Norman duke's daughter who was twice queen of England, as wife first of Æthelred the Unready and then of Cnut the Great; mother of Edward the Confessor and Harthacnut, she fought for her sons' succession and commissioned the Encomium Emmae Reginae to defend her record.
Emma of Normandy was the daughter of Richard the Fearless, ruler of Normandy, and his Danish-born wife Gunnor, and the sister of Duke Richard II. She married Æthelred the Unready in 1002, a match meant to close Norman harbours to the Viking fleets raiding England, and in 1017, after the Danish conquest, she married the conqueror himself, Cnut the Great, ruling beside him as queen of England, Denmark and later Norway.
She was the mother of two English kings and the stepmother or rival of two more, and for half a century she stood at the centre of every English succession crisis. Critics accused her of neglecting her sons by Æthelred in favour of Cnut's son Harthacnut, and Edward the Confessor seized her treasure in 1043. Her own case survives in the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a political defence written at her command, and she is one of the first English queens pictured in her own lifetime.
Emma was born around 984, one of the children of Count Richard the Fearless and Gunnor. Her marriage grew out of Anglo-Norman hostility: Viking fleets used Norman ports to refit and sell plunder, and around 1000 an English force had raided the Cotentin. Æthelred married her in the spring of 1002 to win her brother's friendship. In England she was given the English name Ælfgifu, which appears in official documents, and she received property in Winchester, the city of Exeter and estates in several shires. In 1003 Sweyn Forkbeard sacked Exeter, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle blamed a French reeve called Hugh whom the queen had appointed there.
Emma's reputation depends heavily on who was writing. The Encomium, composed around 1041 by a Flemish monk, probably of Saint-Bertin at Saint-Omer, praises her as the most distinguished woman of her time for beauty and wisdom and tells a carefully edited story. It never mentions her marriage to Æthelred, presents her match with Cnut as her own choice made on condition that any son she bore him would be heir, and blames Harold Harefoot alone for the death of her son Alfred. Simon Keynes judged its author willing to suppress, misrepresent and garble the truth; Elizabeth Tyler and other recent scholars read the same flattery as a deliberate intervention in the politics of Harthacnut's court.
English sources are harsher. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Edward took her treasure in 1043 because she had done less for him than he wished, both before he became king and afterwards. The Encomium's story of a letter in her name that lured Alfred and Edward to England in 1036, which it claims Harold forged, has led some historians to suspect that she wrote it herself. What the record does show is a queen who defended her position with wealth, patronage and persistence across five reigns.
Emma bore Æthelred three children: Edward, Alfred and a daughter, Godgifu. Her sons ranked behind the king's older sons by his first marriage, and after the eldest of those died in 1014 she seems to have pressed Edward's claim against Edmund Ironside. When Sweyn Forkbeard conquered England in 1013 she fled to her brother in Normandy, and the family returned after Sweyn's death the following February. Æthelred died in April 1016 and Edmund in November, leaving Cnut king of all England, and in July 1017, according to the Chronicle, Cnut had Æthelred's widow fetched to be his wife. Her sons by Æthelred stayed in Normandy.
The marriage served both sides. Cnut gained a consecrated queen known to the English and a check on Norman support for Æthelred's sons, and Emma kept her rank. They had a son, Harthacnut, and a daughter, Gunnhild, who married the heir to the German empire. As Cnut's queen Emma became the richest woman in England, with extensive lands in Wessex and the east midlands and a strong voice in church appointments, and in the New Minster Liber Vitae of about 1031 she is drawn beside Cnut, under her English name, presenting a cross to the altar.
Cnut died at Shaftesbury in November 1035. Harthacnut was fighting to hold Denmark, and a council at Oxford agreed that Emma should keep Wessex for him from Winchester with his housecarls, while Harold Harefoot, Cnut's son by an earlier partner, held the north. Harold soon sent men to Winchester to take the best of the royal treasure from her. In 1036 her son Alfred crossed from Normandy, was seized by Earl Godwin's men and handed over to Harold's followers, who blinded him; he died of his wounds at Ely. By 1037 Harold was accepted as king everywhere, and Emma was driven out of England to Bruges, where the Flemish count sheltered her.
According to the Encomium she summoned Edward to Bruges, but he declined to act, and it was Harthacnut who joined her there. Harold died in March 1040, and Harthacnut and Emma crossed to England with a fleet of about sixty ships. In 1041 Harthacnut invited his half-brother Edward home and had him recognised as heir, perhaps at Emma's urging, since it kept a son of hers on the throne. Harthacnut collapsed and died at a wedding feast at Lambeth in June 1042, and Edward the Confessor became king.
On 16 November 1043, months after his coronation, Edward rode to Winchester with the earls Leofric, Godwin and Siward and took all the treasure his mother held, and her adviser Stigand lost his bishopric. Edward soon relented and apparently restored much of her property, and she spent her last years quietly at Winchester.
Emma died on 6 March 1052 and was buried in the Old Minster at Winchester, beside Cnut and Harthacnut. After the Norman cathedral replaced the Old Minster, the bones of the Anglo-Saxon and Danish royal dead, hers among them, were kept in the new church, and inscribed stones from its Norman apse wall still name her. In 1642 Parliamentarian soldiers broke open the mortuary chests and scattered the bones, which were gathered up again in a jumble. A scientific study of the chests' contents, announced in 2019, found the partial skeleton of a mature woman that may be Emma's.