Edith (also known as Ealdgyth) was the only daughter of Earl Godwin of Wessex, the most powerful nobleman in England, and she owned vast lands. On 23 January 1045, she married Edward the Confessor binding together the country's two leading families.
Edith's family connections made her a political pawn. Before Godwin was exiled by Edward in 1051, the king took out his wrath against the Wessex earl by heaping insults on Edith and then confining her to the nunnery at Wherwell in Hampshire. She later rebuilt Wilton Abbey church for the Benedictine nuns.
In Vita Edwardi Regis, a book she wrote to celebrate her life with Edward, she explained their lack of children as pious chastity on her husband's part. However, infertility on one side or the other is deemed more likely. Some accounts say that Edward hated her from the beginning, which meant that their marriage was doomed to be childless.
When William the Conqueror marched across his new kingdom in 1066, it was Edith who was obliged to hand over the keys to Winchester, the county town of Wessex.
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Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and women's power in 11th-century England by Pauline Stafford (Blackwell, 2001)
A biography of the two early English queens in which the author aims to demonstrate the integral place of royal queens in the rule of the English kingdom and in the process of unification by which England was made.
Get this book
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 Wherwell Abbey
3 miles south-east of Andover, Hampshire, 15 minutes from the A303
The large house known as Wherwell Priory, near the river Test, was built in the 19th century on the site of a Benedictine nunnery. There is also a 13th-century barn on the site, now occupied by businesses. The abbey was founded by Queen Elfrida, in expiation of the murder of her stepson Edward the Martyr in 978. It was here that Edith was confined by King Edward in 1051. The nunnery was dissolved by Henry VIII in the 16th century, and nothing remains of it above ground. However, during drainage work in 1962, stone and flint rubble foundations were found under the lawn to the east of the house. The probable extent of the site is marked by a stream diverted during the time of Abbess Euphemia (1226-57). A stone in the garden wall, dated 1649, records that buried here are the last ruins of the 'Monostery of Whorwell, erected by Queen Ethelrea'.
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