Daughter of the count of Flanders who married William the Conqueror around 1051, governed Normandy while he conquered England, was crowned queen at Westminster in 1068 and was the mother of William II and Henry I of England.
Matilda of Flanders was the daughter of Baldwin of Lille, count of Flanders, and a granddaughter of Robert II of France. Around 1051 she married William, Duke of Normandy, in a match that allied Normandy with Flanders but had been forbidden by Pope Leo IX. When William invaded England in 1066 she governed Normandy in his absence, and on Whit Sunday, 11 May 1068, she was crowned queen at Westminster in a service that declared a queen to share in royal power.
She bore at least nine children, among them Robert Curthose, later duke of Normandy, and two kings of England, William II and Henry I of England. For more than thirty years she took part in ducal and royal government on both sides of the Channel, although her secret help to Robert during his rebellion showed that she kept loyalties of her own. Her abbey of Holy Trinity at Caen, the Abbaye aux Dames, still stands over her grave.
Matilda was born around 1031, the daughter of Baldwin of Lille, who became count of Flanders in 1035, and of his wife, a daughter of Robert II of France. She was therefore a niece of Henry I of France and a cousin of the young Philip I of France, whose guardian her father became in 1060. Through the counts of Flanders she also descended from Alfred the Great, whose daughter Ælfthryth had married a ninth-century count.
William of Normandy was seeking her hand by about 1049, when her father was at war with the emperor Henry III and needed allies. At the Council of Reims in October 1049 Pope Leo IX forbade the marriage, probably because the couple were related within the degrees banned by the Church. The wedding went ahead regardless around 1051 or 1052, and the chronicler William of Jumièges places it at the castle of Eu on the Norman frontier.
Norman churchmen described Matilda in the language of ideal queenship. Orderic Vitalis, writing at the abbey of Saint-Évroul a generation after her death, praised her noble birth, learning, piety and generosity to monks and the poor, and her epitaph at Caen celebrates her royal blood and charity. Her charters and gifts bear out part of this picture: she endowed her abbey richly, gave her daughter Cecilia to it as a nun and kept up ties with churches in Flanders. Orderic also shows a queen with a will of her own. When Robert Curthose rebelled in the late 1070s she sent him money in secret, and when William found out and reproached her she answered, in Orderic's telling, that she would shed her own blood for her son.
Later stories are more colourful and less trustworthy. A twelfth-century chronicle from Tours tells how she refused to marry a bastard until William rode to Bruges and threw her to the ground in the street, after which she would have no one else, and the thirteenth-century rhymed chronicle of Philippe Mouskes has her declare that she would rather become a nun. A continuator of the poet Wace claimed that as a girl she had loved the English thegn Brictric, who spurned her, and that as queen she had him imprisoned and took his lands; Domesday Book does show Brictric's estates in the queen's hands, but the romance built around that fact cannot be tested. The modern belief that she was tiny came from a misreported examination of her bones in 1959, which in fact pointed to a woman about 152 centimetres tall.
The papal ban was lifted only in 1059, when Lanfranc of Bec won a dispensation from Pope Nicholas II. William of Jumièges says that the couple founded two abbeys at Caen as penance, William's Saint-Étienne for monks and Matilda's Holy Trinity for nuns, though the link with the dispensation is not proven. Matilda's abbey church was consecrated on 18 June 1066, and a list of William's ships compiled within a generation of the conquest records that she gave him his flagship, the Mora.
While William was in England, Matilda governed Normandy in the name of their son Robert, with experienced counsellors such as Roger of Beaumont. She acted for the absent duke in 1066–1067 and in several later periods up to 1076, hearing disputes, confirming grants to churches and keeping the duchy quiet at a time when a revolt there could have undone the conquest.
Matilda crossed to England in the spring of 1068 and was crowned at Westminster on 11 May by Ealdred, archbishop of York. The coronation included newly composed acclamations, the laudes, which proclaimed that God had placed her beside the king, that she shared in royal power and that her virtue blessed the people. Her son Henry, the only one of her children born in England, followed late in 1068 or in 1069.
She spent most of her remaining years in Normandy but held English estates, including many of Brictric's former lands in Gloucestershire and the South West. Her last years were troubled by the rebellion of Robert Curthose, who fought his father at Gerberoy in 1079; her secret support for him caused a bitter quarrel with William, and she is credited with helping to reconcile father and son in 1080. She was also godmother to the Scottish princess Edith, who took the name Matilda when she married Henry I of England and is known as Matilda of Scotland.
Matilda fell ill in the summer of 1083 and died on 2 November, probably at Caen, after making her confession with William present. She was buried in her own abbey church of Holy Trinity under a black stone slab carrying a Latin verse epitaph that recalls her royal descent, her charity and her foundation of the abbey. William died four years later. Her tomb was broken open during the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, and the bones that could be recovered were later placed back beneath the original slab.