Queen Emma of Normandy: Much More Than a Wife (Part 1)

History generally remembers Emma of Normandy as the wife of King Cnut and the mother of the last Anglo-Saxon King of England, Edward the Confessor. However Emma's life (as with most Queens) was so much more than a wife and mother.

Join Johanna Strong as she interviews Steven Bishop (PhD) about Emma's amazing life, and how it ended with Winchester as her final resting place.

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Intro: 

Welcome to Hampshire Hist Bites. Join us as we delve into the past and go on a journey to discover some of the county's best, and occasionally unknown, history. We'll be speaking to experts, as well as enthusiasts, asking them to reveal some of our hidden heritage, as well as share with you a few fascinating untold stories.

Johanna: So welcome to this episode of Hampshire Hist Bites. I am Johanna Strong. I'm finishing up a PhD at the University of Winchester, studying the legacy of Mary I. You may have heard some of my previous episodes on the podcast. And I'm joined today by Stephen Bishop, also a PhD student, though, at the University of Essex. So welcome, Stephen. It's wonderful to have you on. 

Stephen: It's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me on, Jo. I'm looking forward to this. 

Johanna: Yeah, my pleasure. So Stephen is going to be talking to me about Emma of Normandy, who was one of the very early English Queens. But before we get into talking about her life, Stephen, would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself and your PhD and what you're looking at?

Stephen: Thanks Jo. So yeah, I'm Stephen. I'm a PhD student, like Jo said, at the University of Essex. And I'm actually studying about controversial statues from the 1800s in the American Civil War era and statues that’ve continue to have been built since then. So that's my first sort of confession and caveat to this talk that I'm not an expert on the early medieval period.That's not what I study at doctoral level, but in I'd say maybe the last two years, I've become increasingly interested in the early medieval period. And again, I must confess probably because of shows like Vikings and The Last Kingdom, they've sort of piqued my interest. I did go to school in Battle where the Battle of Hastings was fought, so I suppose that has always sort of been the back of my mind. So it didn't take much to reignite my passion for that period. But as you'll know, Jo, sort of being at university for as long as we have, even if. your particular field of expertise is and what you're talking on, you gain all those skills from academic study that enable you to go and research about whatever you want to, and importantly, university libraries, which are very helpful as well. So I'm also part of History Indoors and that sort of enabled me to talk on lots of different subjects. And at the beginning of this year, I spoke on Lady Godiva and that got a really good reception. So I thought, well, in my reading about the early medieval period, I've, okay. come across Emma of Normandy, who is an absolutely fascinating figure. So I gave a talk on her for History Indoors and, I've been invited on the show to talk about her for this podcast. So very much.

Johanna: Absolutely. And if you haven't listened to Stephen's talk for History Indoors yet on Emma of Normandy or any of the other talks he's done, I would recommend that you go and listen, they are all fascinating. And as you say, it's so nice to be able to do it. the same research skills, but to apply them to different periods. So what do we know about Emma's early life?

Stephen: Figures in this period, you have varying degrees of information about them. And Emma of Normandy is one of those figures where I wouldn't say there's scarce information about her, there is a good amount of material on Emma for this time period, but she's one of those figures where we don't actually even have an exact date for her birth. We have to plot her birth. from things that happened later in her life and then work back and presume an age for her. But Emma was born at the end of the 10th century, so at the end of the 900s, and she was born in Normandy to Richard I, who was Duke of Normandy. Now, a little bit of backstory about Normandy and about her heritage is that Richard I's father was William Longsword, and William Longsword's father was Rollo. Now, anybody who has watched Vikings may be starting to get excited by the mention of Rollo. And the way he's portrayed in Vikings isn't wholly historically accurate, they play it very fast and loose with historicity of this entire time period. But I think most people who watch Vikings sort of accept that. But, something they do have fairly accurately is that Rollo becomes the first Duke of Normandy. He's a raider from probably Norway. I've seen some historians claim that he may have been from the Hebrides from the Scandinavian settlement in North Scotland, but most likely from Norway.And he was what you now call a Viking raider and Frankish King’s have given him some land in Normandy. Now you want to deter these Viking invasions, why would you give them land? But actually it's quite politically astute and not unusual for the time period. So a hundred years previously, King Alfred, the great of Anglo Saxon England to be called, Wessex. At that time, Scandinavian invaders had pretty much taken over almost the entirety of what we would call England today. And Alfred was on the run. He was. in Wessex, but even Guthrum had chased him out of his stronghold there, and he was in the Marshes of Athelney, but he somehow manages to raise his troops whilst on the run, and he defeats Guthrum at the Battle of Edington. And from there, you'd think, oh, is he going to execute Guthrum? Is he going to make the Vikings go once and for all, through harsh punishment, but actually does something that's really quite surprising. He makes Guthrum King of East Anglia. He gives Guthrum the whole land of East Anglia with the intent that if these Vikings actually have a vested interest in the area and they have land to rule themselves. Not only are they going to look after it and the people probably more, but they're also going to deter further invasions. They're going to have a vested interest to support the other rulers of the region in deterring invasions. And this is something that I imagine the Frankish rulers had also hoped for by inviting Rollo to be Duke of Normandy.And it works to varying degrees. It doesn't completely stop Viking raids, but Rollo and his followers, they come down to Normandy and they settle. We have, surprisingly, not that much evidence or archaeological evidence of Scandinavian influence in present day Normandy. So that's the bit of the story that differs to Scandinavian influence in England, where, I mean, just on a surface level, so many of our place names reflect Viking settlements. So, for example, if a place ends in BY, so BY like Whitby, or Thorpe like Scunthorpe, that indicates that Scandinavians had settled there. So there are surface level, very immediate references to our Scandinavian past. Whereas in Normandy, it's a bit harder to uncover that, and that shows us that actually Rollo and his followers and their successors adopted a lot of French customs.The language, some of the political administration. They kind of took the best bits of the surrounding regions, incorporated it for themselves, mastered it. But they never lost that desire for expansion and land and the whole kind of history of Normandy throughout the 1000s and the 1100s is expansion. Now we would most likely remember it for the Battle of Hastings and their conquest of England. But they also go to Eastern Europe. They go to Northern Africa. So that is where Emma is descended from. She is the great granddaughter of Duke Rollo of Normandy, but we don't know when she was born. We have to figure out her age by when she gets married. So she's a daughter of Richard I, Duke of Normandy, and a Danish woman called Gunnar. So she sort of encapsulates that Norman heritage with Scandinavian roots. She's got a Norman father who's Duke, but she's got a Danish mother, meaning that she would have also probably been able to speak Danish as a child. And in 1002, she's invited to come to England to marry King Æthelred, who's been remembered as King Æthelred, The Unready, knowing that she gets married in 1002 to King Æthelred means that we can work back her birth and that she must have been at least an early teenager to have been of marrying age. So we sort of assume that she was born probably late 980s AD. Johanna: It's always interesting to see, I think especially for royal women, we know when they get married, if it's a political marriage because a big deal is made of it, and that's kind of the first time they come into the historical record, and you think, like, if only you had known when she was born, you know, you'd want to write that down.It's always, I guess, a fun, educated guessing game of trying to figure out, well, if this is when the typical woman got married, let's count backwards. It's just such a mystery sometimes. 

Stephen: Indeed, and especially as Æthelred had already had wives, or for lack of a better word, concubines, or other women that he may not have been married with, but he'd had children with. It was an intimidating atmosphere for a very young woman like Emma to come from Normandy to England at a politically unstable time. Again, a little bit of backstory, after Alfred wins the Battle of Eddington, it sort of ushers in a hundred year period where until about second half of the 10th century, there are fewer Viking raids or fewer successful Scandinavian raids into England.His grandson, King Æthelstan, he unites the Anglo Saxon kingdoms into what we would now call England. So you could kind of consider him the first King of England, and he's a very strong ruler and it's really the successors of Æthelstan. And when we get to Æthelred the Unready, who is considered not one of the best Kings, this instability Æthelred from Ethelred’s reign means that there are some more successes from Scandinavian rulers. So when Emma arrives in England in 1002 to marry King, it's an instable time, and in the same year, there was the St. Brice's Day Massacre, where King Æthelred decides to order the killing of all the Danes in England, which is a massive event. and doesn't really solve any of his problems because as we will go to talk about further on in our talk we do eventually get a Danish king on the English throne but for a very young woman like Emma to arrive in England at this time I don't envy her.

Johanna: I can sayas someone who came over to do my first year of my undergraduate in England, kind of alone at 17, 18, it's intimidating in 2013 to do that. I can't imagine doing that when there wasn't Skype and FaceTime and emails and texts, and you probably wouldn't seeyour family again. And so, I mean, hopefully Emma would find support in her new marriage.How does that marriage go and how does she create this new identity for herself as a wife and as a potential mother and as a ruler or a consort, how does her life transform at this point? 

Stephen: So this marriage and her second marriage are political marriages at the end of the day, and it's advantageous from KingÆthelred's point of view to marry the young Emma of Normandy because his fear is that Scandinavian settlers arrive in the ports of Normandy to restock, to get ready to make their crossing to England, and Æthelred wants to make sure that The Duke of Normandy stops harbouring these potential raiders to England. So his hope, I feel, is that he marries Emma andher being the daughter of a Norman Duke and the sister of a Norman Duke, because Richard II becomes Duke of Normandy. Æthelred’s hope is that these raids will not continue, but as history goes on, they eventually do. Emma is married to Æthelred, technically for 14 years, they’re both on the run for the last two of them, more or less. But this time is really punctuated by having children. So she has three children with Æthelred and what's sort of ironic for her and more difficult as well, when she marries, Æthelred, this stage in 1002, she automatically becomes a stepmother as well. So, let's surmise that she could be anywhere between 12 and 15 years old, maybe slightly older. That's a big thing to be walking into, and then also to be having your own children. So, she has Edward, who goes on to become Edward the Confessor, she has a daughter called Godgifu. It's spelt Godgifu if you were looking at it phonetically, but in old English, it would've been pronounced Godiva. Not the same Godgifu as Lady Godiva. A different Godgifu. It would've been cool if there was a link, but sadly there isn't. And then she also has another song. Alfred. So in this 10 or so year long marriage to Æthelred, if you think on a day to day basis, it's going to be greatly punctuated by being pregnant three times and then raising these children.Outside of that, I imagine she would have been learning the English language. She would have known obviously the French Norman language and the Danish language, whether she would have known any English before she came to England. Can't be sure. And also there are some limited references to her being on witnesses to charters and things like this at this time, but quite a restricted use now, whether that's because Æthelred is long in the tooth of the king. He's significantly older than Emma as well. So this isn't a marriage of equals. It might politically be a marriage of a decent political union, but for Emma, she's married to a man who was well into his adult years, has children already, has been partnered with numerous women before. And during this time, she's learning how to be an English queen, as well as being a mother and a stepmother and dealing with all the politics that that entails. But she's, she's listed on some charters, but, but not many, and it's restricted. And I think they're in clusters as well during particular years. Now, whether that reflects the years where she may have been more active because she's not pregnant or not, you know, looking after very, very young babies. Who knows? But through her teenage years into a very sort of early adulthood years, that's her life with King Æthelred until the events of 1014 to 1016. 

Johanna: Which I guess is a perfect segway there. What happens in 1014 to 16 when the marriage ultimately ends? Spoiler alert. What happens to Emma then at that point? 

Stephen: So, like I said, in 1002, Æthelred orders the massacre of all Danes in England, and this sends a warning to potential Scandinavian invaders that this is going to be your end if you come to England.But, like I said, it doesn't succeed. And in 1013-1014, King Sven of Denmark comes over with his son Cnut. And he invades England and Ethelred goes on the run. He and Emma and their young children together flee to Normandy to the call of, I think atthis time it's Emma's brother, for safety. There's this power vacuum now in England, King Sven has come, he set up his camp at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, and he's crowned King of England, so technically he is the first Danish King of all of England, technically.We've had Danish and Scandinavian Kings of certain kingdoms, like I mentioned, Guthrum of East Anglia, and Danish Earls, but he claims to be the first King of all England. And there's a power vacuum on the English side, because Are England goingto still recognize Æthelred as king? Do they look to one of his sons?And he's got many sons. Now his sons with Emma are far too young to become rulers at that time, but he's got other children. And Edmund, one of his sons, now known as Edmund Ironside, he rises up to be a de facto king in his father's absence. We can tell that there's a little bit of strife between Æthelred and Edmund, and this may have emboldened Edmund to think, actually, I'm going to try and become king of England, even if my father's still alive. Sven dies quite soon after becoming king, and then sort of 1016, we've got this battle between Cnut, Sven's son, who rightly sees himself not just King of Denmark, but King of England, because his father had been very briefly King of England. And Edmund Ironside, who hopes to get the support of all the English nobles. There's almost a civil war at this point, and it culminates in 1016 with the Battle of Assandun, where Cnut wins a decisive battle over Edmund, doesn't kill him, but wins the battle. I should also note that in these years as well, Æthelred had also died, so Edmund is one of the most powerful claimants of the English throne at this point, and Emma’s a widow.Edmund loses this battle, and the treaty at the end of this battle, or the decision, is that Edmund will be King of Wessex, and Cnut will be King of the rest of England, so notably Mercia and Northumbria. So the country is divided. We're sort of going back to how things were over 100 years ago in England, where it wasn't a unitedEngland, it was a divided England.Soon after though, Edmund dies. And we don't know how Edmund dies, and I think I mentioned this in my History Indoors talk that figures around this time, you never know whether it was health problems, because people generally didn't tend to live as long during this time, or whether there was a little bit of, you know, malicious intent going on here. We don't know. But what we do know is that whatever happened, it served Cnut very well, because he becomes King of all England very shortly after. So Edmund dies in these mysterious circumstances. But it benefits Cnut because he becomes king of all England and also king of Denmark at the same time. And throughout his reign also rules over Norway and other parts of Scandinavia. So he has this massive North Sea empire. One of the first things he does is that he throws off his union with a woman called Ælfigu of Northampton. She will come back to haunt this story from Emma's perspective, but we'll get to that later. And he invites Emma, the widowed queen of Æthelred from Normandy over to England to become his wife.

Now, this is one of the most interesting parts of the story, because I think if you're a casual observer or listener right now, you're thinking, wait, what? English queen, her husband's died during a time where he's basically been ousted from his own country, and she's going to marry the king of the invading forces. What?But actually, it makes sense on a number of levels and is very clever from both parties. Although fromEmma's perspective, at the end of the day, she doesn't have a huge amount of choice. She's a widowed English queen. If she wants to not only remain influential, but also live, or she wants her children to live, marrying Cnut is one of the only things thatshe can do, because if she doesn't, then her two sons are potential claimants to the English throne, so they are direct threats to Cnut. So if there are any English rebellions against Cnut during his time as King of England, they're probably going to sendher around Edward and Alfred once they are of adult age.And they could very easily invite them back to England from Normandy and it's troops surrounding him and oust Cnut. So from Emma's perspective, if she wants her children to live and if she wants to live herself, marrying Cnut is one of the few things that she can do to guarantee her safety.From Cnut's perspective, and from a perspective of both of them, in many ways they're a marriage of equals, far more than Emma and Æthelred. So they're a similar age to one another. Cnut already has a child from his union with Ælfigu of Northampton. Two children, actually, by this point. So they both have children from previous alliances. Emma can speak Danish, most likely from her mother being Danish. So there is that connection as well, but most importantly for Cnut, Emma is an English queen, and even though she's from Normandy and referred to in history as Emma of Normandy, she's very much seen as an English queen at this point, and therefore Cnut can benefit from that, he's not just an invading king from Denmark bringing Scandinavian trappings and court and wife at the same time. He's actually got a wife who's an English queen and can sort of ameliorate and smooth some of those potential tensions amongst the English nobility, she can speak English. So that's very helpful.And throughout Cnut's reign, he's actually spent most of his time going back and forth between Scandinavia, dealing with threats to his kingdoms there rather than in England. So he can leave Emma more or less in charge of England during this time and trust that she is supported because she's an English queen, she can speak English, she's had the upbringing as an English queen now through Æthelred, so she's very politically useful at the same time. So when you look at all those reasons, Cnut and Emma marrying isn't the most bizarre thing in the world and actually makes a huge amount of sense. 

Outro:

We hope you enjoyed listening to today's episode. If you would like to find out a little bit more about what we've been talking about, then please visit the website, www.winchesterheritageopendays.org. Click on Hampshire HistBites, and there you'll find today's show notes as well as some links to more information. Thank you.