Aelfgifu of Northampton

This got rather long but oh well. Story time.

Once upon a time, the country we now know as England was being overrun by Vikings. They kept coming in, doing damage, and then leaving again after getting big payments from the country’s terrible, terrible king. Eventually even that financial incentive stopped working, and they decided fuck it, we want the whole country. Their leader, a fellow named Sven Forkbeard, determined that he was going to be king instead, and to do that he needed to shore up support for his rule by marrying his younger son into a local noble family. So he found a suitable woman.

That woman was Aelfgifu of Northampton.

-Aelfgifu of Northampton was the daughter of a Northumbrian earl who had, at one time, been a trusted friend and adviser to the terrible, terrible English king. Then, because the king was terrible, he stripped the earl of his titles and land, had him killed on trumped up charges, and had two of his sons blinded. This went over about as well as you would expect, so that by the time Sven Forkbeard showed up looking for supporters, Aelfgifu’s family were more than happy to throw their lot in with him. What else could go wrong for them?

-Aelfgifu settled into marriage with Sven Forkbeard’s son Cnut, and eventually bore him two sons (well done), which the couple named Sven and Harold. Her father-in-law managed to kick out the terrible, terrible king and become king of England instead, so for the briefest of periods, she was the daughter-in-law of the king and the wife of his heir. Not bad for the daughter of a disinherited and disgraced family.

And then Sven Forkbeard died. And the English, bless ’em, asked their terrible, terrible king to come back and be a terrible, terrible king again. Cnut hustled back to Denmark, where his brother was king, and set about trying to convince him to share the throne. (This did not work.) Aelfgifu, meanwhile, was somewhere. England? Denmark? We don’t know. Some sources indicate that a woman brought Sven Forkbeard’s body back to his home, so he could be buried properly, and it’s possible this was Aelfgifu. Not sure who else it *would* have been, and it makes sense that his daughter-in-law would take on this task when no one else in his family was left on the island, so we’re gonna go with it.

-Eventually Cnut came back to England and took up his father’s old work of booting the terrible, terrible king off the throne. Again. Luckily for everyone involved, the terrible, terrible king died in London, while it was besieged, and while his very capable son Edmund tried to keep fighting, they eventually came to an agreement, and Cnut became king of part of the country. Then Edmund died (convenient and not at all shady!) and Cnut became king of everything.

Then he decided he was going to marry the terrible, terrible king’s widow, a woman who had been the crowned and anointed queen of England for 16 or 17 years already, and crown and anoint her again. This was not an unusual thing, in either English or Danish history. What was unusual, for the English at least, is that he never repudiated the first wife. So now Cnut was married to Emma of Normandy, and also Aelfgifu of Northampton.

-Emma did her best to denigrate Aelfgifu and emphasize her much higher, church-consecrated status. Emma’s own record, and more official records of the time, slandered Aelfgifu as Cnut’s mistress, and claimed that her sons were not Cnut’s, nor even her own, but were procured from serving women. This is, obviously, bullshit. We don’t have the records from Cnut’s marriage to Aelfgifu but they WERE married first, under whatever rights and customs were used by the Danes at that time, and the marriage was no less valid than Emma and Cnut’s Christian one. Scholars today continue to label her as Cnut’s ‘mistress’ or ‘concubine,’ because apparently nobody can come to terms with the idea that the man had two. fucking. wives. (‘But maybe he never repudiated her because he didn’t consider the marriage valid!’ Or, or, OR! He didn’t repudiate her because in his context and culture, it wasn’t a fucking problem! She was his wife. Period.)

-Cnut’s brother eventually died, and it seems as though Aelfgifu and her son Sven were sent to or kept in Denmark to sort of hold the fort down until something could be set up. When Cnut took over Norway, they were sent along to do the same thing. Of interest (I mean, to me) is that eventually Cnut’s son by Emma, Harthacnut, was set up as regent king in Denmark, accompanied and advised by one of Cnut’s trusted men. Sven was set up as regent king in Norway, accompanied and advised BY HIS MOTHER. Cnut trusted her enough to leave her in charge of the whole deal.

-To be real, though, she didn’t have an easy go of it. The people of Norway were pretty pissed that their old king had been killed and they’d been taken over. Aelfgifu had a difficult time keeping things under control and bringing everybody over to the idea that they were part of Cnut’s empire now. Not helping: the fact that they dug up the old king’s body and tried to prove he was a saint. Aelfgifu tried to inject some common sense into the proceedings – maybe he was preserved so well because he’d been buried in sand and not soil, the priest was a shyster trying to pull one over by ‘burning’ Olaf’s hair and oohing and aahing over the fact that it remained intact and why wouldn’t he demonstrate that unblessed hair would burn what kind of charlatan act WAS this? – which did not endear her to the people. Eventually she and Sven were ejected from the country. Almost immediately after, Cnut died.

-What do you do when your husband and oldest son are dead? Go find the remaining son! Who was, as it happens, busy trying to make himself king of England. So along went Aelfgifu, giving the nobles fancy presents, holding fancy dinners, and working that campaign trail hard to get her son on the throne. And it paid off. Harold became king of part of the country (shades of his father) and then eventually all of it, Emma of Normandy was sent into exile, and Aelfgifu became queen mother. Her son was kind of a dick who liked to party instead of rule, and it seems as though she did most if not all of the administrative work while he was on the throne. She wasn’t the queen regnant, England wouldn’t have one of those for several hundred more years, but she might as well have been.

-Her son died after a short period on the throne, at which point Aelfgifu disappears from the records. We don’t know where she went or what she did, or even how long she lived after the last of her children had passed and the power she’d wielded slipped out of her hands and back into Emma of Normandy’s grasp. I like to think, though, that she lived out the rest of her life peacefully at the abbey her grandmother founded, on lands she owned in her own right. Maybe she’s still there, somewhere, in the place that bears her powerful granny Wulfrun’s name: Wolverhampton.