Part 1 of 2
IN 1016, the Danish King Cnut the Great took the English crown from Edmund Ironside, son of Ethelred the Unready, at the Battle of Assandun. Edmund’s two infant sons, Edmund and Edward, were banished to Sweden; Cnut’s plan was to have them assassinated, but the boys were smuggled to safety at the court of Stephen I of Hungary. A second attempt in 1028 drove them to Kiev, under the protection of Yaroslav the Wise.*
There, Edmund forfeited Yaroslav’s goodwill by having an affair with a noble lady at court, so when Cnut’s son and successor Harthacnut died in 1042, the talk was of Edward returning to England as King. In the event, both Edward and Edmund returned to Hungary, to help Andrew, a relative of Stephen, capitalise on the Vata Uprising in 1046 and claim the Hungarian throne.* Success raised Edward’s profile further, and in 1054 he was summoned back to England, as heir presumptive to the childless Edward the Confessor.
English connections to Kiev were apparently renewed in the time of Yaroslav’s grandson Vladimir II Monomakh, who is said by some Scandinavian sources to have married a daughter of King Harold Godwinson of England. See Gytha and Vladimir.
Stephen’s son Peter Orseolo had lost the confidence of his nobles and allowed Hungary to be dominated by the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry III. Andrew was the nobles’ choice, as well as Yaroslav’s (Andrew had been exiled to Kiev like Edward and Edmund), as King of a more independent Hungary. Perhaps this helps to explain why the English who fled England after the Conquest in 1066 and went to live by the Black Sea asked for Hungarian priests to minister to them. See The Voyage of Sigurd.
Précis
Edmund and Edward were sons of Edmund Ironside, exiles after Cnut the Great took their father’s crown in 1016. They ended up in Kiev, where Edward won the respect of Yaroslav the Wise, and after helping Andrew of Hungary to win the Hungarian throne, Edward was deemed the outstanding candidate to be heir to the ailing King Edward the Confessor. (59 / 60 words)
Part Two
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.
Précis
Edward the Exile died almost immediately after returning home, so Edward the Confessor lay dying in 1066, he nominated Harold Godwinson in Edward’s place, only for William of Normandy to defeat Harold at Hastings. The English nobles declared loyalty to Edward’s son Edgar, but William prevailed, though his son Henry I still found it prudent to marry Edgar’s niece, Matilda. (59 / 60 words)