Daughter of Earl Godwin who married Edward the Confessor in 1045 and was crowned queen; a wealthy and politically active consort, she commissioned the Vita Ædwardi Regis and was the only senior member of her family to keep rank and lands in England after the Norman Conquest.
Edith of Wessex was the eldest daughter of Godwin, earl of Wessex, the most powerful nobleman in England, and his Danish wife Gytha. Her marriage to Edward the Confessor in January 1045 sealed the alliance between the king and her family, and unlike most wives of English kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries she was crowned queen. The marriage was childless, and that fact opened the way to the succession crisis of 1066.
Edith was far more than an ornament of the court. She was cast off when Edward broke with her father in 1051, restored when the Godwins returned in 1052, and by the 1060s sat among the king's inner counsellors, holding lands worth between about £1,570 and £2,000 a year. She lost four brothers in the battles of 1066, yet kept her rank and property under William the Conqueror, who gave her a royal burial at Westminster.
Edith was probably born in the mid-1020s. Her mother Gytha was the sister of the Danish earl Ulf, who was married to Cnut the Great's sister, so the family belonged to the Anglo-Danish elite that Cnut had raised. Her brothers were Sweyn, Harold Godwinson, Tostig Godwinson, Gyrth, Leofwine and Wulfnoth. She was educated at Wilton Abbey, the royal nunnery in Wiltshire, where according to the Vita Ædwardi Regis she learned several languages; she remained attached to Wilton all her life and later rebuilt its church.
The fullest portrait of Edith comes from the Vita Ædwardi Regis, which she commissioned around 1065–1067 from an anonymous writer, probably a Flemish monk. It praises her learning, piety and wise counsel, and presents her as the guardian of the king's dignity who provided the rich robes and ornaments he wore. Because Edith paid for the book, its praise of her and of her family, especially her brothers Harold and Tostig, has to be read as her own account of how she wished to be remembered.
Other sources are less kind. The monks of Evesham accused her of gathering relics from many monasteries at Gloucester so that she could keep the best, and John of Worcester says that the Northumbrian nobleman Gospatric was killed at court at Christmas 1064 on her orders, for Tostig's sake. The Vita itself tells how Abbot Gervin of Saint-Riquier refused her kiss of greeting and she took offence until Edward rebuked her. Frank Barlow, Edward's biographer, wrote that whenever we catch sight of her outside the Vita "we see a determined woman, interfering, hard, probably bad-tempered." Later churchmen who wanted Edward to be a celibate saint claimed the marriage was never consummated, a story modern historians generally reject.
Edith married Edward on 23 January 1045. In 1051 a violent quarrel at Dover and Edward's favour to Norman churchmen turned into open confrontation, and Godwin and his sons were outlawed. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Edward took Edith's property and sent her to the nunnery at Wherwell, where his sister was abbess, perhaps intending to set aside a childless wife. The Godwins returned in force in 1052, and Edith was restored with them. After Godwin's death in 1053 her brother Harold became earl of Wessex, and by the 1060s Edith was part of the small circle that governed with the king; by 1066 only the king, Archbishop Stigand and Harold held more land in England.
Edith was closest to her brother Tostig, and in 1055 she and Harold helped secure his appointment as earl of Northumbria. His rule there was harsh and unpopular, and the killing of Gospatric at court was laid at her door. In October 1065 the Northumbrians rebelled, killed Tostig's household men and chose Morcar, a brother of the earl of Mercia, as their earl. Edward wanted the rising crushed, but Harold and the English thegns would not fight, and to the fury of both king and queen Tostig was outlawed and went into exile in Flanders.
Edward the Confessor died on 5 January 1066. The Vita describes Edith at his deathbed, warming his feet in her lap, as he commended her and the kingdom to Harold's protection, and the Bayeux Tapestry probably shows her at the foot of the bed. Harold was crowned the next day. Within ten months Edith lost four brothers: Tostig was killed invading England with Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge on 25 September, and Harold, Gyrth and Leofwine fell at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October. Her youngest brother Wulfnoth remained a hostage in Normandy.
Winchester, Edith's dower town, submitted to William the Conqueror soon after the battle, which helped preserve her position. She kept most of her estates under the new king, lived chiefly at Winchester and Wilton, and took an interest in the lives of English saints, supplying information about Saint Kenelm to the hagiographer Goscelin. She was the only senior member of the Godwin family who remained in England with rank and lands intact.