhaps the son of the king of Kent, and related to the kings of West Saxon. When Beorhtric won the West Saxon throne over Ecgberht after the murder of king Cynewulf in 786, Ecgberht was forced to flee, first to Mercia and then, when Beorhtric formed an alliance with Offa the king of Mercia, to France where he resided under the protection of Charlemagne. He returned to England in 802, on the death of Beorhtric, and claimed the West-Saxon throne. In 825, under attack from the Mercian, Ecgberht defeated Beornwulf of Mercia at the Battle of Ellendun and with the Mercians weakened, Ecgberht and his son Æthelwulf took control of the kingdom of Kent, East Anglia wrested independence from Mercia in alliance with the West Saxons, and by 829 he had occupied Mercia and secured recognition of his supremacy by the Northumbrians.

Notes:
Dictionary of national biography vol 17 pp148-51 (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1889)
  EGBERT, ECGBERHT, or ECGBRYHT (d. 839), king of the West-Saxons, son of Ealhmund, an under-king of the kingdom of Kent, which at this time, besides Kent, included Surrey, Sussex, and Essex (A.-S. Chron. sub an. 823), was when a young man banished from England by the joint action of Offa, king of Mercia, and Beorhtric [q. v.], king of Wessex. He represented the branch of the house of Cerdic that sprang from Cuthwine, the son of Ceawlin [q. v.], for his father was the great-grandson of Ingils, the brother of Ine. The West-Saxon kingship had departed from his house when Ine was succeeded by his kinsman Æthelheard. When the West-Saxon king, Cynegils, died in 786, Ealhmund was reigning in Kent, and probably died shortly afterwards; for soon after Beorhtric succeeded Cynegils the pretensions of Ecgberht were held to endanger his throne. Beorhtric forced him to take refuge in Mercia, and sent an embassy to Offa offering alliance and requesting that the fugitive might be given up. Offa determined to support Beorhtric, probably because the accession of Ecgberht to the West-Saxon kingdom might have led to the withdrawal of Kent from the Mercian over-lordship and its union with Wessex; he therefore made alliance with the West-Saxon king, gave him his daughter Eadburh [q. v.] to wife in 789, and joined him in driving Ecgberht out of England. Ecgberht took refuge with the Frankish king, Charles, afterwards the emperor Charles the Great (Charlemagne), who entertained many exiles from the different English kingdoms. The date of Ecgberht’s banishment and its duration are uncertain. The ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ (sub an. 836), Florence of Worcester (i. 69), and Henry of Huntingdon (p. 733) say that his exile lasted for three years; William of Malmesbury (Gesta Regum, sec. 106) makes it last for thirteen years. While, as far as written evidence goes, the period of three years thus rests on strong ground, it is less probable than the other. Ecgberht certainly came to the throne in 802 (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. Introd. p. 87; Eccl. Documents, iii. 557, the dates of the ‘Chronicle’ needing correction by two years at this period), and it is likely that he returned to England in that year on the death of Beorhtric; his exile, however, could not have begun three years before that date, as Offa was then dead. If the account given in the ‘Chronicle’ to be accepted, his return must have taken place on the death of Offa in 796, and his exile in 793, a date which seems to have no significance in this connection, while if William of Malmesbury’s statement of the matter is correct, his exile would coincide with the marriage of Beorhtric to Offa’s daughter, and would come to an end when, on the death of Beorhtric, he returned to England to ascend the West-Saxon throne; and it is highly probable that Malmesbury based his story on some version of the ‘Chronicle’ that has not been preserved. According to this theory, then, Ecgberht was banished in 789, and remained with Charles for thirteen years. Nothing is known of his life during his exile save that Henry of Huntingdon records the tradition that he dwelt in honour. At the same time account must be taken of the influence that his long stay at the court of the Frankish monarch must have had on his future career, of the lessons in war and empire that he must have learnt there. He returned to England in 802, and was accepted by the West-Saxons as their king. No opposition seems to have been offered to his accession by Cenwulf of Mercia, and it may reasonably be supposed that his acquiescence had been secured by the emperor (Making of England, p. 431). Nothing is recorded of Ecgberht for the next thirteen years; for the statement that appears in the register of a hospital at York that soon after his accession he held a ‘parliament’ at Winchester, in which he ordered that the name of his kingdom should be changed from Britain to England (Monasticon, vi. 608), does not need confuting here. It should, however, be noted that he dates certain charters granted in the later years of his reign (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. 1035, 1036, 1038) by the year of his ‘ducatus,’ which he refers to 812 or 813 (STUBBS, art. ‘Egbert,’ Dictionary of Christian Biography). Whatever he may have meant by the term ‘ducatus,’ it certainly points to some accession of dignity, and as in 815 (A.-S. Chron, sub an. 813) he ‘laid waste West Wales [Cornwall] from eastward to westward,’ it has been conjectured (STUBBS) that he refers to the beginning of this war, which in later days he probably regarded as the first step towards the attainment of the leadership he afterwards won. From 815 he does not appear again until 824, when he held a meeting of the West-Saxon witan at Acle, probably Oakley in Hampshire (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. 1031). The next year was evidently marked by a rising of the West Welsh, who were defeated by the men of Devon at Gafulford or Camelford, a war in which Ecgberht took part in person (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, sub an. 823; FLORENCE; KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. 1033; STUBBS).
  As soon as Ecgberht had overthrown the Welsh of Cornwall he had to repel a Mercian invasion. The greatness of Mercia had been shaken by civil discord since the death of Cenwulf in 821; his successor was deposed, and another king, Beornwulf, chosen in his place. Beornwulf, who no doubt took advantage of the rising of the Welsh, seems to have marched far into Wessex.
Battle of Ellendun
Artist's impression of the Battle of Ellendun (825)
illustration by G. D. Rowlands in Story of the British nations p131 (Walter Hutchinson), posted on wikipedia
Ecgberht defeated him at Ellandune, probably in the neighbourhood of Winchester, for Hun, an ealdorman who fell in the battle, was buried there (ÆTHELWEARD, p. 510). The slaughter was great on both sides, and the ‘river of blood’ that was shed was commemorated in popular verse (HENRY OF HUNTINGDON, p. 733). Beornwulf fled, and set himself to gather another army. From Ellandune Ecgberht sent his son Æthelwulf, Ealhstan, the bishop of Sherborne, and an ealdorman, with a large force, to regain his father’s kingdom of Kent. Baldred, king of Kent [q. v.], was driven across the Thames, and the people of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex willingly submitted to Ecgberht as the rightful successor of his father. The king and people of East Anglia, who were under the over-lordship of Mercia, also sent to him seeking his ‘peace and protection.’ On this Beornwulf led his army against them, and began to lay waste the country, but they defeated and slew him (826), and remained imder the over-lordship of Ecgberht (FLORENCE, i. 66; HENRY OF HUNTINGDON, p. 733). Mercia, however, was not yet subdued, for Beornwulf was succeeded by Ludecan, who made another attempt to subdue East Anglia, and was likewise defeated and slain in 828. He was succeeded by Wiglaf. Ecgberht, however, at once led an army against him, drove him from the kingdom, and received the submission of Mercia. In 829 he marched against Northumbria, and the Northumbrians met him on the border of their land at Dore in Derbyshire, and there submitted to him and took him for their lord. Under this year (827, correctly 829) the ‘Chronicle’ says of him that he was the eighth Bretwalda. He had for the first time united all the English race under one over-lordship, and, though there were future divisions of his empire, his work was never wholly undone (Making of England, p. 436). He was not king of England, for the idea of a territorial kingship belongs to a later period. Nor was he the immediate ruler of the peoples that had submitted to him; they still had kings of their own, who were dependent on the West-Saxon overlord, and in 830 Ecgberht restored Wiglaf to the throne of Mercia as under-king. In the case of Kent, where the kingship had come to an end, Ecgberht adopted a special policy. The kingdom was important, both as the seat of the ecclesiastical government of England, and as the district most closely connected with the continent. At the same time the greatness of the primate, and the strong local feeling that had manifested itself in opposition to Mercia, rendered it unadvisable to attempt a policy of absolute annexation. Accordingly Ecgberht, who regarded the kingdom as peculiarly his own. Bestowed it on his son Æthelwulf, probably in 828 (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. 223, 224), and it remained attached to the heir to the West-Saxon throne until it was united with the rest of the south of England on the succession of Æthelberht to the kingdom of Wessex (Constitutional Hist. i. 172). There is some uncertainty as to the date at which Ecgberht made his son king of Kent, and it is further questioned (Eccl. Documents, iii. 557) whether the subjugation of the country took place before 827, the date assigned to it in the St. Albans compilation (WENDOVER). There seem, however, sufficient grounds for the dates given here. Ecgberht’s ‘charters’ record a few personal incidents, such as his presence at the war of 825, and his grants, not many in number, to churches, and especially to Winchester (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. 1033, 1035 sq.) In a charter of 828 (ib. 223) he is styled ‘rex Anglorum;’ this, however, must not be taken as signifying more than the over-lordship of East Anglia; the same style was used by Offa in 772 (ib. 102); and in 830 he is described simply as ‘king of the West-Saxons and Kentishmen,’ and in 833 as ‘king of the West-Saxons’ (ib. 224, 232). His description as ‘king of Kent and other nations’ in another charter of 833 (ib, 234) does not necessarily imply any termination of Æthelwulf’s authority; Ecgberht was presiding over a meeting of the Kentish witan, and naturally used the style of the kingdom; it is, however, curious that Æthelwulf’s name does not occur among the witnesses (Eccl. Documents iii. 557).
A coin from the Ecgberht's reign
Silver penny minted during the reign of Ecgberht
image from A Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Series vol 2, Plate I.2 ( Herbert A. Grueber and Charles Francis Keary, 1893) posted on wikipedia
Coins of Ecgberht are rare, though specimens are extant struck by about nineteen different moneyers. On some of these, besides his name and title of ‘rex,’ there is ‘Saxo,’ on others ‘M,’ and on others ‘A,’ signifying respectively his kingship over the West-Saxons, Mercians and East Anglians (KENYON; STUBBS). Nothing is known certainly as to Ecgberht’s administrative work in his immediate kingdom of Wessex. It has, however, been conjectured with great probability that he brought the shire organisation to its completion there, both as regards the relations of the bishop with the shire and the appointment of the ealdorman as the leader of the shire force or ‘fyrd,’ an arrangement which enabled the West-Saxons to otter a spirited resistance to the Scandinavian invaders (Conquest of England, pp. 47, 68-70, 233). His dealings with the church of Canterbury are of peculiar importance. The Mercian kings had attempted to depress the power of the archbishops; Ecgberht made it a means of strengthemng his own position. He probably procured the election of Ceolnoth in 832, who may have been a West-Saxon (ROBERTSON). At all events he was in full accord with him, and in 838, at an ecclesiastical council held at Kingston, he and his son Æthelwulf entered into an agreement of perpetual alliance with the archbishop and church of Canterbury, the archbishop promising for himself, his church, and his successors unbroken friendship to the kings and their heirs, and the kings giving assurances of protection, liberty of election, and peace. A charter containing a similar agreement with the bishop and church of Winchester is, if genuine, an imitation of that drawn up at Kingston (Eccl. Documents, iii. 617-20).
   The restoration of Wiglaf was probably caused by some hostile movement of the Welsh on the Mercian border, which rendered it advisable to secure the fidelity and provide for the defence of the kingdom; for in that year (831) Ecgberht led an army against the ‘North Welsh’ (the people of the present Wales) and compelled them to acknowledge his over-lordship. In 834 his dominions were invaded by the Scandinavian pirates, who plundered the isle of Sheppey. The next year they came to Charmouth in Dorsetshire with thirty-five ships and landed there. Ecgberht fought a fierce battle with them there and was defeated. Two years later, in 837, a great fleet of northmen, probably from Ireland (Conquest of England, p. 67), sailed over to Cornwall, and the West Welsh rose against the West-Saxon dominion and joined the invaders. Ecgberht met the allies at Hengestdune, immediately to the west of the Tamar, and routed them completely. He died in 839 (A.-S. Chron. sub an. 836), after a reign of thirty-seven years and seven months, and was succeeded by his son Æthelwulf.
   [Anglo-Saxon Chron. (Rolls Ser.); Florence of Worcester (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Henry of Huntingdon and Æthelweard, Mon. Hist. Brit.; William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Rcgum (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Kcmble’s Codex Diploinaticus (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Hawkins’s Silver Coins, ed. Kenyon, vol. iii.; Haddan and Stubb’s Eccliastical Documents, vol. iii. Much light is thrown on the chronology of Ecgberht’s reign, p. 657, in Bishop Stubbs’s Introd. to Roger Hovedon, I. xc-xcviii, and in the Introduction to the Codex Dipl.; for the other side of the question see Hardy’s Introd. to Mon. Hist. Brit. p. 120; Stubbs’s Constitutional History, i. 172, 235, and his exhaustive art. ‘Egbert,’ Dict, of Christian Biog.; Green’s Making of England, and Conquest of England; Robertson’s Historical Essays, p. 200.      W. H.

Other accounts of Ecgberht's life and reign can be found in The Anglo-Saxon chronicle pp42-5 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914), William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England pp94-7 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847), The chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon pp140-3 (ed. Thomas  Forester, 1853), The Annals of Roger de Hoveden vol 1 pp31-33 (translated by Henry T. Riley, 1853), A new and complete history of England p34 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795) and wikipedia (Ecgberht,_King_of_Wessex).

Death: 839

Mortuary Chest in Winchester Cathedral
Mortuary chest from Winchester Cathedral, Winchester, England. One of six mortuary chests near the altar in the Cathedral, this chest purports to contain the Ecgberht's bones
photio by Ealdgyth posted on wikipedia
Buried: in Winchester Cathedral, Hampshire

Winchester Cathedral pp46-7 (William Benham, 1897)
  We have already said there are two unique  features in the Cathedral. Look at the  screens at the sides of the choir, and the six mortuary chests upon them. It is the work of Bishop Fox. Cnut, and Queen Emma, and many early kings and bishops had been buried in the crypt by Bishop de Blois. Fox brought forth the bones, and put them together in these chests, and inscribed the names upon them, though he had found no names in the original resting-place. But even if he had been able to identify each skeleton, there would be uncertainty enough now, for the Parliamentary soldiers are said to have dragged them forth in search of treasure.

Sources:

Edgar

Edgar from Winchester Charter
Edgar, as depicted in the frontispiece of the New Minster charter, an Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscript that was likely composed by Bishop Æthelwold and presented to the New Minster in Winchester by King Edgar in the year 966
image scanned from the book The National Portrait Gallery History of the Kings and Queens of England (David Williamson, 1998), posted by Dcoetzee at wikipedia
Silver penny of King Edgar
Silver 'reform' penny of Edgar, moneyer Lyfing, Norwich, c. 973-5.
Obverse - Draped and diademed bust of Edgar left within circle. +EADGAR REX ANGLOR[um]
photo by Arichis taken at the British Museum, posted at wikipedia
Edgar in the Genealogical Roll
Edgar as depicted in the Genealogical roll of the kings of England (1300-1308) - BL Royal MS 14 B VI
posted at wikipedia
Birth: 943/4
Edgar was 29 at his coronation on 11 May 973

Father: Edmund I

Mother: Ælfgifu

Married (1st): Æthelflæd Eneda between 957 and 959

Æthelflæd was the daughter of Ordmær, ealdorman of East Anglia. For her beauty, she was known as Eneda, or the ‘white duck’.

Children Married (2nd): Wulffchryth of Wilton
It is a matter of debate whether Edgar and Wulffchryth were actually married, or in a "handfast" relationship, but Edith was acknowledged as his daughter.
In 961 probably, when he was about seventeen, Edgar took from the convent at Wilton a lady named Wulffchryth (Wulfrid), who, though veiled, was probably not a professed nun. She bore him a daughter named Eadgyth in or by 962. After the birth of her child she refused to accede to his wish to enter into a permanent marriage with him, and retired to Wilton, taking, as the dissenting party, her child with her.

Children: Married (3rd): Ælfthryth in 964

According to a charter of 864, they were married in that year, but the Chronicle places the marriage in 865.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicle p82 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1906)
  A. 965. In this year king Edgar took Elfrida for his queen; she was daughter of Ordgar the ealdorman.

Children: Occupation: King of England
In 957, following a rebellion by the north against the rule of Edgar's older brother, Eadwig, Edgar was chosen to be king of the area north of the Thames (he was described in a charter ‘king of the Mercians, Northumbrians, and Britons’), while Eadwig continued to rule Wessex, south of the Thames. After Eadwig's death in 959, Edgar suceeded to that kingdom as well, although it was some years before he was formally crowned king of all England, at Bath on Whitsunday, 11 May 973.

Notes:
Dictionary of national biography vol 16 pp365-70 (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1888)
  EDGAR or EADGAR (944-975), king of the English, the younger son of Eadmund the Magnificent [see EDMUND] and the sainted Ælfgifu, was born in 944, the year of his mother’s death, for he was twenty-nine at the time of his coronation in 973 (Anglo-Saxon Chron. sub ann. 972; FLOR. WIG. sub ann. 973). He was probably brought up at the court of his uncle Eadred [see EDRED], for his name, coupled with that of his brother Eadwig [see EDWY], is appended to a charter of Eadred dated 955 (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. 435). After his brother’s accession he resided at his court, and was there on 9 May 957 (ib. 465), when the insurrection of the north had already broken out. Some time, probably, before the close of that year he was chosen king by the insurgents. The kingdom was divided by a decree of the ‘witan,’ and he ruled over the land north of the Thames. He begins to issue charters as king the following year. In a charter of 958 he styles himself ‘king of the Angles and ruler of the rest of the peoples dwelling round’ (ib. 471); in a charter of the next year ‘king of Mercia,’ with a like addition (ib. 480); and in another charter, granted probably about the same time, ‘king of the Mercians, Northumbrians, and Britons’ (Wells Chapter MSS.) As he was now scarcely past childhood he must have been little more than a puppet in the hands of the northern party. As soon as he was settled on the throne he sent for Dunstan [q. v.], who was then in exile, and who from that time became his chief minister and adviser. The other leading men of his party were Oskytel, archbishop of York; Ælfhere, ealdorman of Mercia; Brihtnoth [q. v.], ealdorman of Essex; and Æthelstan, the ‘half-king,’ ealdorman of East Anglia, whose wife, Ælfwen, was the young king’s foster-mother (Historia Ramesiensis, 11), a connection that may have had a curious bearing on the rivalry between him and his elder brother, for it has been suggested that Æthelfgifu, the mother of Eadwig’s wife, and a person of great weight at his court, stood in the same relation to the West-Saxon king (ROBERTSON, Essays, 180, 201).
  On the death of Edwy [q. v.] or Eadwig in October 959 Eadgar, who was then sixteen, was chosen king by the whole people (FLOR. WIG.), and succeeded to the kingdom of the West-Saxons, as well as of the Mercians and Northumbrians (A.-S. Chron.) His reign, though of considerable historical importance, does not appear to have been eventful. It was a period of national consolidation, peace, and orderly government. Much of the prosperity of the reign should certainly be attributed to the wisdom of Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury (960-988), who served the king as well and faithfully as he had served his uncle Eadred. In 968 (?) Eadgar made an expedition into Wales because the prince of the North Welsh withheld the tribute that had been paid to the English king since the time of Æthelstan, and, according to William of Malmesbury, laid on the rebellious prince a tribute of three hundred wolves’ heads for four years, which was paid for three years, but was then discontinued because no more wolves were left to be killed, a highly improbable story (Gesta Regum, 155). It seems as though the Welsh were virtually independent during this reign, for their princes do not attest the charters of the English king, and so may be supposed not to have attended his witenagemots. Eadgar’s relations with the Danish parts of the kingdom are of more importance. From the time of the death of Eric Haroldsson and the skilful measures taken by Eadred and Dunstan to secure the pacification of Northumbria, the northern people had remained quiet until they had joined in the revolt against Eadwig. By the election of Eadgar and the division of the kingdom they broke off their nominal dependence on the West-Saxon throne. Now, however, Eadgar himself had become king of the whole land, and Wessex was again the seat of empire. It was probably this change that in 966 led to an outbreak in Northumbria. The disturbance was quelled by Thored, the son of Gunner, steward of the king’s household, who harried Westmoreland, and Eadgar sought to secure peace by giving the government of the land to Earl Oslac. It is said, though not on any good authority, that as Kenneth of Scotland had taken advantage of this fresh trouble in the north to make a raid upon the country, Eadgar purchased his goodwill, at least so it is said, by granting him Lothian, or northern Bernicia, an English district to the south of the Forth, to be held in vassalage of the English crown. (This grant, which has been made the subject of much dispute, has been fully discussed by DR. FREEMAN, Norman Conquest, i. 610-20; and E. W. ROBERTSON, Scotland under her Early Kings, ii. 386 sq.)
  While Eadgar thus provided for the peace of the north, he seems to have carefully forborne from interfering with the customs and internal affairs of the Danish district. He declared in his laws: ‘I will that secular rights stand among the Danes with as good laws as best they may choose. But with the English let that stand which I and my witan have added to the dooms of my forefathers.’ Only the police arrangement of the hundred was to be common to all his peoples, ‘English, Danes, and Britons.’ But in the case of powerful offenders, while in the English districts their punishment was decided by the king and the witan, the Danes were to choose according to their laws the punishment that was to be awarded. This self-government was granted, Eadgar tells the Danes, as a reward ‘for the fidelity which ye have ever shown me’ (THORPE, Ancient Laws, 116, 117). The two peoples, then, lived on terms of equality each under its own law, though, indeed, the differences between the systems were trifling, and this arrangement, as well as the good peace Eadgar established in the kingdom, was no doubt the cause that led the ‘witan’ in the reign of Cnut to declare the renewal of ‘Eadgar’s law’ [see under CANUTE]. Besides this policy of non-interference he favoured men of Danish race, and seems to have adopted some of their customs. The steward of his household was a Dane, and a curious notice in the ‘Chronicle’ concerning a certain king, Sigferth, who died by his own hand and was buried at Wimborne, seems to point to some prince of Danish blood who was held in honour at the English court. Offices in church and state alike were now open to the northern settlers. While, however, Eadgar was thus training the Danes as good and peaceful subjects, his policy was looked on with dislike by Englishmen of old-fashioned notions, and the Peterborough version of the ‘Chronicle’ preserves a song in which this feeling is strongly expressed. The king is there said to have ‘loved foreign vices’ and ‘heathen manners,’ and to have brought ‘outlandish’ men into the land. The same principle of non-interference was carried out in church matters, for on the death of Oskytel in 972 the king, by the advice of Dunstan, conferred the archbishopric of York on Oswald, who was by birth a Northumbrian Dane, and possibly set aside the election of the English Æthelwald in his favour (SYMEON, col. 79; T. STUBBS, col. 1699; ROBERTSON, Essays, 214). Oswald, though, in his diocese of Worcester and elsewhere, he continued to carry on his efforts to promote the Benedictine reform that was strongly favoured by the king, did not attempt to introduce it into Northumbria, where it would certainly have met with considerable resistance, and in this matter he must have acted with the approval of Eadgar, who had a strong affection for him (Vita S. Oswaldi, 435).
  The king’s conciliatory policy met with signal success, and the Danish population lived peacefully under his supremacy. Nor did this success lack definite acknowledgment. On the return of Oswald from Rome, whither he had gone not merely to fetch his pall, but to transact several matters of state, probably to obtain the pope’s assent to the step the king was about to take, Eadgar was ‘at length’ solemnly crowned (ÆTHELWEARD, 520). The ceremony took place at Bath on Whitsunday, 11 May 973, in the presence of a vast assembly of the ‘witan,’ and was performed by both the archbishops; it is the first recorded instance of a coronation of an English king in which the archbishop of the ‘Northumbrians’ (Vita S. Oswaldi) took part, and this is certainly not without significance. It is also the first coronation of which we have a minute description (ib. 436-8). It will be sufficient to note here that the king entered the church wearing his crown, and laid it aside as he knelt before the altar; that Dunstan then began the ‘Te Deum;’ that at the conclusion of the hymn the bishops raised the king from his knees; and that at Dunstan’s dictation he then took a threefold oath that the church of God and all Christian people should enjoy true peace for ever, that he would forbid all wrong and robbery to all degrees, and that he would command justice and mercy in all judgments. Then the consecration prayers were said, the archbishops anointed him, the antiphon ‘Zadok the priest’ was sung, and all joined in the shout ‘Let the king live for ever.’ Dunstan next invested him with the ring and sword, placed the crown on his head and the sceptre and rod in his hands, and both the archbishops enthroned him. Although this ceremony is sometimes spoken of as a second coronation, there is no good reason for supposing that the king had ever been crowned before. No contemporary chronicler assigns any reason for this delay of the rite, or for the special time chosen for its performance; the story that connects it with a penance will be noted further on. It may, therefore, be held to have been, to quote the words of Dr. Stubbs: ‘a solemn typical enunciation of the consummation of English unity, an inauguration of the king of all the nations of England, celebrated by the two archbishops, possibly with special instructions or recognition from Rome, possibly in imitation of the imperial consecration of Eadgar’s kinsmen, the first and second Otto, possibly as a declaration of the imperial character of the English crown itself’ (Memorials of St. Dunstan, introd. ci.; this view was first propounded by ROBERTSON, Essays, 203-15; comp. FREEMAN, Norman Conquest, i. 639, 3rd edition). It evidently took strong hold on the imagination of the people, and was made the subject of one of the national ballads preserved in the ‘Chronicle’ (Anglo-Saxon Chron. sub ann.; ÆTHELWEARD, 520). After this ceremony the king with all his fleet sailed round to Chester, and there six (A.-S. Chron.), or rather eight (FLOR. WIG.), kings met him and swore to be faithful to him, and to be ‘his fellowworkers by sea and by land.’ They were the kings of the Scots, of Cumberland, and of the Isles, and five Welsh princes, and it is said that they further declared their vassalage by rowing Eadgar in a boat which he himself steered at the head of a great procession from his palace to the minster of St. John Baptist, where they prayed, and then returned in the same manner (ib.) While this may be a later embellishment, the ‘commendation’ of the kings is beyond doubt. (On the nature of such commendations see FREEMAN, Historical Essays, i. 56; Norman Conquest, i. 142; ROBERTSON, Scotland under her Early Kings, ii. 386 sq.) The Danes of Ireland were friendly, and acknowledged the power if not the supremacy of the English king, for coins of Eadgar were minted at Dublin (ROBERTSON). The relations between Eadgar and the other kings and princes then reigning in these islands are probably signified by his use of grandiloquent titles borrowed from the imperial court. Following the example of his predecessors since the reign of Æthelstan, he describes himself in his charters as ‘Albionis Imperator Augustus,’ and the like (Norman Conquest, i. 623; STUBBS, Constitutional History, i. 177). As a near kinsman of Otto I and II, he may well have been influenced by the imperial ideas of western Europe. He made alliance with Otto the Great, and received splendid gifts from him (FLOR. WIG. sub ann. 959). This alliance was probably renewed at the accession of Otto II, when other kings are said to have marvelled at the profusion of Eadgar’s gifts. His fame was spread abroad, and Saxons, and men of Flanders, and Danes are said to have sailed hither constantly; all were welcomed, but their coming was evidently disliked by the more conservative part of the English (Gesta Regum, 148, where William of Malmesbury expands the notice of the Peterborough chronicler, which as it stands seems to apply chiefly to the Danes, the men of ‘heathen manners’).
  At the date of his coronation at Bath, Eadgar was in his thirtieth year. He is said to have been short and slenderly made, but of great strength (ib. 156), ‘beauteous and winsome’ (A.-S. Chron.) His personal character, the events of his life, and the glories of his reign made a deep impression on the English people. Not only are four ballads, or fragments of ballads, relating to his reign preserved in the different versions of the national chronicle, but a large mass of legends about him, originally no doubt contained in gleemen’s songs, is given by William of Malmesbury. He is represented in somewhat different lights. All contemporary writers save one speak of him in terms of unmixed praise; the one exception, the Peterborough chronicler, while dwelling on his piety, his glory, and his might, laments, as we have seen, his love of foreigners and of foreign fashions and evil ways. As a zealous patron of the monks, he is naturally depicted by the monastic writers of his time in glowing colours, and the excellence of his government, which rests on better evidence than vague phrases, justifies all that they say of him as a ruler. On the other hand, popular tradition, represented by the stories told by William of Malmesbury, while endorsing all that the chroniclers say of the glories of the reign, conveys a widely different impression of his personal character from that which is to be gathered from his monastic admirers. He was, we are told, cruel to his subjects, and inordinately lustful; he coveted his friend’s wife, and murdered her husband in order to marry her, and was guilty of other acts of immorality (Gesta Regum, 157-60; Gesta Pontificum, p. 190). The charge of cruelty probably arose from the general strictness with which he repressed disorder, and from the remembrance of certain special incidents in which his justice was too little tempered with mercy (see below). As regards his lustfulness and other crimes the historian expressly states that the legends concerning them refer only to his younger days. The two of most importance tell us how Eadgar slew Æthelwold, and married his widow, Ælfthryth, or Elfrida, and how he seduced a veiled lady of Wilton. All the circumstances of the first legend are unhistorical (the growth of this legend has been discussed fully by DR. FREEMAN, Historical Essays, i. 15-25); the second rests on a firmer basis. A review of the king’s life, as far as we know it, certainly goes far to show that in his early years he was flagrantly immoral, and this is borne out by the reference to his vices in the song preserved in the ‘Chronicle.’ Cnut, it should be noted, held that he was ‘given up to vice and a slave to lust’ (Gesta Pontiff, p. 190 [see under CANUTE and EDITH, ST.]) In 961 probably, when he was about seventeen, he took from the convent at Wilton a lady named Wulffchryth (Wulfrid), who, though veiled, was not a professed nun (Gesta Regum, 159). She bore him a daughter named Eadgyth (St. Edith [q. v.]) in or by 962. Her connection with the king was evidently a ‘handfast’ union, for after the birth of her child she refused to accede to his wish to enter into a permanent marriage with him, and retired to Wilton, taking as the dissenting party her child with her (GOTSELIN, Life of St. Edith, Acta SS. MABILLON, saec. v. 636). As a punishment for this violation of the cloister, Osbern says that Dunstan ordered the king a penance of seven years, during which he was not to wear his crown, that he made atonement for his sin by building the nunnery at Shaftesbury, which was in fact built by Ælfred, and that at the end of the seven years he was solemnly crowned (Vita S. Dunstani, p. 111). Apart from the fact that the ceremony at Bath in 973 appears to have been the only coronation of Eadgar, it will be observed that the dates prove that this story cannot be accepted as it stands. Eadgar next took to wife Æthelflæd, who for her beauty was known as the ‘White Duck’ (FLOR. WIG. sub an. 964), the daughter of an ealdorman named Ordmær, of whom little is known, and who probably owed such power as he had to his daughter’s marriage. She bore the king a son named Eadward [see EDWARD THE MARTYR]. Her union with Eadgar is said by Nicholas of Worcester, writing about 1120, to have been a lawful marriage (Memorials of St. Dunstan, p. 423); this would scarcely be gathered from Florence of Worcester, and as her name does not appear in any charter, her connection with Eadgar must have terminated by the date of his marriage in 964, and as the succession of her son was disputed there is some ground for believing that this too was a ‘handfast’ union for a year, and that it was terminated by Eadgar, who as the dissenting party acknowledged and brought up her son (ROBERTSON, Historical Essays, 169, 172-6). In 964 Eadgar took to wife Ælfthryth, the daughter of Ordgar, ealdorman of the western shires. Ælfthryth’s first husband, Æthelwold, the son and successor of Æthelstan of East Anglia, died in 962. There is no reason to attribute his death to Eadgar as William of Malmesbury and later writers do; indeed it is absurd to imagine that the king would have thus injured the family in which he found his mightiest and most trusted adherents. Ælfthryth bore him Eadmund, who died in 971 or 972, and Æthelred (Ethelred the Unready), who afterwards came to the throne. Second marriages were uncanonical, and in the tenth century priests were forbidden to bless them. The name of Ælfthryth became odious, as she was held to be guilty of the murder of her stepson Eadward. These two facts are perhaps enough to account for the scandalous tales that later writers tell about this marriage. It took place just seven years before Eadgar’s coronation, and in the account given of the ceremony at Bath by the anonymous author of St. Oswald’s life there is a curious passage which seems as though the coronation was followed by some public recognition of it (p. 438). It seems possible, therefore, that we have here the key to the legend of the seven years’ penance said to have been imposed in consequence of the violation of the ‘veiled lady’ of Wilton. Although we must reject the story of laying aside the crown, Dunstan may have imposed a penance, possibly of seven years’ length, on the king for contracting a union which was uncanonical, and probably lacked the blessing of the church. Eadgar may have atoned for his sin by the foundation of a religious house, for he founded many, and the coronation at Bath may well have been accompanied by the removal of ecclesiastical censure, and, as the ‘Life of St. Oswald’ implies, by the recognition of the marriage (‘peractis egregiis nuptiis regalis thori,’ &c.)
  With Eadgar’s alliance with the East-Anglian house, which was perhaps drawn closer by his marriage with Ælfthryth, may be connected his zeal in the work of monastic reform which began in England that year (ROBERTSON). He was first persuaded to undertake the work by Oswald, who was a friend of Æthelwine, the brother and successor of Ælfthryth’s first husband. With the king in their favour, with Dunstan at Canterbury, Oswald at Worcester, and, above all, Æthelwold at Winchester, the monastic party was all-powerful. Eadgar upheld Æthelwold in his severity towards the clerks at Winchester (Vita S. Æthelwoldi, 260), he finished and dedicated the new minster there, and obtained a letter from John XIII authorising Æthelwold to establish monks there (FLOR. WIG. sub ann. 964; Vita S. Oswaldi, 426; Memorials of St. Dunstan, 364). With his co-operation monks took the place of clerks at Chertsey, Milton, Exeter, Ely, Peterborough, Thorney, and other places. He commanded that the reform should be carried out in Mercia, ordered that new buildings should be provided for the new inmates of the monasteries, and is said to have founded forty new houses. He also gave large gifts to many other monasteries, and especially to Glastonbury. Nor was his bounty confined to the monasteries of his own kingdom, as may be seen by a letter from the abbot of St. Ouen at Rouen asking his help, and by another from the convent of St. Genevieve at Paris thanking him for his gifts (Memorials of St. Dunstan, 363, 366).
  Young as Eadgar was, his rule was vigorous and successful. The tendency of the period was towards provincial rather than national administration. As the theory of royalty increased, its actual power diminished. The great ealdormen, such as Ælfhere and Æthelwine, were practically independent, and local jurisdictions were in full operation. Eadgar did not attempt to overthrow the power of the provincial rulers, nor did he do anything to weaken the local courts. On the contrary he seems to have avoided all unnecessary interference, and as he had no national machinery for government he strengthened the local machinery, while at the same time he used it for national ends and as a means of making his power felt in all that concerned the good of the nation. This required wisdom and vigour—the wisdom may to a large extent have been Dunstan’s, the vigour of the king’s administration was due to himself. In order to rid the coasts of the northern pirates he organised, we are told, a system of naval defence. He formed three fleets of twelve hundred vessels each, and every year after the Easter festival he sailed with each of these fleets in turn along the whole coast. Within the land, to use the chronicler’s words, he ‘the folks’ peace bettered the most of the kings that were before him.’ He used the territorial division of the hundred as the basis of an efficient police system for catching thieves, and by organising local jurisdictions and adapting them to the needs of the people gave them new life. He desired that the local courts should suffice for all ordinary purposes of justice, and commanded that no man should apply to the king in any civil suit unless he was not worthy of law or could not obtain it at home. Nevertheless he did not allow these courts to work without control. Every winter and spring we are told, doubtless with some exaggeration, he went through all the provinces and made inquisition as to how the great men administered the laws and whether the poor were oppressed by the mighty. His laws were few, and, except the ordinance of the hundred, call for no special remark; his work was rather administrative than legislative, and the words that stand at the head of his ordinances commanding that every man should be worthy of folk-right, poor as well as rich, show the spirit of his administration. He was stern in punishing crimes, and in 968, probably in consequence of some local rebellion, caused the island of Thanet to be ravaged, His ecclesiastical laws command the payment of tithe, church-seat, and hearth-penny or Peter’s pence, and the observance of feasts and fasts. The general character of the canons enacted in this reign will be found in the article on Dunstan. It is convenient to consider the secular side of Eadgar’s reign as specially pertinent to his life, and the ecclesiastical side as rather appropriate to the life of the archbishop. No such division, however, is satisfactory. Dunstan’s greatness cannot be measured except by taking into account the glories of Eadgar’s rule, nor is it likely that the king, who was so earnest in the matter of monastic reform, was an indifferent or inactive spectator of the efforts made by the archbishop to reform the character and raise the position of the clergy. The characteristic of Eadgar’s reign which impressed the men of his own time most forcibly was the peace he gave to his people. ‘God him granted that he dwelt in peace,’ and the evil days that followed his death made men dwell on this so that he came to be called Eadgar the Peaceful King (FLOR. WIG.) He died on 8 July 975 in his thirty-second year, and was buried at Glastonbury. In 1052 Abbot Æthelnoth translated his body to a shrine above the altar of the abbey church; and in spite of his early vices Eadgar was at this time reverenced as a saint at Glastonbury, and is said to have worked miracles (Gesta Regum, ii. 160; De Antiq. Glaston. GALE, iii. 324).
  [Anglo-Saxon Chron.; Florence of Worcester (Engl. Hist. Soc.); William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum (Engl. Hist. Soc.) and Gesta Pontiff. (Rolls Ser.); Memorials of St. Dunstan (Rolls Ser.); Vita S. Oswaldi, Historians of York (Rolls Ser.); Vita, S. Æthelwoldi, Chron. de Abingdon (Rolls Ser.); Historia Ramesiensis (Rolls Ser.); Kemble’s Codex Dipl.; Thorpe’s Ancient Laws and Institutes; Vita S. Eadgithse, Mabillon's Acta SS. sæc. v.; Stubbs’s Constitutional History; Robertson’s Historical Essays and Scotland under her Early Kings; Freeman’s Norman Conquest and Historical Essays, i.; Green’s Conquest of England.]      W. H.

Other accounts of Edgar's life and reign can be found at The Anglo-Saxon chronicle pp78-84 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914), William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England pp147-62 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847), The chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon pp174-6 (ed. Thomas  Forester, 1853), A new and complete history of England pp48-52 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795), The history of the Norman conquest of England pp42-5 (Edward A.Freeman, 1873) and wikipedia (Edgar,_King_of_England).

Death: 8 July 975

Glastonbury Abbey ruins
Ruins of Glastonbury Abbey church seen from the east end of the apse, looking west through the choir and crossing to the Galilee and Lady chapels
image posted at wikipedia
Buried: Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset, England

Sources:

Edmund I

Edmund I
Edmund I as depicted in the Genealogical roll of the kings of England (1300-1308) - BL Royal MS 14 B VI
image posted on wikipedia
Birth: 921 or 922
Edmund was aged 18 when he succeeded to the throne on 27 October 940.

Father: Edward the Elder

Mother: Eadgifu of Kent

Married (1st): Ælfgifu

Children Married (2nd): Æthelflæd of Domerham

Æthelflæd was called, probably from her marriage portion, ‘at Domerham,’ the daughter of Ælfgar, one of his thegns, who was made an ealdorman. They had no recorded children.

A penny from the reign of King Edmund I
A silver penny from the reign of Edmund I, obverse inscribed 'EADMUND REX'
photographed by York Museums Trust Staff, posted at wikipedia
Occupation: King of the English
Edmund succeeded to the throne of England on the death of his brother, Æthelstan, on 27 October 940. He ruled until his murder on 26 May 946.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicle p75 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914)
  A. 940. This year king Athelstan died at Gloucester on the 6th before the Kalends of November, about forty-one years, except one day, after king Alfred died. And Edmund the etheling, his brother, succeeded to the kingdom, and he was then eighteen years of age:

Notes:
Dictionary of national biography vol 16 pp401-3 (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1888)
  EDMUND or EADMUND (922?-946), king of the English, son of Eadward the Elder and Eadgifu, first appears as sharing in the victory of his elder brother Æthelstan at Brunanburh in 937, when he must have been about fifteen. On Æthelstan’s death, on 27 Oct. 940, he succeeded to the kingdom at the age of eighteen. He appears to have attempted to bring the north under his immediate rule, and it is said that the Norwegian king, Eric Bloodaxe, now left Northumbria. This, however, seems impossible for chronological reasons, for Eric did not arrive in England until the next reign (see under EDRED; LAING, Sea-kings, i. 317; Corpus Poeticum Boreale, ii. 489). Still, it is probably true that Eadmund tried to assert his authority over the north in some practical manner instead of resting content with the bare submission of the people, and leaving them to manage their own affairs. A revolt broke out, and the northern people made Olaf (Anlaf), a northman from Ireland, their king. The revolt appears to have spread to the confederate towns called the Five Boroughs. In 942 Olaf died, and was succeeded by another Olaf, the son of Sihtric, and Ragnar, the son of Guthfrith. Up to this time Wulfstan, the archbishop of York, appears to have remained faithful to the West-Saxon king (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. 393). He now openly joined Olaf, and marched with him to war. In 943 Olaf and Wulfstan took Tamworth and ravaged the country round about. Eadmund came up with them at Leicester and besieged them there. The suddenness of his attack evidently surprised them. A peace was arranged by the two archbishops, Oda and Wulfstan, and the war was brought to an end on nearly the same terms as those that had been made between Ælfred and Guthorm. The kingdom was divided, and Eadmund was left the immediate kingship only of the country south of Watling street; his supremacy over the north was, however, acknowledged, for Olaf was baptised, probably at Leicester, the English king standing godfather to him, as Alfred had stood to Guthorm, and later in the same year Ragnar also submitted to baptism. This revival of the Danelaw did not last long, for in 944 Eadmund drove out both the Norse kings, and brought the country into subjection. His conquest of Mercia, and especially of the Five Boroughs, is celebrated in a song preserved in the Winchester version of the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.’ This song is inserted under 941, the year in which the towns appear to have revolted; but the chronology of the war is uncertain, and the sequence of events given here only represents one opinion. Dr. Freeman believes that Mercia and the Five Boroughs were conquered in 941 (Norman Conquest, i. 64; Old English History, p. 163). Eadmund’s brilliant success won him the name of the ‘deed-doer,’ or, to use the modern form of the word, written in Latin by Florence of Worcester, the ‘magnificent.’ In the struggles of the English kings with the Danish people of the north, Cumbria, the remaining fragment of the Celtic kingdom of Strathclyde, and the Scots had been active on the Danish side. Eadmund endeavoured to secure his kingdom from attack through Cumbrian territory by a stroke of policy, for in 945 he conquered the land and delivered it over to Malcolm of Scotland on condition that he should be ‘his fellow-worker by sea and land.’ The Scots were thus set to keep the Welsh in subjection, ‘while the fidelity of the Scot king seemed to be secured by the impossibility of holding Cumbria against revolt without the support of his fellow-worker in the south’ (GREEN). Abroad, Eadmund demanded the release of his nephew, King Lewis, who was kept in prison by Hugh, duke of the French. His ambassadors were answered haughtily by the duke, who declared that he would do nothing for the threats of the English. The dispute was brought to an end by Eadmund’s death. In ecclesiastical matters he seems to have been on the side of those who were anxious to effect a reformation of morals. He made Dunstan abbot of Glastonbury [see under DUNSTAN], and was a benefactor of Glastonbury, Abingdon, and Shaftesbury. At a synod held at London by the king and both the archbishops, laws were made commanding that spiritual persons should live in chastity, and that bishops should take care that the churches of their dioceses were kept in repair. Another set of laws ascribed to him are on the subject of betrothal, dower, and marriage. His civil administration appears to have been marked by efforts to enforce order, and his secular laws refer to his efforts to prevent robberies, and contain provisions rendering the man-slayer responsible for his own act, and checking the feud that was anciently maintained between the kindreds of the slayer and the slain. Eadmund met his death in 946. He was keeping the feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury (26 May) at Pucklechurch in Gloucestershire, when a certain robber named Liofa, whom he had banished six years before, entered the hall and sat down by one of the ealdormen, near the king himself. Eadmund bade his cup-bearer to take the man away, but Liofa struggled with the officer and tried to kill him. Eadmund came to the help of his cup-bearer, and threw the robber to the ground; but Liofa had a dagger with him, and with it he stabbed the king and slew him. He was himself slain by the king’s men. Eadmund married first Ælfgifu, who bore him Eadwig and Eadgar, and died in 944. After her death she was hallowed as a saint, and miracles were worked at her tomb at Shaftesbury (ÆTHELWEARD). His second wife was Æthelflæd, called, probably from her marriage portion, ‘at-Domerham,’ the daughter of Ælfgar, one of his thegns, who was made an ealdorman.
  [Anglo-Saxon Chron.; Florence of Worcester (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Æthelweard’s Chronicle, Mon. Hist. Brit. p. 520; Symeon of Durham (Rolls Ser.); William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regnm (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Historia de Abingdon, i. 88-120; Kemble’s Codex Dipl. ii. 205-66; Thorpe’s Ancient Laws, p. 104; Laing’s Seakings, i. 317; Vigfusson and Powell’s Corpus Poeticum Boreale, ii. 489; Freeman’s Norman Conquest, i. 64, 135, 245; Green’s Conquest of England, p. 268-81; Robertson’s Historical Essays, 168, 181, 197.]      W. H.

Other accounts of Edmund's life and reign can be found at The Anglo-Saxon chronicle pp75-7 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914), William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England pp141-3 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847), The chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon pp171-2 (ed. Thomas  Forester, 1853), A new and complete history of England pp44-5 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795) and wikipedia (Edmund_I).

The murder of King Edmund I
The Murder of King Edmund at Pucklechurch, drawn by Robert Smirke, engraved by A. Smith
illustration from A new and complete history of England opp p44 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795)
Death: 26 May 946, at Pucklechurch in Gloucestershire, murdered by a robber named Liofa, while keeping the feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury.
Liofa was then killed by the king's men.

A new and complete history of England p45 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795)
  In all appearance, this prince would have made his people happy, had his reign been longer; but a fatal accident occaſioned his death, when he had juſt begun to enjoy the fruits of his victories. As he was ſolemnizing a feſtival at Pucklekirk in Glouceſterſhire, he ſpied one Leolf, a notorious robber, who, though baniſhed the kingdom for his crimes, had the audacity to ſit at one of the tables in the hall, where the king was at dinner. Enraged at his inſolence, he commanded him to be apprehended. But perceiving he was drawing his dagger in order to defend himſelf, the king leapt up in a great fury, and catching hold of him by the hair, dragged him out of the hall. This imprudent action coſt him his life. Whilſt he was wholly taken up in venting his injurious paſſion, Leolf ſtabbed him in the breaſt with a dagger, upon which he fell down and expired on the body of his murderer. This was the tragical end of king Edmund in 946, in the twenty-fifth year of his age, and the ſixth of his reign. He was buried at Glaſtonbury, where Dunſtan was abbot; and the town where he was killed was beſtowed upon the ſame monaſtery to ſing maſſes for his ſoul. 

Glastonbury Abbey ruins
Ruins of Glastonbury Abbey church seen from the east end of the apse, looking west through the choir and crossing to the Galilee and Lady chapels
image posted at wikipedia
Buried: In the northern part of the tower at Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset, England, where Dunstan was the abbot.

Sources:

Edmund Ironside

Edmund Ironside
Edmund Ironside, as depicted in the Genealogical roll of the kings of England (1300-1308) - BL Royal MS 14 B VI
image posted at wikipedia
Father: Æthelred the Unready

Mother: unknown, possibly named Ælfgifu

Married: Ealdgyth

Children Occupation: King of England
Edmund Ironside's short reign was from 23 April 1016 to 30 December 1016.

Notes:
The Anglo-Saxon chronicle pp104-7 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914)
  A. 1015. In this year was the great council at Oxford; and there Edric the ealdorman betrayed Sigeferth and Morcar, the chief thanes in the Seven Boroughs. He allured them into his chamber, and there within they were cruelly slain. And the king then took all their possessions, and ordered Sigeferth’s relict to be taken, and to be brought to Malmesbury. Then, after a little space, Edmund the etheling went there and took the woman, contrary to the king’s will, and had her for his wife. Then, before the Nativity of St. Mary, the etheling went thence, from the west, north to the Five Boroughs, and soon took possession of all Sigeferth’s property, and Morcar’s; and the people all submitted to him. And then, during the same time, came king Canute to Sandwich; and soon after went about Kent into Wessex, until he came to the mouth of the Frome: and then he ravaged in Dorset, and in Wiltshire, and in Somerset. Then lay the king sick at Corsham. Then gathered Edric the ealdorman forces, and the etheling Edmund in the north. When they came together, then would the ealdorman betray the etheling, but he was not able: and they then parted without a battle on that account, and gave way to their foes. And Edric the ealdorman then enticed forty ships from the king, and then went over to Canute. And the men of Wessex submitted, and delivered hostages, and horsed the army; and then was it there until mid-winter.
  A. 1016. In this year came Canute with his army, and Edric the ealdorman with him, over Thames into Mercia at Cricklade. And then they went to Warwickshire, during the midwinter’s tide, and ravaged, and burned, and slew all that they could come at. Then began the etheling Edmund to gather his forces. When the forces were assembled, then would it not content them except it so were that the king were there with them, and they might have the help of the citizens of London: then gave they up the expedition, and each man went him away home. Then after that tide, the forces were again called out, so that each man, who was able to go, should come forth, under full penalties; and they sent to the king at London, and prayed him that he would come to meet the forces with such help as he could gather. When they all had come together, then it availed them nothing more than it oft before had done. Then was it made known to the king that they would betray him; they who ought to have been of aid to him. Then left he the forces and returned to London. Then rode the etheling Edmund into North-humbria to Utred the earl, and every man thought that they would assemble forces against king Canute. Then marched they into Staffordshire, and into Shropshire, and to Chester; and they plundered on their part, and Canute on his part. He went out through Buckinghamshire into Bedfordshire, and thence to Huntingdonshire, and so into Northamptonshire along the fens to Stamford, and then into Lincolnshire; then thence to Nottinghamshire, and so to North-humbria towards York. When Utred heard this, then left he off his plundering, and hastened northwards, and then submitted, from need, and all the North-humbrians with him; and he delivered hostages: and, notwithstanding, they slew him, through the counsel of Edric the ealdorman, and Thurkytel, son of Nafan, with him. And then, after that, king Canute appointed Eric to be his earl in North-humbria, in like manner as Utred had been; and afterwards went southward, by another way, all to the west: and then before Easter, came all the army to their ships. And the etheling Edmund went to London to his father. And then, after Easter, went king Canute with all his ships towards London. Then befell it that king Ethelred died, before the ships arrived. He ended his days on St. George’s mass day, and he held his kingdom with great toil and under great difficulties the while that his life lasted. And then, after his end, all the peers who were in London, and the citizens, chose Edmund to be king: and he strenuously defended his kingdom the while that his time lasted. Then came the ships to Greenwich at Rogation days. And within a little space they went to London, and they dug a great ditch on the south side, and dragged their ships to the west side of the bridge; and then afterwards they ditched the city around, so that no one could go either in or out: and they repeatedly fought against the city; but the citizens strenuously withstood them. Then had the king Edmund, before that, gone out; and then he over-ran Wessex, and all the people submitted to him. And soon after that he fought against the army at Pen, near Gillingham. And a second battle he fought, after mid-summer, at Sherston; and ther much slaughter was made on either side, and the armies of themselves separated. In that battle was Edric the ealdorman, and Ælmer darling, helping the army against king Edmund. And then gathered he his forces for the third time, and went to London, all north of Thames, and so out through Clayhanger; and relieved the citizens, and drove the army in flight to their ships. And then, two days after, the king went over at Brentford, and there fought against the army, and put them to flight: and there many of the English people were drowned, from their own carelessness; they who went before the forces, and would take booty. And after that the king went into Wessex, and collected his forces. Then went the army, soon, to London, and beset the city around, and strongly fought against it, as well by water as by land. But the Almighty God delivered it.
  The enemy went then, after that, from London, with their ships, into the Orwell, and there went up, and proceeded into Mercia, and destroyed and burned whatsoever they over-ran, as is their wont, and provided themselves with food: and they conducted, as well their ships as their droves, into the Medway. Then king Edmund assembled, for the fourth time, all his forces, and went over the Thames at Brentford, and went into Kent; and the army fled before him, with their horses, into Sheppey: and the king slew as many of them as he could overtake. And Edric the ealdorman went then to meet the king at Aylesford: than which no measure could be more ill-advised.
  The army then went again up into Essex, and passed into Mercia, and destroyed whatever it over-ran.
  When the king learned that the army was upward, then assembled he, for the fifth time, all the English nation, and followed after them, and overtook them in Essex, at the down which is called Assingdon: and there they strenuously joined battle. Then did Edric the ealdorman, as he had oft before done, begin the flight first with the Maisevethians, and so betrayed his royal lord and the whole people of the English race. There Canute had the victory; and all the English nation fought against him. There was slain bishop Ednoth, and abbat Wulsy, and Elfric the ealdorman, and Godwin the ealdorman of Lindsey, and Ulfkytel of East-Anglia, and Ethelward, son of Ethelwine the ealdorman; and all the nobility of the English race was there destroyed.
  Then, after this battle, went king Canute up with his army into Gloucestershire, where he learned that king Edmund was.
  Then advised Edric the ealdorman, and the counsellors who were there, that the kings should be mutually reconciled. And they delivered hostages mutually; and the kings came together at Olney near Deerhurst, and then confirmed their friendship as well by pledge as by oath, and settled the tribute for the army. And they then separated with this reconcilement: and Edmund obtained Wessex, and Canute Mercia and the northern district. The army then went to their ships with the things they had taken. And the men of London made a truce with the army, and bought themselves peace: and the army brought their ships to London, and took up their winter-quarters therein. Then, at St. Andrew’s mass, died king Edmund; and his body lies at Glastonbury, with his grandfather Edgar.

William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England pp191-5 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847)
  The wife of Sigeferth, a woman remarkable for her rank and beauty, was carried prisoner to Malmesbury; on which account, Edmund, the king’s son, dissembling his intention, took a journey into those parts. Seeing her, he became enamoured; and becoming enamoured, he made her his wife; cautiously keeping their union secret from his father, who was as much an object of contempt to his family as to strangers. This Edmund was not born of Emma, but of some other person, whom fame has left in obscurity. With that exception, he was a young man in every respect of noble disposition; of great strength both of mind and person, and, on this account, by the English, called “Ironside:” he would have shrouded the indolence of his father, and the meanness of his mother, by his own conspicuous virtue, could the fates have spared him. Soon after, at the instigation of his wife, he asked of his father the possessions of Sigeferth, which were of large extent among the Northumbrians, but could not obtain them; by his own exertions, however, he procured them at last, the inhabitants of that province willingly submitting to his power.
… Thus all being subdued, [Canute] ceased not pursuing Edmund, who was gradually retreating, till he heard that he was at London with his father. Canute then remained quiet till after Easter, that he might attack the city with all his forces. But the death of Ethelred preceded the attempt: for in the beginning of Lent, on St. Gregory’s day,* he breathed out a life destined only to labours and misery: he lies buried at St. Paul’s in London. The citizens immediately proclaimed Edmund king, who, mustering an army, routed the Danes at Penn,† near Gillingham, about Rogation-day. After the festival of St. John, engaging them again at Sceorstan,‡ he retired from a drawn-battle. The English had begun to give way, at the instance of Edric; who being on the adversaries’ side, and holding in his hand a sword stained with the blood of a fellow whom he had dexterously slain, exclaimed, “Fly. wretches! fly! behold, your king was slain by this sword!” The Angles would have fled immediately, had not the king, apprised of this circumstance, proceeded to an eminence, and taking off his helmet, shown his face to his comrades. Then brandishing a dart with all his forces, he launched it at Edric; but being seen, and avoided, it missed him, and struck a soldier standing near; and so great was its violence, that it even transfixed a second. Night put a stop to the battle, the hostile armies retreating as if by mutual consent, though the English had well-nigh obtained the victory.
  After this the sentiments of the West Saxons changed, and they acknowledged their lawful sovereign. Edmund proceeded to London, that he might liberate those deserving citizens whom a party of the enemy had blocked up immediately after his departure; moreover they had surrounded the whole city, on the parts not washed by the river Thames, with a trench; and many men lost their lives on both sides in the skirmishes. Hearing of the king’s approach, they precipitately took to flight; while he pursuing directly, and passing the ford called Brentford, routed them with great slaughter. The remaining multitude which were with Canute, while Edmund was relaxing a little and getting his affairs in order, again laid siege to London both on the land and river side; but being nobly repulsed by the citizens, they wreaked their anger on the neighbouring province of Mercia, laying waste the towns and villages, with plunder, fire, and slaughter. The best of the spoil was conveyed to their ships assembled in the Medway; which river flowing by the city of Rochester, washes its fair walls with a strong and rapid current. They were attacked and driven hence also by the king in person; who suddenly seizing the ford, which I have before mentioned at Brentford,* dispersed them with signal loss.
  While Edmund was preparing to pursue, and utterly destroy the last remains of these plunderers, he was prevented by the crafty and abandoned Edric, who had again insinuated himself into his good graces; for he had come over to Edmund, at the instigation of Canute, that he might betray his designs. Had the king only persevered, this would have been the last day for the Danes; but misled by the insinuations of a traitor, who affirmed that the enemy would make no farther attempt, he brought swift destruction upon himself, and the whole of England. Being thus allowed to escape, they again assembled; attacked the East Angles, and, at
Edmund Ironside and Canute
Illustration of the battle of Assandun, showing Edmund Ironside (left) and Canute the Dane.
Illustration from the 13th C manuscript Matthaei Paris Chronica Maiora I fol 80v posted at wikipedia
Assandun,† compelled the king himself, who came to their assistance, to retreat. Here again, the person I am ashamed to mention so frequently, designedly gave the first example of flight. A small number, who, mindful of their former fame, and encouraging each other, had formed a compact body, were cut off to a man. On this field of battle Canute gained the kingdom; the glory of the Angles fell; and the whole flower of the country withered. Amongst these was Ulfkytel, earl of East Anglia, who had gained immortal honour in the time of Sweyn, when first attacking the pirates, he showed that they might be overcome: here fell, too, the chief men of the day, both bishops and abbats, Edmund flying hence almost alone, came to Gloucester, in order that he might there re-assemble his forces, and attack the enemy, indolent, as he supposed, from their recent victory. Nor was Canute wanting in courage to pursue the fugitive. When everything was ready for battle, Edmund demanded a single combat; that two individuals might not, for the lust of dominion, be stained with the blood of so many subjects, when they might try their fortune without the destruction of their faithful adherents: and observing, that it must redound greatly to the credit of either to have obtained so vast a dominion at his own personal peril. But Canute refused this proposition altogether; affirming that his courage was surpassing, but that he was apprehensive of trusting his diminutive person against so bulky an antagonist: wherefore, as both had equal pretensions to the kingdom, since the father of either of them had possessed it, it was consistent with prudence that they should lay aside their animosity, and divide England.* This proposition was adopted by either army, and confirmed with much applause, both for its equity and its beneficent regard to the repose of the people who were worn out with continual suffering. In consequence, Edmund, overcome by the general clamour, made peace, and entered into treaty with Canute, retaining West Saxony himself and giving Mercia to the other. He died soon after on the festival of St. Andrew,† though by what mischance is not known, and was buried at Glastonbury near his grandfather Edgar.
  * March 12th, but the Saxon Chronicle says St. George’s day, 23d April.
  † In Somersetshire?
  ‡ Sceorstan is conjectured to be near Chipping Norton.—SHARP. Supposed to be a stone which divided the four counties of Oxford, Glouccster, Worcester and Warwick.—HARDY.
  * He passed the Thames at Brentford, followed them into Kent, and defeated them at Aylesford. Saxon Chron.
  † Thought to be either Assingdon, Ashdown in Essex, or Aston in Berkshire.
  * Henry Huntingdon says they actually engaged, and that Canute finding himself likely to be worsted, proposed the division.—H. Hunt. 1. 6.
  † “Florence of Worcester and the Saxon Chronicle place his death on the 30th of November, 1016. Florence, however, adds the year of the indiction, which corresponds with A.D. 1017.”—HARDY.

Dictionary of national biography vol 16 pp403-5 (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1888)
  EDMUND or EADMUND, called IRONSIDE (981 ?-1016), king, the third son, probably, of Æthelred the Unready, by his first wife, Ælfgifu, daughter either of an ealdorman named Æthelberht (FLOR. WIG. i. 275), or of Thored, earl of the Northumbrians (AILRED, col. 362), is said by the St. Albans compiler to have been born in 981 (Chron. Maj. sub ann.); but this date is certainly too early, as Æthelred was then not more than thirteen. Æthelstan, who seems to have been Æthelred's eldest son, probably died in 1016, and Ecgberht, who came next, about 1005 (Norman Conquest, i. 686, 700). In 1015 Eadmund desired to marry Ealdgyth, the widow of the Danish earl Sigeferth, who, along with his fellow earl Morkere, had that year been slain at Oxford by Eadric Streona [see under EDRIC]. Æthelred, who had seized on the possessions of the earls, and had sent Ealdgyth to Malmesbury, was not willing that his son should make this marriage. Nevertheless Eadmund took Ealdgyth from Malmesbury, married her, and then went to the Five (or Seven) Boroughs of the Danish confederacy, where the murdered earls had ruled, and received the submission of the people. It seems highly probable that this marriage, and the establishment of his power in the Danish district, deeply offended his brother-in-law Eadric, the Mercian earl (GREEN); for, when Cnut invaded the country shortly afterwards, and Eadmund raised an army to meet him and joined forces with Eadric, a bitter quarrel broke out between them, and the earl, after having, it is said, endeavoured to slay him, went over to the side of Cnut. After this desertion Eadmund was unable to defend Mercia in the beginning of 1016, for his levies declared that they would not fight unless he was joined by the king, who had lately been sick, and by the Londoners. He tried to raise another force, declaring that all who disobeyed his summons should suffer the full penalty, and sent to his father desiring him to come and help him. Æthelred came, did no good, and went back to London. Eadmund then retired into Northumbria, joined Earl Uhtred, and with his help harried Staffordshire and other parts of eastern Mercia which had submitted to Cnut. Uhtred was compelled to draw off his forces and hasten back to his own earldom, for Cnut was marching on York, and Eadmund joined his father in London about Easter. While Cnut was threatening to lay siege to the city Æthelred died on 23 April, and the Londoners, together with such of the ‘witan’ as were there, with one consent chose Eadmund as king, and there is no reason to doubt the assertion of Ralph of Diceto (i. 169, ii. 237) that he was crowned in London by Lyfing, archbishop of Canterbury. Cnut was, however, chosen king at Southampton by the witan generally (FLOR. WIG. i. 173), and at the time of his election Eadmund’s kingdom was bounded by the walls of London. His elder brother, Æthelstan, who does not appear to have been put forward as a candidate for the crown, and his step-mother, the Norman Emma, seem to have been with him in the city.
  Before the siege of London was actually formed Eadmund and Æthelstan appear to have left the city, and it is probable that Æthelstan was slain about this time in a skirmish with a Danish leader named Thurgut (Earl Thurcytel?), for when Thietmar (vii. 28, PERTZ, iii. 848) says that Eadmund was thus slain, and that the war was carried on by Æthelstan, he evidently confuses the two brothers together. Meanwhile Eadmund, ‘who was yclept Ironside for his bravery’ (A.-S. Chron. sub ann. 1057), rode through the western shires, received their submission, and raised an army from them. His troops are said to have been British or Welsh (‘Britanni,’ THIETMAR), and it is suggested that they came from the ‘shires of the old Wealhcyn’ (Norman Conquest, i. 701); in the twelfth century it was believed that they were natives of Wales, for Gaimar (l. 4222) says that Eadmund’s wife was the sister of a Welsh king, and that this gained him the help of her countrymen, and though Ealdgyth had an English name, it does not follow that she was an Englishwoman any more than Ælfgifu, as the English called Emma, the Norman wife of Æthelred. When Cnut heard that Eadmund had received the submission of the west, he left the siege of London and marched after him. Eadmund gave him battle at Pen (Selwood) in Somerset, and defeated his army. This victory enabled him to raise another and larger force, and shortly after midsummer he again met Cnut’s army at Sherston, in Wiltshire. He was now at the head of troops raised from Devonshire, Dorsetshire, and Wiltshire, while Cnut had in his army levies from Hampshire and other parts of Wiltshire (FLOR. WIG.), so that Eadmund had now extended his kingdom so far east as to take in some parts of Wiltshire. The fight began on a Monday, and Eadmund, who had placed his best warriors in the front line, stood with them and fought hand to hand with the enemy. When evening came the two armies, wearied with battle, drew off a little from one another. The next day they renewed the fight, and the army of Eadmund had, it is said, gained a decided advantage, when Eadric Streona discouraged the English by holding up a head which he declared to be the head of their king (ib.) Eadmund, we are told, got upon some mound, took off his helmet that his men might see his face, and then with all his strength hurled a spear at Eadric, who warded it off; it glanced from his shield, struck the soldier who was standing by him, and pierced him and another man also (Gesta Regum, ii. 180); such was the tradition as to his strength in the twelfth century. The battle again lasted till twilight, and again both armies fell back from each other, but though the issue was undecided Eadmund reaped the fruits of victory, for in the stillness of the night Cnut drew off his forces and marched back towards London, where he again pressed the siege, thus leaving Eadmund undisputed possession of Wessex (FLOR. WIG.) A legendary account of the battle is given in the ‘Knytlinga Saga’ (c. 10), and in a still stranger version of it the command of Cnut’s army is attributed to Thurcytel, and he is represented as the victor (Enc. Emmæ, p. 15).
  After the battle of Sherston, Eadric, impressed by the success of his brother-in-law, came to him and owned him as king. Eadmund now gathered a third army, for the local levies appear to have dispersed after every action, ‘whether a victory or a defeat’ (FREEMAN), and with it set out to raise the siege of London. He marched along the northern bank of the Thames and drove the Danes to their ships, a success which is reckoned as the third of his battles (HENRY OF HUNTINGDON). Two days later he crossed the river at Brentford, and it is said again routed the enemy (A.-S. Chron.), who appear to have fought behind some fortifications. Several of his men were drowned in crossing the river, for they rushed heedlessly into the water excited by the hope of plunder (OTHERE, Knutz-drapa in Corpus Poet. Bor. ii. 156, where the victory is attributed to Cnut). He again went into Wessex to raise another army, and Cnut renewed the siege of London, but after a short time gave it up, and after bringing his ships into the Medway employed his men in plundering expeditions, which showed that his hopes of conquest were dashed by the constant success of the English king. The fourth army raised by Eadmund was made up of men from every part of the country (FLOR. WIG.); he again crossed the Thames at Brentford, marched into Kent, fought a fifth battle at Otford, where the Danes made little resistance, and compelled the enemy to take refuge in Sheppey. He did not follow up his success, for when he had reached Aylesford he listened to the counsel of Eadric, who persuaded him not to press the pursuit. The counsel is said to have been evil (A.-S. Chron.), and by later writers to have been given in subtlety (FLOR. WIG.) However this may have been, Eadmund is of course responsible for the course he took, and he probably had good reason for it. If his troops had begun to disperse, he may well have hesitated to incur the risk of attacking the Danes when in a strong position. A defeat would probably have been fatal to his cause, for it would have made it difficult to raise new levies, while a victory would not necessarily have been final, for the Danes would have taken to their ships, and have sailed off, only to land on some other part of the coast. The English army now dispersed, and Eadmund, finding that the enemy was again making head, set about raising another force. His fifth army was, we are told, a gathering of the whole nation, and with this vast force he came up with the Danes ‘at the hill which is called Assandûn’ (A.-S. Cnron.) This has been clearly identified with Ashington (‘mons asini,’ FLOR. WIG.) in Essex, one of two hills which ‘look down on a swampy plain watered by the tidal river’ the Crouch (Norman Conquest, i. 390), though Ashdown (‘mons fraxinorum,’ Enc. Emmæ, p. 18) has also been suggested. Dr. Freeman, in his account of the battle, points out that both the armies were on high ground, and that it was the object of the Danes, who were far inferior in number to the English host, to gain their ships in safety. The raven’s beak opened and her wings fluttered. Thurcytel cried that the banner gave the lucky omen, and shouted for the battle (ib.) Cnut, however, did not venture to attack the English army, and began to lead his men down to the plain (FLOR. WIG.) Both armies were on foot, and the English were drawn up in their usual close formation. Eadmund himself stood between the dragon of Wessex and the royal standard (HUNTINGDON). When he saw that the Danes were making their way to their ships, he left his position and charged them furiously. At this moment, before the shock of battle actually took place, Eadric fled with the body of troops under his command, and, according to Henry of Huntingdon, who probably confuses the stories of the two battles, practised much the same trick as that ascribed to him at Sherston. The battle lasted until men could only tell friend from foe by the light of the moon. At last the English host began to give way, and was finally routed with great slaughter. ‘All the flower of the English race’ perished in the battle (A.-S. Chron.)
  After this defeat Eadmund went into Gloucestershire, and there for the seventh time began to gather a fresh force (HUNTINGDON). Cnut followed him, and though Eadmund was anxious to make another attack upon the enemy, Eadric and other nobles refused to allow him to do so, and arranged that the kings should hold a conference and divide the kingdom between them. This conference, which was held on an island of the Severn, called Olney, has by Henry of Huntingdon and other later writers been turned into a single combat. As the whole story is imaginary, the only detail worth noticing here is the tradition that Eadmund was a man of great size, far larger than the Danish king (Gesta Regum, ii. 180; for other accounts of this supposed combat see HUNTINGDON, p. 185, MAP, De Nugis, p. 204; Flores Hist. i. 407). The meeting of the kings was peaceful, a division of the kingdom was agreed upon; Eadmund was to be king over the south of the land and apparently to have the headship, Cnut was to reign over the north [see under CANUTE]. It seems probable that it was arranged that, whichever survived, the other should become sole king (Knytlinga Saga, c. 16; see under CANUTE). Very shortly after this meeting Eadmund died, on 30 Nov. 1016, at London (FLOR. WIG.), or less probably at Oxford (HUNTINGDON, followed by the St. Albans compiler; the statement of Florence is accepted by Dr. Freeman, while Mr. Parker, in his Early History of Oxford, argues that Oxford must be held to be the place of Eadmund’s death; his strongest argument is met in Norman Conquest, 3rd ed. i. 714). The cause of his death is left uncertain by the chronicle writers, and Florence; the author of the ‘Encomium Emmæ’ (p. 22) implies that it was natural. William of Malmesbury says that it was doubtful, but that it was rumoured that Eadric, in the hope of gaining Cnut’s favour, bribed two chamberlains to slay him, and adds the supposed manner in which the crime was carried out: ‘Ejus [Edrici] consilio ferreum uncum, ad naturæ requisita sedenti, in locis posterioribus adegisse’ (Gesta Regum, ii. 180). Henry of Huntingdon makes a son of Eadric the actual perpetrator of the deed, of which he gives much the same account. Later writers ascribe the murder to Eadric. Among these ‘Brompton’ tells the oddest story, for he makes out that the king was slain by Eadric by mechanical means, being shot by the image of an archer that discharged an arrow when it was touched (col. 996). Of foreign authorities, the ‘Knytlinga Saga’ (c. 16) says that Eadmund was killed by his foster-brother Eadric, who was bribed by Cnut; in the ‘Lives of the Kings’ (LAING, ii. 21) it is said that he was slain by Eadric, but Cnut is not mentioned; Saxo (p. 193), while relating that the murder was done by certain men who hoped to please Cnut by it, adds that some believed that Cnut himself had secretly ordered it; Adam of Bremen (ii. 51) says that he was taken off by poison. Dr. Freeman, who discusses the subject fully (Norman Conquest, i. 398, 711 sq.), inclines to the belief that his death was due to natural causes. The matter must of course be left undecided. In the face of the vigour he had lately shown at Ashington it is impossible to accept the statement that ‘the strain and failure of his seven months’ reign proved fatal to the young king’ (Conquest of England, p. 418). His death happened opportunely for Cnut, but there does not seem sufficient evidence to attribute it to him [see CANUTE]. On the other hand, unless we are to believe that it was caused by sudden sickness, it certainly seems highly probable that it was the work of Eadric. Eadmund was buried with his grandfather Eadgar at Glastonbury, before the high altar (De Antiq. Glast. ed. Gale, iii. 306). He left two sons, Eadmund and Eadward.
  [Anglo-Saxon Chron. (Rolls Ser.); Florence of Worcester (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Henry of Huntingdon (Rolls Ser.); William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum (Engl. Hist. Soc.), De Antiq. Glast. (Gale); Ailred [Æthelred] of Rievaux, Bromton, Twysden; Ralph of Diceto (Rolls Ser.); Flores Hist. (Wendover) (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Thietmar’s Mon. Hist. Germ. iii. (Pertz); Gaimar, Mon. Hist. Brit.; Encomium Emmæ, Adam of Bremen, Pertz in usum Schol.; Knytlinga Saga, Antiq. Celto-Scandinavicæ (Johnstone); Saxo (Stephanius); Sea Kings (Laing); Vigfusson and Powell’s Corpus Poet. Boreale; Kemble’s Codex Dipl. iii. 369; Freeman’s Norman Conquest, i. 3rd ed.; Green’s Conquest of England; Parker’s Early Hist, of Oxford (Oxf. Hist. Soc.)]      W. H.

Further accounts of Edmund's life can be found at A new and complete history of England pp59-61 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795) and wikipedia (Edmund_Ironside).

Death: 30 November 1016

Glastonbury Abbey ruins
Ruins of Glastonbury Abbey church seen from the east end of the apse, looking west through the choir and crossing to the Galilee and Lady chapels
image posted at wikipedia
Buried: Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset, England

Sources:

Edward the Elder

Edward the Elder penny
Portrait of Edward on a silver penny from the time of his reign
image posted on wikipedia
Edward the Elder
Edward as depicted in the Genealogical roll of the kings of England (1300-1308) - BL Royal MS 14 B VI
image posted on wikipedia
Father: Ælfred the Great

Mother: Ealhswith

Married (1st): Ecgwyn

Ecgwyn was a lady of high rank according to Florence of Worcester, or, according to later and less trustworthy tradition, a shepherd’s daughter (Gesta Regum, ii. 131, 139; Liber de Hyda, 111). This may not have been a formal marriage, and many believe that Ecgwyn was Edward's consort.

Children William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England p124 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847)
  By Egwina, an illustrious lady, he had Athelstan, his first-born, and a daughter, whose name I cannot particularise, but her brother gave her in marriage to Sihtric, king of the Northumbrians.

Married (2nd): Ælflæd, by 901, when Ælflæd attested a charter of Edward as coniux regis (wife of the king). The charter was also attested by Edward's mother, "Ealhswið".

Codex diplomaticus aevi saxonici vol 2 p141 (ed. John Mitchell Kemble, 1840)
      CCCXXXIII.
    EADWEARD, 901.
  ✠ In nomine domini! Ego Eaduuardus dei gratia Angol Saxonum rex, … Scripta uero est haec libertas, anno ab incarnatione domini DCCCC.I. indictione VII.
  ✠ Eadward rex.  ✠ Ealhswið mater regis. ✠ Ælfled coniunx regis. …

Children: William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England p124 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847)
  The second son of Edward was Ethelward, by Elfleda, daughter of earl Etheline; deeply versed in literature, much resembling his grandfather Alfred in features and disposition, but who departed, by an early death, soon after his father. By the same wife he had Edwin, of whose fate what the received opinion is I shall hereafter describe, not with confidence, but doubtingly. By her too he had six daughters; Edfleda, Edgiva, Ethelhilda, Ethilda, Edgitha, Elgifa: the first and third vowing celibacy to God, renounced the pleasure of earthly nuptials; Edfleda in a religious, and Ethelhilda in a lay habit: they both lie buried near their mother, at Winchester. Her father gave Edgiva, as I have mentioned, to king Charles, and her brother, Athelstan, gave Ethilda to Hugh: this same brother also sent Edgitha and Elgifa to Henry, emperor of Germany, the second of whom he gave to his son Otho, the other to a certain duke, near the Alps.

Married (3rd): Eadgifu of Kent

Children William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England p125 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847)
  Again; by his third wife, named Edgiva, he had two sons, Edmund and Edred, each of whom reigned after Athelstan: two daughters, Eadburga, and Edgiva; Eadburga, a virgin, dedicated to Christ, lies buried at Winchester; Edgiva, a lady of incomparable beauty, was united, by her brother Athelstan, to Lewis, prince of Aquitaine.
A penny from the reign of Edward the Elder
A silver penny of Edward the Elder (899-924). Obverse: small central cross with inscription around border +EADVVEARD REX [King Edward]. Reverse: two line inscription BEAHSTAN MO [Beahstan the Moneyer], with a small cross above the first line, three crosses between the lines, and a triangle of 3 pellets below the second line.
photographed by Matt Butler, Kent County Council, in 2011, posted at wikipedia
Occupation: King of the Angles and Saxons
Edward succeeded to the throne of England on the death of his father, Ælfred, on 28 October 901. He ruled until his death in 924.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicle p64 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914)
  A. 901 This year died ALFRED, the son of Ethelwulf, six days before the mass of All Saints. He was king over the whole English nation, except that part which was under the dominion of the Danes; and he held the kingdom one year and a half less than thirty years. And then Edward his son succeeded to the kingdom.

Notes:
Dictionary of national biography vol 17 pp1-5 (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1889)
  EDWARD, EADWARD, or EADWEARD, called THE ELDER (d. 924), king of the Angles and Saxons, the elder son of King Ælfred and Ealhswyth, was brought up most carefully at his father’s court with Ælfthryth, his sister, who was next above him in age; they were both beloved by all, and were educated as became their rank, learning psalms and English poetry and reading English books (ASSER, p. 485). Eadward distinguished himself in his father’s later wars with the Danes, and the taking of the Danish camp on the Colne and the victory at Buttington in 894 are attributed to him (ÆTHELWEARD, p.518). Although he had no special part of the kingdom assigned to him, he bore the title of king in 898, probably as his father’s assistant (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. 324). He was, we are told, as good a soldier as his father, but not as good a scholar (FLOR. WIG.) On Ælfred’s death, which took place on 28 Oct. 901, he was chosen by the ‘witan’ to succeed to the kingdom (ÆTHELWEARD, p. 519), and was crowned on the Whitsunday following. His succession was disputed by one of his cousins, the ætheling Æthelwald, a son of Æthelred, the fourth son of Æthelwulf, who seized on two of the king’s vills, Wimborne in Dorsetshire and Twynham (Christ Church) in Hampshire. The king led an army against him and encamped at Badbury, near Wimborne, but Æthelwald shut himself up in the town with his men and declared that he would ‘either live there or lie there’ (A.-S, Chron.) Nevertheless he escaped by night, and went to the Danes in Northumbria, who received him as king. Eadward entered Wimborne and sent the lady with whom Æthelwald lived back to her nunnery, for she had taken the veil before she joined her lover. For two or three years after this Eadward seems to have reigned in peace, save that there was some fighting between the Kentishmen and the Danes. Meanwhile Æthelwald was preparing to attack the kingdom, and in 904 he came to Essex from ‘over sea’ with a fleet that he had purchased, received the submission of the people, and obtained more ships from them. With these he sailed the next year to East Anglia and persuaded the Danes to join him in an invasion of Mercia. They overran the country, and even entered Wessex, crossing the Thames at Cricklade in Wiltshire, and then ravaged as far as Bredon in Worcestershire. Eadward retaliated by laying waste the western districts of East Anglia, and then ordered his army to return. The Kentishmen refused to obey the order, and waited to give battle to the Danes. A fierce conflict took place, and the Danes kept the battle-ground, but they lost more men than the English, and among the slain was the ætheling Æthelwald. His death put an end to the war. The next year (906) the peace which Ælfred had made with Guthrum-Æthelstan was renewed at Eadward’s dictation at Ittingford, and he and the Danish under-king of East Anglia, Guthrum Eohricsson, joined in putting out laws which, though binding both on the English and the Danes, expressly recognised and confirmed the differences between the usages of the two peoples, though, indeed, these differences were very superficial (THORPE, Ancient Laws, p.71).
  The death of Æthelwald delivered Eadward from a dangerous rival, and enabled him, as soon as opportunity offered, to enter on his great work, the widening and strengthening of his immediate kingdom and the reduction of princes who reigned beyond its borders to a condition of dependence. He styled himself in his charters ‘Angul-Saxonum rex,’ treating the two races over which he reigned as one people. The treaty of 878 had left his house the kingship of the western half of the Mercian Angles and of the Saxons of the south; his father had ruled over both as separate peoples; he, though as yet there was little if any fusion between them, seems to have marked by this change in the royal style his intention to treat them as one (GREEN, Conquest of England p. 192). At the same time an important political distinction existed between them, for the Mercians were still governed by their own ealdorman, descended probably from the line of ancient Mercian kings. This, however, proved to be a source of strength rather than of weakness, for the ealdorman Æthelred had married the king’s sister Æthelflæd [see ETHELFLEDA], and Eadward owed much of the prosperity of his reign to this marriage, and much too to the fact that no son was bom of it to carry on the old line of separate, though now dependent, rulers.
  The first measure of defence against Danish attacks was taken by Æthelred and his wife, who in 907 ‘restored,’ that is fortified and colonised, Chester, and thus gained a port that might be used by ships employed in keeping off invasion by the Irish Ostmen, and established a stronghold commanding the Dee. In 910 Eadward was again at war with the Danes; they seem to have broken the peace, and in return an army of West-Saxons and Mercians ravaged Northumbria for the space of forty days. A battle was fought on 6 Aug. at.Tettenhall in Staffordshire, where the Danes were defeated. Then Eadward went into Kent to gather his fleet together, for the Northmen infested the Channel, and he bade a hundred ships and their crews meet him there, so well had his father’s work in naval organisation prospered. While he was in Kent in 911 the Northmen, reckoning that he had no other force at his disposal beyond that in his ships (A.-S. Chron.), again broke the peace, and, refusing to listen to the terms offered them by the king and the ‘witan,’ swept over the whole of Mercia to the Avon, and there embarked, no doubt in ships from Ireland, and did some damage to Wessex as they sailed on the Severn (ÆTHELWEARD, p. 519). They were stoutly resisted by the levy of those parts, and sustained much loss. Eadward’s army, composed of both West-Saxons and Mercians, defeated them at Wodensfield in Staffordshire, with the loss of their two kings, Halfdan and Ecwils, and many of their principal men. In the course of this or of the next yeor the ealdorman Æthelred died, and Eadward gave the ealdormanship of Mercia to his widow Æthelflæd. At the same time he annexed London and Oxford, ‘with all the lands which belonged thereto’ (A.-S. Chron.), he detached them from the Mercian ealdormanry, and definitely united them to the West-Saxon land. After the accession of Æthelflæd as sole ruler, with the title of the Lady of the Mercians, she carried on with extraordinary vigour the work, already begun during her husband’s life, of guarding her dominions from attack by building ‘burhs’ or fortified settlements at different points of strategic importance, such as Tamworth and Stafford [see under ETHELFLEDA]. Meanwhile Eadward pursued a similar policy in the south-east. No longer waiting for the Danes to attack him, he advanced his border by building two burhs at Hertford to hold the passage of the Lea, and then marched into Essex and encamped at Maldon, while his men fortified Witham on the Blackwater. He thus added a good portion of Essex to his dominions, and ‘much folk submitted to him that were before under the power of the Danish men’ (ib.) Then, perhaps, followed a period of rest as far as Eadward and the West-Saxons were concerned, though Æthelflæd still went on with her work, securing the Mercian border against the Danes and the Welsh. In 915 Eadward was suddenly called on to defend his land from foreign invasion, for a viking fleet from Brittany under two jarls sailed into the Severn, attacked the Welsh, and took the Bishop of Llandaff prisoner. Eadward ransomed the bishop, and sent a force to guard the coast of Somerset. The Northmen landed, and were defeated with great loss by the levies of Gloucester and Hereford; they then made attempts to land at Watchet and Porlock in Somerset, but were beaten off. Some landed on one of the Holms in the Bristol Channel, and many of them died of hunger on the island. Finally the remainder of them sailed away to Ireland. Later in the year Eadward began to advance his border in a new direction, and attacked the Danish settlements on the Ouse; he took Buckingham after a siege of four weeks, and raised fortifications there. Then the jarl Thurcytel, who held Bedford, and all the chief men there, and many of those who belonged to the settlement of Northampton, submitted to him.
  From the submission of Thurcytel, which should probably be placed under 915 (A,-S. Chron., Mercian; FLORENCE; under 918, according to A.-S. Chron., Winton, followed by GREEN), the chronology of the reign is very confused. In this attempt to deal with it, as far as seems necessary for the present purpose, the Mercian has for obvious reasons been preferred to the Winchester version of the ‘Chronicle,’ considerable weight has been given to Florence of Worcester, and the deaths of Æthelflæd in 918 and Eadward in 924 have been assumed as settled. After receiving the submission of Thurcytel and his ‘holds,’ Eadward went to Bedford early in November, stayed there a month, and fortified it with a ‘burh’ on the southern side of the river. After a while Thurcytel and his Danes, finding that England was no place for them under such a king, obtained his leave to take ship and depart to ‘Frankland.’ Eadward restored Maldon and put a garrison there, perhaps in 917 (A.-S. Chron., Winton, 920; FLORENCE, 918), and the next year advanced to Towcester, built a ‘burh’ there, and ordered the fortification of Wigmore in Herefordshire. Then a vigorous effort was made by the Danes of Mercia and East Anglia to recover the ground they had lost. They besieged Towcester, Bedford, and Wigmore, but in each case were beaten off. A great host, partly from Huntingdon and partly from East Anglia, raised a ‘work’ at Tempsford as a point of attack on the English line of the Ouse, leaving Huntingdon deserted. This army was defeated, with the loss of the Danish king of East Anglia and many others, and an attack made on Maldon by the East Angles, in alliance with a viking fleet, was also foiled. Finally Eadward compelled the jarl Thurferth and the Danes of Northampton ‘to seek him for father and lord,’ and fortified Huntingdon and Colchester. The year was evidently a critical one; the struggle ended in the complete victory of the English king, who received the submission of the Danes of East Anglia, Essex, and Cambridge.
  Meanwhile the Lady of the Mercians had, after some trouble, compelled the Welsh to keep the peace, and had then turned against the Danes of the Five Boroughs, subduing Derby and Leicester. She lived to hear that the people of York had submitted to her, and then died at Tamworth on 12 June 918 [on this date see under ETHELFLEDA]. Her vigorous policy had done much to forward the success of her brother. Between them they had succeeded in setting up a line of strongly fortified places which guarded all the approaches from the north from the Blackwater to the Lea, from the Lea to the Ouse, and from the Ouse to the Dee and the Mersey. Eadward was completing the reduction of the Fen country by the fortification of Stamford, when he heard of her death. He reduced Nottingham, another of the Five Boroughs, and caused it to be fortified afresh and colonised partly by Englishmen and partly by Danes. This brought the reconquest of the Mercian Danelaw to a triumphant close, and Eadward now took a step by which the people of English Mercia, as well as of the newly conquered district, were brought into immediate dependence on the English king. Æthelflæd’s daughter Ælfwyn was, it is said, sought in marriage by Sihtric, the Danish king of York (CARADOC, p. 47). This marriage would have given all the dominions that Æthelflæd had acquired, and all the vast influence which she exercised, into the hands of the Danes. Eadward therefore would not allow Æfwyn to succeed to her mother’s power, and in 919 carried her away into Wessex. The notice of this measure given by Henry of Huntingdon probably preserves the feelings of anger and regret with which the Mercians saw the extinction of the remains of their separate political existence. The ancient Mercian realm was now fully incorporated with Wessex, and all the people in the Mercian land, Danes as well as English, submitted to Eadward. A most important step was thus accomplished in the union of the kingdom.
  The death of Æthelflæd appears to have roused the Danes to fresh activity; Sihtric made a raid into Cheshire (SYMEON, an. 920), and a body of Norwegians from Ireland, who had perhaps been allowed by Æthelflæd to colonise the country round Chester, laid siege to, and possibly took, the town (‘urbem Legionum,’ Gesta Regum, § 1 33. Mr. Green appears to take this as Leicester, and to believe that the passage refers to the raid of the Danes from Northampton and Leicester on Towcester, placed by the Winchester chronicler under 921, and by Florence, followed in the text, under 918. The help that the pagans received from the Welsh makes it almost certain that William of Malmesbury records a war at Chester, and possibly the siege that in the ‘Fragment’ of MacFirbisigh is assigned to the period of the last illness of the Mercian ealdorman Æthelred; see under ETHELFLEDA). Eadward recovered the city, and received the submission of the Welsh, ‘for the kings of the North Welsh and all the North Welsh race sought him for lord.’ He now turned to a fresh enterprise; he desired to close the road from Northumbria into Middle England that gave Manchester its earliest importance, as well as to prepare for an attack on York, where a certain Ragnar had been received as king. Accordingly he fortified and colonised Thelwall, and sent an army to take Manchester in Northumbria, to renew its walls and to man them. This completed the line of fortresses which began with Chester, and he next set about connecting it with the strong places he had gained in the district of the Five Boroughs, for he strengthened Nottingham and built a ‘burh’ at Bakewell in Peakland, which commanded the Derwent standing about midway between Manchester and Derby. After recording how he placed a garrison in Bakewell, the Winchester chronicler adds: ‘And him there chose to father and to lord the Scot king and all the Scot people, and Regnald, and Eadulf’s son, and all that dwelt in Northumbrian whether Englishmen, or Danish, or Northmen, or other, and eke the king of the Strathclyde Welsh and all the Strathclyde Welsh’ (an. 924, A.-S. Chron., Winton; but this is certainly too late, and 921 seems a better date; comp. FLOR. WIG.) In these words the most brilliant writer on the reign finds evidence of a forward march of the king, of a formidable northern league formed to arrest his progress, of the submission of the allies, and of a visit to the English camp, probably at Dore, in which ‘the motley company of allies’ owned Eadward as their lord (Conquest of England, pp. 210, 217). While there is nothing improbable in all this, the picture is without historical foundation. It is best not to go beyond what is written, especially as there is some ground for believing that the ‘entry cannot be contemporary’ (ib.) We may, however, safely accept it as substantially correct. Its precise meaning has been strenuously debated, for it was used by Edward I as the earliest precedent on which he based his claim to the allegiance of the Scottish crown (HEMINGBURGH, ii. 198). Dr. Freeman attaches extreme importance to it as conveying the result, in the case of Scotland, of ‘a solemn national act,’ from which may be dated the ‘permanent superiority’ of the English crown (Norman Conquest, i, 60, 128, 610). On the other hand, it is slighted by Robertson (Scotland under her Early Kings, ii. 384 sq.) It must clearly be interpreted by the terms used of other less important submissions. When the kings made their submission they entered into exactly the same relationship to the English king as that which had been entered into by the jarl Thurferth and his army when they sought Eadward ‘for their lord and protector.’ They found the English king too strong for them, and rather than fight him they ‘commended’ themselves to him, and entered into his ‘peace.’ The tie thus created was personal, and was analogous to that which existed between the lord and his comitatus. It marked the preponderating power of Eadward, but in itself it should perhaps scarcely be held as more than ‘an episode in the struggle for supremacy in the north’ (GREEN). Eadward thus succeeded in carrying the bounds of his immediate kingdom as far north as the Humber, and in addition to this was owned by all other kings and their peoples in the island as their superior.
  In the midst of his wars he found time for come important matters of civil and ecclesiastical administration. Two civil developments of this period were closely connected with his wars. The conquest of the Danelaw and the extinction of the Mercian ealdormanry appear to have led to the extension of the West-Saxon system of shire-division to Mercia. While it is not probable that this system was carried out at all generally even in Mercia till after Eadward’s death, the beginning of it may at least be traced to his reign, and appears in the annexation of London and Oxford with their subject lands Middlesex and Oxfordshire. Another change, the increase of the personal dignity of the king and the acceptance of a new idea of the duty of the subject, is also connected with conquest. The conouered Danes still remained outside the English people, they had no share in the old relationship between the race and the king, they made their submission to the king personally, and placed themselves under his personal protection. Thus the king’s dignity was increased, and a new tie, that of personal loyalty, first to be observed in the laws of Ælfred, was strengthened as regards all his people. Accordingly, at a witenagemot held at Exeter, Eadward proposed that all ‘should be in that fellowship that he was, and love that which he loved, and shun that which he shunned, both on sea and land.’ The loyalty due from the dwellers in the Danelaw was demanded of all alike. The idea of the public peace was gradually giving place to that of the king’s peace. Other laws of Eadward concern the protection of the buyer, the administration of justice, and the like. In these, too, there may be discerned the increase of the royal pre-eminence. The law-breaker is for the first time said to incur the guilt of ‘oferhyrnes’ towards the king; in breaking the law he had shown ‘contempt’ of the royal authority (THORPE, Ancient Laws, pp. 68-75; STUBBS, Constitutional History, i. 175, 183). In ecclesiastical affairs Eadward seems to have been guided by his father’s advisers. He kept Grimbold with him and, at his instance it is said, completed the ‘New Minster,’ Ælfred’s foundation at Winchester, and endowed it largely (Liber de Hyda, 111; Ann. Winton. 10). Asser appears to have resided at his court (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. 335, 337), and he evidently acted cordially with Archbishop Plegmund. The increase he made in the episcopate in southern England is connected with a story told by William of Malmesbury, who says (Gesta Regum, ii. 129) that in 904 the West-Saxon bishoprics had lain vacant for seven years, and that Pope Formosus wrote threatening Eadward and his people with excommunication for their neglect, that the king then held a synod over which Plegmund presided, that the two West-Saxon dioceses were divided into five, and that Plegmund consecrated seven new bishops in one day. As it stands this story must be rejected, for Formosus died in 896. Still it is true that in 909 the sees of Winchester, Sherborne, and South-Saxon Selsey were all vacant, and that Eadward and Plegmund separated Wiltshire and Berkshire from the see of Winchester and formed them into the diocese of Ramsbury, and made Somerset and Devonshire, which lay in the bishopric of Sherborne, two separate dioceses, with their sees at Wells and Crediton. Five West-Saxon bishops and two bishops for Selsey and Dorchester were therefore consecrated by Plegmund, possibly at the same time (Anglia Sacra, i. 554; Reg. Sac. Anglic. 13).
  The ‘Unconquered King’, as Florence of Worcester calls him, died at Farndon in Northamptonshire in 924, in the twenty-fourth year of his reign (A.-S. Chron., Worcester; FLORENCE; SYMEON; 925 A.-S.Chron., Winton). As Æthelstan calls 929 the sixth year of his reign (Kemble, Codex Dipl 347, 348), it is obvious that Eadward must have died in 924, and there are some reasons for believing that he died in the August of that year (Memorials of Dunstan, introd. lxxiv n.) He was buried in the ‘New Minster’ of Winchester. By Ecgwyn, a lady of high rank (FLOR. WIG.), or, according to later and untrustworthy tradition, a shepherd’s daughter (Gesta Regum, ii. 131, 139; Liber de Hyda, 111), who seems to have been his concubine, he had his eldest son Æthelstan, who succeeded him, possibly a son named Ælfred, not the rebel ætheling of the next reign, and a daughter Eadgyth, who in the year of her father’s death was given in marriage by her brother to Sihtric, the Danish king of Northumbria. By 901 he was married to Ælflæd, daughter of Æthelhelm, one of his thegns, and Ealhswith (KEMBLE, Codex Dipl. 333). She bore him Ælfweard, who is said to have been learned, and who died sixteen days after his father, and probably Eadwine, drowned at sea in 933 (A.-S. Chron. sub an.), possibly by order of his brother (SYMEON, Mon. Hist. Brit. p. 686; Gesta Regum, § 139), and though the story, especially in its later and fuller form, is open to doubt (FREEMAN, Hist. Essays, i. 10-15), and six daughters: Æthelflæd, a nun perhaps at Wilton (Gesta Regum, iii. 126) or at Rumsey (Liber de Hyda, 112); Eadgifu, married in 919 by her father to Charles the Simple, and after his death to Herbert, count of Troyes, in 951 (Acta SS. Bolland. Mar. xii. 760); Æthelhild, a nun at Wilton; Eadhild, married by her brother to Hugh the Great, count of Paris; Ælfgifu, called in France Adela, married about 936 to Eblus, son of the count of Aquitaine (RICHARD. PICT., BOUQUET, ix. 21); Eadgyth or Edith, married in 930 to Otto, afterwards emperor, and died on 26 Jan. 947, after her husband became king, but before he became emperor, deeply regretted by all the Saxon people (WIDUKIND, i. 37, ii. 41). Eadward’s second wife (or third, if Ecgwyn is reckoned) was Eadgifu, by whom he had Eadmund and Eadred, who both came to the throne, and two daughters, Eadburh or Edburga, a nun at Winchester, of whose precocious piety William of Malmesbury tells a story (Gesta Regum, ii. 217), and Eadgifu, married to Lewis, king of Arles or Provence. Besides these, he is said to have had a son called Gregory, who went to Rome, became a monk, and afterwards abbot of Einsiedlen.
  [Anglo-Saxon Chron. sub ann.; Florence of Worcester, sub ann. (Engl. Hist. Soc.); William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, §§ 112, 124-6, 129, 131, 139 (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Gesta Pontificum, 177, 395 (Rolls Ser.); Henry of Huntington, 742, Mon. Hist. Brit.; Symeon of Durham, 686, Mon. Hist. Brit.; Æthelweard, 519, Mon. Hist. Brit.; Liber de Hyda, 111, 112 (Rolls Ser.); Annales Winton. 10 (Rolls Ser.); Thorpe’s Ancient Laws and Institutes, 68-75; Kemble’s Codex Dipl. ii. 138-49; Three Irish Fragments by Dubhaltach MacFirbisigh, ed. O’Donovan (Irish Archæol. and Celtic Soc.); Widukind’s Res Gestæ Saxonicæ, i. 37, ii. 41, Pertz; Caradoc’s Princes of Wales, 47; Recueil des Historiens, Bouquet, ix. 21; Stubbs’s Constitutional Hist. i. 176, 183, and Registrum Sacrum Anglic. 13; Freeman’s Norman Conquest, i. 58-61, 610; Robertson’s Scotland under her Early Kings, ii. 384 sq.; Green’s Conquest of England, 189-215—the best account we have of the wars of Eadward and Æthelflæd; Lappenberg’s Anglo-Saxon Kings (Thorpe), ii. 85 sq.]      W. H.

Other accounts of Edward's life and reign can be found at The Anglo-Saxon chronicle pp64-73 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914), William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England pp122-8 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847), The chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon pp161-9 (ed. Thomas  Forester, 1853), A new and complete history of England pp41-2 (Charles Alfred Ashburton, 1795) and wikipedia (Edward_the_Elder).

Death: 924, at the royal estate of Farndon, twelve miles south of Chester

Buried: in the New Minster of Winchester Abbey, Hampshire

In 1109, the New Minster was moved outside the city walls to become Hyde Abbey, and the following year the remains of Edward and his parents were translated to the new church.

Sources:

Edward the Exile

Edward the Exile
Edward the Exile, as depicted in the Genealogical chronicle of the English Kings (1275-1300) - BL Royal MS 14 B V
image posted at wikipedia
Birth: about 1016.
Edward's parents married in 1015, and his father died on 30 November 1016.

Father: Edmund Ironside

Mother: Ealdgyth

Married: Agatha

Children Notes:
Edward the Exile was an infant when his father died, and, on the orders of king Canute, he and his brother were exiled, eventually residing in Hungary. Some forty years later, in 1057, he was called back to England by his uncle, then the childless king Edward the Confessor, with the aim of making Edeards his heir to the throne, but Edward the Exile died shortly after his return, and before the Edward the Confessor, who was then succeeded by his his wife's brother, Harold Godwinson.

William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the kings of England p196 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1847)
  His sons, Edwy and Edward, were sent to the king of Sweden to be put to death; but being preserved by his mercy, they went to the king of Hungary, where, after being kindly treated for a time, the elder died; and the younger married Agatha, the sister of the queen.
p253
  King Edward declining into years, as he had no children himself, and saw the sons of Godwin growing in power, despatched messengers to the king of Hungary, to send over Edward, the son of his brother Edmund, with all his family: intending, as he declared, that either he, or his sons, should succeed to the hereditary kingdom of England, and that his own want of issue should be supplied by that of his kindred. Edward came in consequence, but died almost immediately at St. Paul’s* in London: he was neither valiant, nor a man of abilities. He left three surviving children; that is to say, Edgar, who, after the death of Harold, was by some elected king; and who, after many revolutions of fortune, is now living wholly retired in the country, in extreme old age: Christina, who grew old at Romsey in the habit of a nun: Margaret, whom Malcolm king of the Scots espoused. Blessed with a numerous offspring, her sons were Edgar, and Alexander, who reigned in Scotland after their father in due succession: for the eldest, Edward, had fallen in battle with his father; the youngest, David, noted for his meekness and discretion, is at present king of Scotland. Her daughters were, Matilda, whom in our time king Henry has married, and Maria, whom Eustace the younger, earl of Boulogne, espoused.
  * Died and was buried at St. Paul’s. Sax. Chron. A. 1057.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicle p107 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914)
  A. 1017. … And king Canute banished Edwy the etheling, and afterwards commanded him to be slain, and Edwy king of the churls
pp132-3
  A. 1057.
Here came Edward etheling to Angle-land;
He was king Edward’s brother's son, Edmund king,
who Ironside was called for his valour.
This etheling Canute king
had sent away to Unger-land‖ to be betrayed :
but he there grew up to a good man.
as God him granted, and him well became;
so that he obtained wife, the emperor's kinswoman to
and by her, fair offspring he begot:
she was Agatha hight.
Nor wist we for which cause that done was,
that he might not his kinsman Edward king behold.
Alas ! that was a rueful case
and harmful for all this nation
that he so soon his life did end
came after that he to Angle-land
for the mishap of this wretched nation.
… In this year Edward etheling, king Edmund’s son, came hither to land, and soon after died: and his body is buried within St. Paul’s minster at London.
  ‖ Hungary,

Holinshed’s Chronicle of England, Scotland and Ireland vol 5 p279 (ed. Raphaell Hollindshead, 1808)
Héere ye haue to vnderstand, that king Edward in his life time had sent for his nephue Edward, the sonne of his brother Edmund Ironside, to come home foorth of Hungarie, whither (after his fathers deceasse) he and his brother Edwine had béene sent awaie, as in the historic of England it appéereth more at large. This Edward had married the daughter of the emperor Henrie, named Agatha, sister to the quéene of Hungarie, and not the king of Hungaries daughter, although the Scotish writers doo so affirme. By hir he had issue a sonne named Edgar, and two daughters, the one named Margaret and the other Christen.
  King Edward ment that his nephue the said Edward should haue succeeded him, and (as some write) he would in his life time haue resigned the crowne vnto him. But he (a thing woorthie of admiration) vtterlie refused it, and would not once meddle therewith during his vncles life time;-& (as it chanced) he died, whilest his vncle king Edward was yet liuing.

Annals of Scotland vol 1 p7n (David Dalrymple, 1797)
  ‡ Edmund Ironſide left two infant ſons, Edwin and Edward. By order of Canute, they were conveyed out of England, in 1017; Chron. Sax. p. 150. At length they found an aſylum in Hungary. Edwin died there. Edward was recalled by Edward the Confeſſor in 1057. He only lived to ſee the land of his nativity, from which he had been exiled during 40 years; Ibid. p. 169. The children of Edward were, Edward Ætheling, Margaret, and Chriſtian.

Dictionary of national biography vol 36 p132 (ed. Sidney Lee, 1893)
  MARGARET, ST. (d. 1093), queen of Scotland, was daughter of Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside [q. v.], by Agatha, usually described as a kinswoman of Gisela, the sister of Henry II the Emperor, and wife of St. Stephen of Hungary. Her father and his brother Edmund, when yet infants, are said to have been sent by Canute to Sweden or to Russia, and afterwards to have passed to Hungary before 1038, when Stephen died. No trace of the exiles has, however, been found in the histories of Hungary examined by Mr. Freeman or by the present writer, who made inquiries on the subject at Buda-Pesth. Still, the constant tradition in England and Scotland is too strong to be set aside, and possibly deserves confirmation from the Hungarian descent claimed by certain Scottish families, as the Drummonds.

Further account of Edward's life can be found at wikipedia (Edward_the_Exile).

Death: 19 April 1057 in London, England

Buried: St Paul's, London, England

Sources:

Margaret of Scotland

Margaret Ætheling
Margaret, as depicted on the Forman Armorialin 1562.
image posted at wikipedia
Queen St Margaret, Queen of Scotland (1045/6–1093)
Titled "Queen St Margaret, Queen of Scotland (1045/6–1093)", this was painted by Nicolas de Largillière (1656–1746) about 1692.
image posted at wikipedia
Birth: in the Kingdom of Hungary

Father: Edward the Exile

Mother: Agatha

Married: Malcolm III of Scotland, in either 1067 or 1070, in Dunfermline, Scotland.

The marriage was celebrated by Fothad, Celtic bishop of St. Andrews, not in the abbey, for that was founded by Malcolm and Margaret in commemoration of it, but in some smaller church attached to the tower, of whose foundations a few traces may still be seen in the adjoining grounds of Pittencreiff.

Holinshed’s Chronicle of England, Scotland and Ireland vol 5 p279 (ed. Raphaell Hollindshead, 1808)
  Finallie, when he vnderstood their estate, he brought them home with him to his palace, shewing them all the loue and friendship he could deuise; and in the end considering the excellent beutie, wisdome, and noble qualities of the ladie Margaret, sister to the same Edgar, he required of Agatha hir mother to haue hir in mariage, wherevnto Agatha gladlie condescended. Shortlie after, with an assemblie of all the nobles of Scotland, this mariage was made and solemnized after the octaues of Easter, in the yeare 1067, with all the ioy & triumph that might be deuised.

Children Notes:
The Anglo-Saxon chronicle pp142-3 (ed. John Allen Giles, 1914)
  A. 1067.
… This summer the child Edgar, with his mother Agatha, his sisters Margaret and Christina, Merlesweyne and several good men, went to Scotland under the protection of king Malcolm, who received them all. Then it was that king Malcolm desired to have Margaret to wife: but, the child Edgar and all his men refused for a long time: and she herself also was unwilling, saying that she would have neither him nor any other person, if God would allow her to serve him with her carnal heart, in strict continence, during this short life. But the king urged her brother until he said yes; and indeed he did not dare to refuse, for they were now in Malcolm’s kingdom. So that the marriage was now fulfilled, as God had foreordained, and it could not be otherwise, as he says in the Gospel, that not a sparrow falls to the ground, without his foreshowing. The prescient Creator knew long before what he would do with her namely that she should increase the glory of God in this land, lead the king out of the wrong into the right path, bring him and his people to a better way, and suppress all the bad customs which the nation formerly followed. These things she afterwards accomplished. The king therefore married her, though against her will, and was pleased with her manners, and thanked God who had given him such a wife. And being a prudent man he turned himself to God and forsook all impurity of conduct, as St. Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles, says: “Salvabitur vir,” &c. which means in our language “Full oft the unbelieving husband is sanctified and healed through the believing wife, and so belike the wife through the believing husband.” The queen above-named afterwards did many things in this land to promote the glory of God, and conducted herself well in her noble rank, as always was her custom. She was sprung from a noble line of ancestors, and her father was Edward Etheling, son of king Edmund. This Edmund was the son of Ethelred, who was the son of Edgar, the son of Edred; and so on in that royal line. Her maternal kindred traces up to the emperor Henry, who reigned at Rome.

John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish nation pp200-9 (ed. William F. Skene, 1872)
  So Edgar Atheling, says Turgot, seeing that everywhere matters went not smoothly with the English, went on board ship, with his mother and sisters, and tried to get back to the country where he was born. But the Sovereign Ruler, who rules the winds and waves, troubled the sea, and the billows thereof were upheaved by the breath of the gale; so, while the storm was raging, they all, losing all hope of life, commended themselves to God, and left the vessel to the guidance of the waves. Accordingly, after many dangers and huge toils, God took pity on His forlorn children, for when no help from man seems to be forthcoming, we must needs have recourse to God’s help—and at length, tossed in the countless dangers of the deep, they were forced to bring up in Scotland. So that holy family brought up in a certain spot which was thenceforth called Saint Margaret’s Bay by the inhabitants. We believe that this did not come about by chance, but that they arrived there through the providence of God Most High. While, then, the aforesaid family tarried in that bay, and were all awaiting in fear the upshot of the matter, news of their arrival was brought to King Malcolm, who at that time was, with his men, staying not far from that spot; so he sent off messengers to the ship, to inquire into the truth of the matter. When the messengers came there, they were astonished at the unusual size of the ship, and hurried back to the king as fast as they could, to state what they had seen. On hearing these things, the king sent off thither, from among his highest lords, a larger embassy of men more experienced than the former. So these, being welcomed as ambassadors from the king’s majesty, carefully noted, not without admiration, the lordliness of the men, the beauty of the women, and the good-breeding of the whole family; and they had pleasant talk thereon among themselves. To be brief—the ambassadors chosen for this duty plied them with questions, in sweet words and dulcet eloquence, as to how the thing began, went on, and ended; while they, on the other hand, as guests newly come, humbly and eloquently unfolded to them, in simple words, the cause and manner of their arrival. So the ambassadors returned; and when they had informed their king of the stateliness of the older men, and the good sense of the younger, the ripe womanhood of the matrons, and the loveliness of the young girls, one of them went on to say —“We saw a lady there—whom, by the bye, from the matchless beauty of her person, and the ready flow of her pleasant eloquence, teeming, moreover, as she did, with all other qualities, I declare to thee, O king, that I suspect, in my opinion, to be the mistress of that family—whose admirable loveliness and gentleness one must admire, as I deem, rather than describe.” And no wonder they believed her to be the mistress; for she was not only the mistress of that family, but also the heiress of the whole of England, after her brother; and God’s providence had predestined her to be Malcolm’s future queen, and the sharer of his throne. But the king, hearing that they were English, and were there present, went in person to see them and talk with them; and made fuller inquiries whence they had come, and whither they were going. For he had learnt the English and Roman tongues fully as well as his own, when, after his father’s death, he had remained fifteen years in England; where. from his knowledge of this holy family, he may happen to have heard somewhat to make him deal more gently, and behave more kindly, towards them.
  THE king, therefore, says Turgot again, when he had seen Margaret, and learnt that she was begotten of royal, and even imperial, seed, sought to have her to wife, and got her: for Edgar Atheling, her brother, gave her away to him, rather through the wish of his friends than his own—nay, by God’s behest. For as Hester of old was, through God’s providence, for the salvation of her fellow-countrymen, joined in wedlock to King Ahasuerus, even so was this princess joined to the most illustrious King Malcolm. Nor was she, however, in bondage; but she had abundant riches, which her uncle, the king of England, had formerly given to her father, Edward, as being his heir (whom also the Roman emperor, Henry, himself, had sent to England, as we stated a little ago, graced with no small gifts), and a very large share thereof the holy queen brought over with her to Scotland. She brought, besides, many relics of saints, more precious than any stone or gold. Among these was that holy Cross, which they call the black, no less feared than loved by all Scottish men, through veneration for its holiness. The wedding took place in the year 1070, and was held, with great magnificence, not far from the bay where she brought up, at a place called Dunfermline, which was then the king’s town.
… WHEN the queen, who had before been racked with many infirmities, almost unto death, heard this—or, rather, foreknew it through the Holy Ghost—she shrived, and devoutly took the Communion in church; and, commending herself unto God in prayer, she gave back her saintly soul to heaven, in the Castle of Maidens (Edinburgh), on the 16th of November, the fourth day after the king. Whereupon, while the holy queen’s body was still in the castle where her happy soul had passed away to Christ, whom she had always loved, Donald the Red, or Donald Bane, the king’s brother, having heard of her death, invaded the kingdom, at the head of a numerous band, and in hostilewise besieged the aforesaid castle, where he knew the king’s rightful and lawful heirs were. But, forasmuch as that spot is in itself strongly fortified by nature, he thought that the gates only should be guarded, because it was not easy to see any other entrance or outlet. When those who were within understood this, being taught of God, through the merits, we believe, of the holy queen, they brought down her holy body by a postern on the western side. Some, indeed, tell us that, during the whole of that journey, a cloudy mist was round about all this family, and miraculously sheltered them from the gaze of any of their foes, so that nothing hindered them as they journeyed by land or by sea; but they brought her away, as she had herself before bidden them, and prosperously reached the place they wished—namely, the church of Dunfermline, where she now rests in Christ.

Scottish kings; a revised chronology of Scottish history, 1005-1625 pp27-33 (Archibald Hamilton Dunbar, 1899)
    MALCOLM THE THIRD
… Eadgar Æitheling and his sisters fled from England and took refuge with Malcolm III., king of Scots, in 1067-8.
Married Secondly. King Malcolm III. married, as his second wife, Margaret (‘St. Margaret of Scotland’), daughter of Eadward Ætheling, at Dunfermline, in 1068-9.
… King Malcolm the Third had by his second wife, St. Margaret, six sons, Eadward, Eadmund, Æthelred, Eadgar, Alexander, and David; and two daughters, Matilda, and Mary:
  (IV.) Eadward, wounded at Alnwick on the 13th, died at Edwardsisle near Jedburgh, on the 16th November 1093.
  (V.) Eadmund joined his uncle Donald Bane against his eldest half-brother, King Duncan II., and seems to have ruled the parts of Scotia south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde, from 12th November 1094 to October 1097. He became a monk, and died at Montague in Somersetshire.
  (VI.) Æthelred, abbot of Dunkeld, gave lands to the Culdees of Lochleven. He was buried in the church at Kilremont.
  (VII.) Eadgar, king of Scots from October 1097 to the 8th of  January 1106-7.
  (VIII.) Alexander, king of Scots as Alexander I. from 8th  January 1106-7 to 23rd April 1124.
  (IX.) David, king of Scots as David I. from 23rd April 1124 to 24th May 1153.
  (X.) Matilda, ‘The Good Queen Maud,’ married to Henry I.,  king of England, ‘hallowed to queen at Westminster,’ 11th November 1100, died 1st May 1118, buried at Westminster. Issue, a son, William, lost at sea, and a daughter:
    Matilda, married first to the Emperor Henry V.; secondly, to Geoffrey Plantagenet, comte d’Anjou (father of Henry II.).
  (XI.) Mary, married to Eustace, comte de Boulogne, in 1102; died on the 31st of May 1116; buried at St. Saviour’s monastery, Bermondsey. Issue, a son, who died young, and a daughter:
    Matilda, married to Stephen, king of England.
    Queen Margaret (‘St. Margaret of Scotland’), wife of King Malcolm the Third, on hearing of her husband’s death, died of grief in Edinburgh Castle, 16th November 1093, and was buried opposite the high-altar in the church of the Holy Trinity at Dunfermline.

Dictionary of national biography vol 36 pp132-4 (ed. Sidney Lee, 1893)
  MARGARET, ST. (d. 1093), queen of Scotland, was daughter of Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside [q. v.], by Agatha, usually described as a kinswoman of Gisela, the sister of Henry II the Emperor, and wife of St. Stephen of Hungary. Her father and his brother Edmund, when yet infants, are said to have been sent by Canute to Sweden or to Russia, and afterwards to have passed to Hungary before 1038, when Stephen died. No trace of the exiles has, however, been found in the histories of Hungary examined by Mr. Freeman or by the present writer, who made inquiries on the subject at Buda-Pesth. Still, the constant tradition in England and Scotland is too strong to be set aside, and possibly deserves confirmation from the Hungarian descent claimed by certain Scottish families, as the Drummonds. The legend of Adrian, the missionary monk, who is said to have come from Hungary to Scotland long before Hungary was Christian, possibly may have been due to a desire to flatter the mother-country of Margaret. The birth of Margaret must be assigned to a date between 1038 and 1057, probably about 1045, but whether she accompanied her father to England in 1057 we do not know, though Lappenberg assumes it as probable that she did. Her brother, Edgar Atheling [q. v.], was chosen king in 1066, after the death of Harold, and made terms with William the Conqueror. But in the summer of 1067, according to the ‘Anglo Saxon Chronicle’ ‘Edgar child went out with his mother Agatha and his two sisters Margaret and Christina and Merleswegen and many good men with them and came to Scotland under the protection of King Malcolm III [q. v.], and he received them all. Then Malcolm began to yearn after Margaret to wife, but he and all his men long refused, and she herself also declined,’ preferring, according to the verses inserted in the ‘Chronicle,’ a virgin’s life. The king ‘urged her brother until he answered “Yea,” and indeed he durst not otherwise because they were come into his power.’ The contemporary biography of Margaret supplies no dates. John of Fordun, on the alleged authority of Turgot, prior of Durham and archbishop of St. Andrews, who is doubtfully credited with the contemporary biography of Margaret, dates her marriage with Malcolm in 1070, but adds, ‘Some, however, have written that it was in the year 1067.’ The later date probably owes its existence to the interpolations in Simeon of Durham, which Mr. Hinde rejects. The best manuscripts of the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ accept 1067. Most writers since Hailes, including Mr. Freeman, have assumed 1070. Mr. Skene prefers the earlier date, which has the greater probability in its favour. The marriage was celebrated at Dunfermline by Fothad, Celtic bishop of St. Andrews, not in the abbey of which parts still exist, for that was founded by Malcolm and Margaret in commemoration of it, but in some smaller church attached to the tower, of whose foundations a few traces may still be seen in the adjoining grounds of Pittencreiff.
  According to a letter preserved in the ‘Scalacronica’ from Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, the archbishop, in reply to Margaret’s petition, sent her Friar Goldwin and two monks to instruct her in the proper conduct of the service of God. Probably soon after her marriage, at the instance of these English friars, a council was held for the reform of the Scottish church, in which Malcolm acted as interpreter between the English and Gaelic clergy. It sat for three days, and regulated the period of the Lenten fast according to the Roman use, by which it began four days before the first Sunday in Lent; the reception of the sacrament at Easter, which had been neglected; the ritual of the mass according to the Roman mode, the observance of the Lord’s day by abstaining from work, the abolition of marriage between a man and his stepmother or his brother’s widow, as well as other abuses, among which may have been the neglect of giving thanks after meals, from which the grace cup received in Scotland the name of St. Margaret’s blessing.
  According to a tradition handed down by Goscelin, a monk of Canterbury, she was less successful in asserting the right of a woman to enter the church at Laurencekirk, which was in this case forbidden by Celtic, as it was commonly by the custom of the Eastern church. Her biographer dilates on her own practice of the piety she inculcated: her prayers mingled with her tears, her abstinence to the injury of health, her charity to the orphans, whom she fed with her own spoon, to the poor, whose feet she washed, to the English captives she ransomed, and to the hermits who then abounded in Scotland. For the pilgrims to St. Andrews she built guest-houses on either side of the Firth of Forth at Queensferry, and provided for their free passage. She fasted for forty days before Christmas as well as during Lent, and exceeded in her devotions the requirements of the church. Her gifts of holy vessels and of the jewelled cross containing the black rood of ebony, supposed to be a fragment from the cross on which Christ died, are specially commemorated by her biographers, and her copy of the Gospels, adorned with gold and precious stones, which fell into the water, was, we are told, miraculously recovered without stain, save a few traces of damp. A book, supposed to be this very volume, has been recently recovered, and is now in the Bodleian Library. To Malcolm and Margaret the Culdees of Lochleven owed the donation of the town of Balchristie, and Margaret is said by Ordericus Vitalis to have rebuilt the monastery of Iona. She did not confine her reforms to the church, but introduced also more becoming manners into the court, and improved the domestic arts, especially the feminine accomplishments of needlework and embroidery. The conjecture of Lord Hailes that Scotland is indebted to her for the invention of tartan may be doubted. The introduction of linen would be more suitable to her character and the locality. The education of her sons was her special care [see under MALCOLM III], and was repaid by their virtuous lives, especially that of David. ‘No history has recorded,’ says William of Malmesbury, ‘three kings and brothers who were of equal sanctity or savoured so much of their mother’s piety. . . . Edmund was the only degenerate son of Margaret. . . . But being taken and doomed to perpetual imprisonment, he sincerely repented.’ Her daughters were sent to their aunt Christina, abbess of Ramsey, and afterwards of Wilton. Of Margaret’s own death her biographer gives a pathetic narrative. She was not only prepared for, but predicted it, and some months before summoned her confessor, Turgot (so named in Capgrave’s ‘Abridgment,’ and in the original Life), and begged him to take care of her sons and daughters, and to warn them against pride and avarice, which he promised, and, bidding her farewell, returned to his own home. Shortly after she fell ill. Her last days are described in the words of a priest who attended her and more than once related the events to the biographer. For half a year she had been unable to ride, and almost confined to bed. On the fourth day before her death, when Malcolm was absent on his last English raid, she said to this priest: ‘Perhaps on this very day such a calamity may befall Scotland as has not been for many ages.’ Within a few days the tidings of the slaughter of Malcolm and her eldest son reached Scotland. On 16 Nov. 1093 Margaret had gone to her oratory in the castle of Edinburgh to hear mass and partake of the holy viaticum. Returning to bed in mortal weakness she sent for the black cross, received it reverently, and, repeating the fiftieth psalm, held the cross with both hands before her eyes. At this moment her son Edgar came into her room, whereupon she rallied and inquired for her husband and eldest son. Edgar, unwilling to tell the truth, replied that they were well, but, on her abjuring him by the cross and the bond of blood, told her what had happened. She then praised God, who, through affliction, had cleansed her from sin, and praying the prayer of a priest before he receives the sacrament, she died while uttering the last words. Her corpse was carried out of the castle, then besieged by Donald Bane, under the cover of a mist, and taken to Dunfermline, where she was buried opposite the high altar and the crucifix she had erected on it.
  The vicissitudes of her life continued to attend her relics. In 1250, more than a century and a half after her death, she was declared a saint by Innocent IV, and on 19 June 1259 her body was translated from the original stone coffin and placed in a shrine of pinewood set with gold and precious stones, under or near the high altar. The limestone pediment still may be seen outside the east end of the modern restored church. Bower, the continuator of Fordun, adds the miracle that as the bearers of her corpse passed the tomb of Malcolm the burden became too heavy to carry, until a voice of a bystander, inspired by heaven, exclaimed that it was against the divine will to translate her bones without those of her husband, and they consequently carried both to the appointed shrine. Before 1567, according to Papebroch, her head was brought to Mary Stuart in Edinburgh, and on Mary’s flight to England it was preserved by a Benedictine monk in the house of the laird of Dury till 1597, when it was given to the missionary Jesuits. By one of these, John Robie, it was conveyed to Antwerp, where John Malder the bishop, on 15 Sept. 1620, issued letters of authentication and license to expose it for the veneration of the faithful. In 1627 it was removed to the Scots College at Douay, where Herman, bishop of Arras, and Boudout, his successor, again attested its authenticity. On 4 March 1645 Innocent X granted a plenary indulgence to all who visited it on her festival. In 1785 the relic was still venerated at Douay, but it is believed to have perished during the French revolution. Her remains, according to George Conn, the author of ‘De Duplici Statu Religionis apud Scotos,’ Rome, 1628, were acquired by Philip II, king of Spain, along with those of Malcolm, who placed them in two urns in the chapel of St. Laurence in the Escurial. When Bishop Gillies, the Roman catholic bishop of Edinburgh, applied, through Pius IX, for their restoration to Scotland, they could not be found.
  Memorials, possibly more authentic than these relics, are still pointed out in Scotland: the cave in the den of Dunfermline, where she went for secret prayer; the stone on the road to North Queensferry, where she first met Malcolm, or, according to another tradition, received the poor pilgrims; the venerable chapel on the summit of the Castle Hill, whose architecture, the oldest of which Edinburgh can boast, allows the supposition that it may have been her oratory, or more probably that it was dedicated by one of her sons to her memory; and the well at the foot of Arthur’s Seat, hallowed by her name, probably after she had been declared a saint.
  [The Life of Queen Margaret, published in the Acta Sanctorum, ii. 320, in Capgrave’s Nova Legenda Angliæ, fol. 225, and in Vitae Antiquæ SS. Scotiæ, p. 303, printed by Pinkerton and translated by Father Forbes Leith, certainly appears to be contemporary, though whether the author was Turgot, her confessor, a monk of Durham, afterwards archbishop of St. Andrews, or Theodoric, a less known monk, is not clear; and the value attached to it will vary with the religion or temperament of the critic, from what Mr. Freeman calls the ‘mocking scepticism’ of Mr. Burton to the implicit belief of Papebroch or Father Forbes Leith. Fordun and Wyntoun’s Chronicles, Simeon of Durham (edition by Mr. Hinde), and William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum are the older sources; Freeman’s Norman Conquest, Skene’s Celtic Scotland, Grub, Cunningham, and Bellesheim’s Histories of the Church of Scotland, and Robertson’s Scotland under her Early Kings give modern versions.]     Æ. M.

A contemporary account of Margaret's life, written by her confessor, Turgot, is at Life of St. Margaret Queen of Scotland (Turgot, Bishop of St. Andrews, d. 1115, translated by William Forbes-Leith, 1884). Other accounts of Margaret's life can be found in  Holinshed’s Chronicle of England, Scotland and Ireland vol 5 p279-83 (ed. Raphaell Hollindshead, 1808), Annals of Scotland vol 1 pp8n-10n (David Dalrymple, 1797), Scotland under her early kings vol 1 pp134-53 (E. William Robertson, 1862) and wikipedia (Saint_Margaret_of_Scotland).

Death: 16 November 1093, in Edinburgh Castle, Scotland, which is now her feast day in the Roman Catholic calendar of saints.

Buried: opposite the high-altar in the church of the Holy Trinity at Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland

St. Margaret's Tomb, Dunfermline Abbey
St. Margaret's Tomb, Dunfermline Abbey
In 1250 the remains of St Margaret were transferred from the old original tomb, in the now western church, to the splendid new tomb specially erected to receive them in the “Lady Aisle” of the then recently-built choir. From 1250 to 1560, lights were kept perpetually burning before this tomb, as also on each side of the shrine, of which frequent mention is made in the Register of Dunfermline. This tomb appears to have been destroyed by the reformers on the 28th of March, 1560, or by the falling of the walls shortly after that period. All that now remains is the double plinth of a limestone, in dilapidated condition, now outside the area of the present church (on the east). On the upper plinth are still to be seen six circular indentures, from which rose "six slender shafts of shapely stone," that supported a highly-ornamented canopy. In the centre of the second or upper plinth stood St Margaret's shrine. (E. Henderson, "Annals of Dunfermline " P. 86.)
image from Life of St. Margaret Queen of Scotland p22 (ed. William Forbes-Leith, 1884)
Site of the shrine of St. Margaret, Dunfermline Abbey, Fife
Site of the shrine of St. Margaret, Dunfermline Abbey, Fife, Scotland (2011)
photo from Kim Traynor posted at wikipedia
Following Margaret's canonization in 1250, her body, along with Malcolm's, was reburied on 19 June 1259, in a new shrine built at Dunfermline Abbey in her honour. Then, according to the Dictionary of national biography vol 36 p134 "Before 1567, according to Papebroch, her head was brought to Mary Stuart in Edinburgh, and on Mary’s flight to England it was preserved by a Benedictine monk in the house of the laird of Dury till 1597, when it was given to the missionary Jesuits. By one of these, John Robie, it was conveyed to Antwerp, where John Malder the bishop, on 15 Sept. 1620, issued letters of authentication and license to expose it for the veneration of the faithful. In 1627 it was removed to the Scots College at Douay, where Herman, bishop of Arras, and Boudout, his successor, again attested its authenticity. On 4 March 1645 Innocent X granted a plenary indulgence to all who visited it on her festival. In 1785 the relic was still venerated at Douay, but it is believed to have perished during the French revolution. Her remains, according to George Conn, the author of ‘De Duplici Statu Religionis apud Scotos,’ Rome, 1628, were acquired by Philip II, king of Spain, along with those of Malcolm, who placed them in two urns in the chapel of St. Laurence in the Escurial. When Bishop Gillies, the Roman catholic bishop of Edinburgh, applied, through Pius IX, for their restoration to Scotland, they could not be found.

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