Daughter of an ealdorman of Kent who became the third wife of Edward the Elder, mother of the kings Edmund I and Eadred and grandmother of Eadwig and Edgar; a powerful queen mother, backer of the monastic reformers, and the voice of a rare first-person lawsuit record.
Eadgifu of Kent was the third wife of Edward the Elder, king of the Anglo-Saxons, and the mother of two English kings, Edmund I of England and Eadred of England. The daughter of Sigehelm, ealdorman of Kent, she married Edward around 919, when he already had a large family by two earlier wives, and she was widowed in 924 while her sons were still small.
Her real influence came in widowhood. Under her stepson Æthelstan she vanished from court, but from 939 to 955, while her sons reigned, she attested royal charters near the head of the witness lists and backed the churchmen who led the tenth-century monastic reform. She lived long enough to see both sons die, to be stripped of her estates by her grandson Eadwig and to witness a charter of her other grandson Edgar in 966.
Eadgifu was born in or before 903. Her father Sigehelm was one of the Kentish leaders killed at the battle at the Holme, fought in 902 or 903 between Edward's army and the Danes of East Anglia, who had taken up the cause of Edward's rebel cousin; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle names him among the fallen. According to Eadgifu's own later account, Sigehelm had pledged the estate of Cooling in north Kent to a man called Goda as security for a loan of thirty pounds, and had repaid it before setting out on the campaign, leaving the land to his daughter.
Eadgifu is one of the few Anglo-Saxon women whose own voice survives. The Cooling record of the early 960s is written in the first person: she tells how Goda denied that the loan had been repaid, how the king's council ruled that she could keep the land if she swore that her father had paid, how she swore the oath at Aylesford, and how she still obtained Cooling only six years after her father's death, when friends persuaded Edward to intervene. The document was written to defend her title and presents her as patient and wronged, but its detail shows a woman who knew the law, used royal favour and kept the charters that proved her case.
Her handling of Goda also shows calculation. When Edward declared Goda's lands forfeit and gave her all his charters, she returned most of the estates and kept only Cooling, Osterland and the documents, a choice the historian Matthew Firth explains as a way to avoid a lasting feud with a powerful rival. The reformers' biographers remembered her warmly. Wulfstan of Winchester, writing in the 990s, says that when Æthelwold wished to go abroad to study monastic life she advised Eadred not to let so able a man leave the kingdom, and the king gave him Abingdon instead. That praise came from the party she had supported, and her dispossession under Eadwig shows that others at court found her far less welcome.
Eadgifu married Edward around 919, after his second wife Ælfflæd had been set aside or had died. She bore two sons, Edmund in 921 and Eadred around 923, and two daughters: Eadburh, who became a nun at the Nunnaminster in Winchester and was later venerated as a saint, and a second Eadgifu. Edward died in July 924, and Æthelstan, his eldest son by an earlier union, became king. Eadgifu disappears from the court record for the whole of his fifteen-year reign. Goda even asked Æthelstan to press her to hand back his charters, and she gave them up while keeping the land.
Æthelstan died in October 939 and Eadgifu's eighteen-year-old son Edmund succeeded him. From then until 955 she was a constant presence at court, attesting many charters of both sons as the king's mother. Edmund was stabbed to death at Pucklechurch in 946, and Eadred, who suffered from long illness, relied heavily on her and on Dunstan, abbot of Glastonbury. In 953 Eadred granted her land at Felpham in Sussex, and the charter calls her famula Dei, handmaid of God, which suggests she had taken religious vows while still living on her own estates. Felpham later belonged to Shaftesbury Abbey, and Susan Kelly has suggested that Eadgifu was associated with that house.
Eadred died in November 955 and the throne passed to Edmund's elder son Eadwig, then about fifteen. His short reign was a struggle between court factions, and Eadgifu was among the losers: the young king took her lands, possibly because she favoured his younger brother Edgar, and in 956 Dunstan was driven into exile. In 957 Mercia and Northumbria accepted Edgar as king, and on Eadwig's death in 959 Edgar reunited the kingdom. He restored some of her property and gave her generous gifts, and she granted Cooling and Osterland to Christ Church, Canterbury, but she never regained her old place at court. Her last known appearance is as a witness to the New Minster refoundation charter of 966.