EDWARD arrived in England in 1057, but died almost immediately, leaving his uncle King Edward the Confessor without an heir. The King nominated his brother-in-law, Harold Godwinson, but just months after the Confessor died in 1066, Harold was killed at the Battle of Hastings, and the victorious William, Duke of Normandy, a cousin of King Edward, claimed the crown.*
Harold’s council of noblemen, the Witenagemot, rebelled. They awarded the crown to Edgar,* young son of Edward the Exile and his Kievan wife Agatha,* saying he had inherited his father’s right; but William swore the crown had been promised to him first, and that his right had been proven in combat.
By Christmas, Edgar had stepped aside, though he subsequently took part in the ill-fated revolts which provoked William’s brutal ‘harrying of the North’ in 1069. Following an awkward reconciliation, Edgar survived to see his sister Margaret marry Malcolm III of Scotland and his niece Matilda marry Henry I of England, and died sometime after 1125.
See our post The Battle of Hastings.
Agatha’s identity is much disputed, and there is little agreement among mediaeval chroniclers. Roger of Howden, who was close to her great-great-grandson Henry II, wrote that she was a Kievan aristocrat, and much earlier William of Malmesbury, a contemporary of Edgar, said Agatha’s sister was Queen of Hungary. If that Queen was Anastasia, Queen consort of King Andrew, then Agatha would also be a daughter of Yaroslav the Wise.
Edgar’s surname ‘the Atheling’ is simply Old English for ‘the Prince’; the same word is found in the name William Adelin, who died in The Disaster of the White Ship of 1120, and who was the son of Edgar’s niece Matilda and her husband, King Henry I of England.
Matilda of Scotland (?1080-1118) was baptised Edith. For a quick guide to the bewildering variety of Matildas in this period, see The Matildas of England. Edgar was born in about 1051, and was still alive when the historian William of Malmesbury was writing in 1125.