Truth, Saga
& Legend

Emma arrived from Normandy in the spring of 1002, daughter of Duke Richard I and sister of Duke Richard II, and was married to Æthelred II as part of an Anglo-Norman settlement over the Viking fleets that were using Norman ports. The English record from then on calls her Ælfgifu. She witnesses charters as Ælfgifu regina; she is labelled ÆLFGYFU REGINA in the drawing of 1031; the Chronicle only joins the two names — Ælfgifu Ymma — at the very end.

“Emma” survives because her own book, the Encomium, and the Norman writers use it. It is the name she was born with and the name she chose to be remembered by. The English name was the one she worked under for fifty years.

The album’s first track turns on that exchange: a seventeen-year-old answering to a new name the first time it is called. The renaming is fact. How quickly she learned to answer is the album’s reading.

The Chronicle records that in 1002 the king ordered all the Danish men in England to be slain on St Brice’s Day, 13 November, because he had been told they meant to kill him and his councillors. Two years later Æthelred described it himself, in a charter re-granting the privileges of St Frideswide’s in Oxford: the Danes who had sprung up in the island “like cockle amongst the wheat” were to be destroyed “by a most just extermination.” Those in Oxford fled into St Frideswide’s church, and the townspeople burned it with them inside.

What is not known is the scale. “Every Dane in England” cannot have meant the settled Danelaw, where it was unenforceable; historians read it as aimed at Danish mercenaries and recent settlers in the south. A mass grave of some thirty-five young men found at St John’s College, Oxford in 2008, radiocarbon-dated to around the right years, may be victims.

Emma had been queen since spring, and her own great-grandfather Rollo was a Norse sea-king. The album’s The Feast of Saint Brice puts her at the table. The Chronicle does not say where she was.

The Chronicle gives the order of departure precisely. As Swein’s army took the submission of one region after another and London finally gave in, “the queen went over sea to her brother Richard,” accompanied by Abbot Ælfsige of Peterborough. The king then sent the æthelings Edward and Alfred after her with Bishop Ælfhun. Æthelred himself stayed with the fleet, went to the Isle of Wight for Christmas, and crossed to Normandy last, reaching his brother-in-law’s court in January 1014.

The sequence is documented. The reading of it — that she judged the kingdom lost and moved before her husband did — is the album’s. The Chronicle gives no reasons, and it is at least as likely that the king sent her ahead for safety. I Left Before the King takes the order of the boats and makes it a decision.

Æthelred died in London on 23 April 1016 with Cnut’s army in the country; his son Edmund Ironside fought on, divided the kingdom with Cnut, and died that November. In 1017, the Chronicle says, “before the first of August the king ordered the widow of the late King Æthelred, Richard’s daughter, to be fetched as his wife.”

The marriage gave Cnut a consecrated queen of England, a link to the Norman court that was sheltering Æthelred’s sons, and continuity in a kingdom he had just taken by force. It gave Emma her crown back. Cnut already had a partner, Ælfgifu of Northampton, and two sons by her; she was not put aside, and she would matter again.

The Chronicle’s verb is “fetched.” The Encomium, written for Emma, turns it into a courtship in which she sets the terms — see the 1017 oath, below. I Married the Conqueror sings the Encomium’s version.

Two contemporary pictures of Emma survive, and both are pieces of politics. In the New Minster Liber Vitae of Winchester, made in 1031, Cnut and Emma together place a great gold cross on the altar while Christ looks down from above; she is labelled ÆLFGYFU REGINA, and she stands at the same height and in the same register as the king. In the frontispiece of the Encomium, ten years later, she sits enthroned and crowned, receiving the book from its kneeling author, while her sons Harthacnut and Edward look on from the side.

These are among the earliest surviving images of an English queen, and the second was made to her order. The album’s Leave the First One Out is about the second: a queen sitting three feet from a man painting her enthroned, and watching him do it.

Cnut died at Shaftesbury on 12 November 1035 and was buried in the Old Minster at Winchester. Harthacnut, his son by Emma, was in Denmark and did not come. A council at Oxford made a compromise: Harold Harefoot, Cnut’s son by Ælfgifu of Northampton, would act as regent, and Emma was to stay at Winchester “with the housecarls of her son,” holding Wessex for him.

It did not hold. The Chronicle records that Harold sent men to Winchester and “had taken from her all the best treasures” that Cnut had left. In 1037 Harold was chosen king outright, “and Harthacnut was deserted because he was too long in Denmark.”

I Held Winchester takes the day the news arrived and the treasury she was holding. The counting scenes are the album’s staging; the room, the housecarls and the treasure are the Chronicle’s.

In 1036 Alfred, Emma’s younger son by Æthelred, crossed from Normandy. The Chronicle’s C and D manuscripts break into verse to tell what happened: Earl Godwin met him and turned him from his path; his men were scattered, some sold, some killed, some maimed; Alfred himself was taken by ship to Ely, blinded on board, and died in the care of the monks there. “No more cruel deed was done in this land since the Danes came.”

The death is secure. Who ordered it is not. The C and D chroniclers point at Godwin; the Encomium blames Harold Harefoot; Godwin would later swear his innocence to Harthacnut with a lavish gift of a warship. Nobody accused Emma at the time — but see the forged letter, below.

Somebody Wrote to Him keeps her sixty miles away, in the treasury, for the whole song. That is not a claim that she knew. It is a claim about where she was.

When Harold was accepted as king in 1037, the Chronicle says, Emma “was driven out without any mercy to face the raging winter,” and went over sea to Bruges, where Count Baldwin V of Flanders received her and kept her “as long as she had need.” She did not go to Normandy, where her nephew’s regime was unstable after the death of Duke Robert.

She stayed in Flanders three years. It was there she summoned Harthacnut, there the fleet of 1040 was gathered, and there — at the abbey of Saint-Bertin, a few miles away at Saint-Omer — that she would later find the monk who wrote her book.

Harthacnut joined his mother at Bruges in 1039 and prepared an invasion. Before he could use it, Harold Harefoot died at Oxford on 17 March 1040. The English sent to Bruges for Harthacnut, and he landed at Sandwich in June, “seven days before midsummer,” with sixty-two warships. There was no battle.

The fleet was paid for by a heavy tax, and the Chronicle is sour about both the ships and the bill. Harthacnut then had Harold’s body dug up from Westminster and thrown into a fen. Emma came back with him, queen-mother to a king, four years after she had been told to hold Winchester for his arrival.

Sixty-Two Ships is the count. The number is the Chronicle’s. The tally-stick is the album’s.

In 1041–42, at the English court of her son Harthacnut, Emma had a monk of Saint-Bertin write the Encomium Emmae Reginae — In Praise of Queen Emma. It tells Swein’s conquest, Cnut’s reign and his marriage to her, and the succession crisis after 1035, in her interest and to her brief. It was aimed at a delicate moment: Harthacnut was king, and Edward, her son by Æthelred, had been brought back from Normandy as his likely heir.

The book is famous for what it leaves out. Æthelred, to whom Emma was married from 1002 to 1016 and by whom she had three children, is never named. Cnut’s marriage to her is presented as though she were a desirable unmarried lady from Normandy, not a widow of the old regime. Edward and Alfred appear as her sons without a father.

That silence is the album’s thesis — leave the first one out — and the reason the album exists. She is the one woman in this catalogue who wrote the record herself.

Harthacnut died at Lambeth on 8 June 1042, “as he stood at his drink” at a wedding feast. Edward, Emma’s son by Æthelred, became king and was crowned at Winchester at Easter 1043. That November he rode from Gloucester to Winchester with the three great earls — Leofric, Godwin and Siward — came on his mother unannounced, and seized her lands and “all the treasures which she owned, which were untold.”

The Chronicle gives the reason: she had done less for him than he wanted, before he was king and after. Stigand, her chaplain and ally, lost his new bishopric at the same time. Some of her property was later restored and she lived on at Winchester, but her political career was over.

He Came for the Silver is this day. Godwin — the man who met Alfred at Guildford in 1036 — really is one of the three who rode in with her son.

The Chronicle records that “Ælfgifu Emma, the mother of King Edward and King Harthacnut,” died on 6 March 1052, and that her body lies in the Old Minster at Winchester with King Cnut. Harthacnut was buried there too. Æthelred, her first husband, had been buried in St Paul’s in London in 1016.

Where a queen was buried was often decided by her, her household and her son, and Winchester was her city. Whether she asked for the place beside Cnut is not recorded. Put Me Beside Cnut sings it as an instruction — the last edit to her own history, matching the book that left the first husband out. The burial is fact. The instruction is the album’s.

The Anglo-Saxon royal burials of the Old Minster were moved into the new Norman cathedral, and in the sixteenth century gathered into painted wooden mortuary chests above the choir screen, labelled with the names of kings, bishops — and Emma. In 1642 Parliamentarian soldiers broke into the cathedral, pulled the chests down and scattered the bones; they were gathered back afterwards without any means of telling whose was whose.

In 2019 a team from the University of Bristol and Winchester Cathedral reported on 1,300-odd bones from six chests. They reassembled at least twenty-three partial skeletons, radiocarbon-dated to the late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman period, among them a mature woman. Given the names on the chests, she may be Emma.

“May” is the honest word: there is no DNA reference and no inscription. But it is likely she is still in the building she chose, and that she is not in London.

Æthelred had been married before, in the 980s, and had at least six sons and several daughters by that marriage — Æthelstan, Edmund Ironside and the rest, several of them close to Emma’s own age. The first wife never witnesses a charter as queen and never appears in the Chronicle. Her name, Ælfgifu, and her father’s comes from writers of the twelfth century, who disagree about who he was.

Modern historians generally accept the name. If it is right, the name Emma was given in 1002 was the name of the woman whose place she was taking — which may be coincidence (Ælfgifu was a common royal name) or policy.

The First Wife’s Name is built on it. It is the best-motivated reading of the evidence, not a contemporary fact, and it is filed here for that reason.

The English sources do not say where Emma was in 1016. Thietmar, bishop of Merseburg in Saxony, writing within two years, says the widowed queen was in London when the Danes besieged it after Æthelred’s death, and that she negotiated with them — in his account bargaining over a huge ransom and the surrender of her stepsons.

Thietmar is contemporary and has no motive to invent her, but he was writing hundreds of miles away from traders’ and envoys’ reports, and his English names are garbled. Historians take seriously that she was in London; the details of the deal are much less secure.

I Married the Conqueror opens with her on the London wall, counting ships. The wall is Thietmar’s. The counting is the album’s.

The Encomium says that when Cnut sought her hand, Emma refused to marry him unless he swore that he would never set up the son of any other wife to rule after him — and that he swore it. The purpose is plain: it made her future children by Cnut his heirs over his sons by Ælfgifu of Northampton, and over her own sons by Æthelred, who stayed in Normandy.

This is the only source, and it was written about twenty-five years later, for Emma, at a moment when the legitimacy of her son Harthacnut against Harold’s memory was the whole point of the book. It may be true. It is exactly what she would have wanted it to say.

The album sings it as her claim — the thesis happening in real life before the book writes it down — and files it here, where it belongs.

The Encomium prints a letter in which the queen, “Emma, queen in name only,” urges her sons in Normandy to come to England and claim the throne — and then says Harold Harefoot forged it to lure them over and kill them. Alfred came, and died.

Nobody else mentions a letter at all. Several modern historians, following Simon Keynes, have asked the obvious question: why would the Encomium go to such trouble to disown a letter unless people were saying she had written it? If she did write it, she was trying to get a son onto the throne while Harthacnut stayed in Denmark, and it went catastrophically wrong.

No letter survives, and there is no way to decide. Somebody Wrote to Him refuses to decide too: and I never said it wasn’t, / and I never said it was.

The Chronicle explains Edward’s seizure only as a son’s grievance: she had done less for him than he wanted. A report current later in the Middle Ages gave a sharper reason — that Emma had encouraged Magnus of Norway, who claimed England under a treaty with Harthacnut, and offered him her wealth.

It would explain the speed and force of the raid and the fall of her ally Stigand at the same moment. It is also exactly the charge an embarrassed court would want in circulation after a king had plundered his own mother. Historians treat it as possible and unproven.

He Came for the Silver does not use it. The album keeps the Chronicle’s reason and has her claim it: I gave him exactly what his father gave me.

The kinship is real. Emma’s brother Richard II was the grandfather of William, Duke of Normandy, so Emma was William’s great-aunt and Edward the Confessor his first cousin once removed. Edward had spent twenty-five years in exile at the Norman court, and Norman writers made much of the family tie.

But the Norman case in 1066 rested on Edward’s alleged promise of the throne and Harold Godwinson’s alleged oath, not on inheritance through a woman; kinship through Emma made William a plausible heir, not a legal one. “Through Emma” is shorthand for why an English king would ever have looked to Normandy at all — which is fair, and which runs straight back to the marriage of 1002.

In the story, Edward the Confessor, stirred up by Robert of Jumièges, accuses his mother of adultery with Ælfwine, bishop of Winchester. She submits to ordeal in the cathedral, walks blindfold over nine red-hot ploughshares without feeling them, and asks when the trial will begin. Edward begs her forgiveness and gives land to Winchester in penance.

No contemporary source knows it. It first appears in the Winchester annals, about two centuries after her death, and it has the shape of a monastic foundation legend — a miracle that explains why a church owns certain estates. It is the most famous thing about Emma and none of it happened. The album leaves it out.

Emma’s side told this story. The Encomium says it was widely believed that Harold was the child of a servant, secretly brought into the bedchamber of Cnut’s other partner. A Chronicle manuscript reports that Harold claimed to be the son of Cnut and Ælfgifu of Northampton, “though it was not true.” John of Worcester, in the twelfth century, adds detail: a cobbler’s son for Harold and a priest’s son for his brother Swein.

It was the standard way to attack a rival heir, and there is no evidence for it beyond the people who needed it. Cnut treated both boys as his sons. It survives because it was useful to Emma, and because her book wrote it down.

William of Malmesbury, writing more than a century after the event, says that among the victims of St Brice’s Day was Gunhild, sister of King Swein of Denmark, married to an English-settled Dane called Pallig; that she was made to watch her husband and son killed before she was beheaded; and that her brother’s invasions were revenge.

No earlier source names her. Swein’s raids on England began before 1002 and had obvious motives of their own. The story may preserve a real killing, but it is a later tidying of cause and effect. The Feast of Saint Brice uses it the way the song itself does — “They say a Danish king’s own sister died that day” — as a story told at table, not as fact.

Some of what the album shows is its own. There is no record of Emma counting the treasury on the day Cnut died, or counting ships from London’s wall, or the chests going out past her in 1043. There is no evidence she watched Oxford burn, or that she walked the Old Minster nave three times in the same way. The silver disc brooch that is pinned on her in 1002 and taken in 1043 is a costume device. The Winchester treasury as the room her whole life passes through is a structure the album chose, not a fact.

Those are dramatisations, set in real rooms on real dates with the real people present. Where the album sings something only her book says, it is marked above in From the sources. Where it sings something nobody recorded at all, it is marked here.