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Born c. 985, died 1052
Emma was the half-Danish sister of Duke Richard II of Normandy and queen to two kings of England. She married Ethelred the Unready in 1002 and Cnut in 1017 after Ethelred's death.
From her base at Winchester, she played a key role in affairs of state. Two of her sons became king: first, Harthacnut, son of Cnut; then Edward the Confessor, Ethelred's son.
Her loyalties seem to have lain chiefly with her Scandinavian kinfolk. Although she is said to have eased Edward's passage to the throne, she also schemed at one stage to replace him with Magnus, king of Norway.
In 1041, she commissioned a book, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, to document her family's achievements. She was buried next to Cnut at Winchester. Her marriages forged the link between England and Normandy that was to culminate in her grandnephew William of Normandy's invasion of England in 1066.
Emma
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/
encyclopaedia_romana/britannia/
anglo-saxon/hastings/emma.html
Emma's story from the time she married Cnut.
Emma: The twice-crowned queen by Isabella Strachan (Peter Owen, 2004)
Standing at the meeting point of the three cultures of the early Middle Ages - Saxon, Viking and Norman - Emma and her queenship provide a captivating glimpse, based on contemporary writings and the work of modern scholars, of a pious and brutal age.
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Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and women's power in eleventh-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
Corfe Castle
On the A351 between Wareham and Swanage in Dorset, in an area popularly known as the Isle of Purbeck
The site of Edward's murder, the ruins that can be seen today are mainly from the reign of King John, whose favourite residence this was. The castle is now owned by the National Trust.
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