He was son of King Edgar and Queen Ælfthryth.

Æthelred was not personally suspected of participation, but as the murder was committed at Corfe Castle by the attendants of Ælfthryth, it made it more difficult for the new king to rally the nation against the military raids by Danes, especially as the legend of St Edward the Martyr grew.

Like Queen Ælfthryth, she acted as patroness of the clergy and abbot Ælfsige of Peterborough was one of her closest advisors.

A number of lives of Edward were written in the centuries following his death in which he was portrayed as a martyr, generally seen as a victim of the Queen Dowager Ælfthryth, mother of Æthelred.

Edward was known to be King Edgar's son, but was not the son of Queen Ælfthryth, the third wife of Edgar.

Ælfthryth was the widow of Æthelwald, Ealdorman of East Anglia and perhaps Edgar's third wife.

Dunstan was said to have questioned Edgar's marriage to Queen Dowager Ælfthryth and the legitimacy of their son Æthelred.

The version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which contains the most detailed account, records that Edward was murdered, probably at or near the mound on which the ruins of Corfe Castle now stand, in the evening of 18 March 978, while visiting Ælfthryth and Æthelred.

A recent study translates his words as follows :" And a very great betrayal of a lord it is also in the world, that a man betray his lord to death, or drive him living from the land, and both have come to pass in this land: Edward was betrayed, and then killed, and after that burned ..." Later sources, further removed from events, such as the late 11th century Passio S. Eadwardi and John of Worcester, claim that Ælfthryth organised the killing of Edward, while Henry of Huntingdon wrote that she killed Edward herself.

In the second version, Ælfthryth was implicated, either beforehand by plotting the killing, or afterwards in allowing the killers to go free and unpunished.

Edgar was crowned at Bath and anointed with his wife Ælfthryth, setting a precedent for a coronation of a queen in England itself.

He left two sons, the elder named Edward, who was probably his illegitimate son by Æthelflæd ( not to be confused with the Lady of the Mercians ), and Æthelred, the younger, the child of his wife Ælfthryth.

In 979 AD a Benedictine abbey, the Abbey of St Mary and St Melor, was founded on what may have been the site of a previous monastery by Dowager Queen Ælfthryth.

Arnulf was the son of count Baldwin II of Flanders and Ælfthryth of Wessex, daughter of Alfred the Great.

Ælfthryth (-1000 or 1001, also Alfrida, Elfrida or Elfthryth ) was the second or third wife of King Edgar of England.

Ælfthryth was the first king's wife known to have been crowned and anointed as Queen of the Kingdom of England.

Ælfthryth was the daughter of Ealdorman Ordgar.

Ælfthryth was first married to Æthelwald, son of Æthelstan Half-King as recorded by Byrhtferth of Ramsey in his Life of Saint Oswald of Worcester.

According to William, the beauty of Ordgar's daughter Ælfthryth was reported to King Edgar.

Sound political reasons encouraged the match between Edgar, whose power base was centred in Mercia, and Ælfthryth, whose family were powerful in Wessex.

In 966 Ælfthryth gave birth to a son who was named Edmund.

Edmund died young, circa 970, but in 968 Ælfthryth had given birth to a second son who was called Æthelred.

Here Ælfthryth was also crowned and anointed, granting her a status higher than any recent queen.

In the 19th-century depiction by James William Edmund Doyle, Edward the Martyr is offered a cup of mead by Ælfthryth, widow of the late Edgar, unaware that her attendant is about to murder him.

Æthelflæd is mentioned by King Alfred's biographer Asser, who calls her the first-born child of Alfred and Ealhswith and a sister to Edward, Æthelgifu, Ælfthryth and Æthelweard.

On 18 March 978, while visiting Ælfthryth at Corfe Castle, King Edward was killed by servants of the Queen, leaving the way clear for Æthelred to be installed as king.

Although her reputation was damaged by the murder of her stepson, Ælfthryth was a religious woman, taking an especial interest in monastic reform when Queen.

One of her sons by Baldwin married Ælfthryth, a daughter of Æthelbald's brother, Alfred the Great.

A royal nunnery, Cholsey Abbey, was founded in the village in 986 by Queen Dowager Ælfthryth on land given by her son, King Ethelred the Unready.

When the succession became an issue late in Edgar's reign, Æthelwold supported the claim of Æthelred, the son of his major patron, Ælfthryth, whereas Dunstan and Oswald appear to have supported Edgar's son by an earlier wife, Edward the Martyr, who succeeded to the throne.

On a charter to the New Minster at Winchester, the names of Ælfthryth and her son Æthelred appear ahead of Edward's name.

Sometime before Edgar's death ( 975 ), she left a will in which she bequeathed extensive estates in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire, considerable sums of money and various objects of value to ( 1 ) ecclesiastical houses ( Old and New Minster, Abingdon Abbey, Romsey Abbey and Bath Abbey ), ( 2 ) Bishop Æthelwold ( in person ), ( 3 ) members of the royal family ( Edgar, Queen Ælfthryth and Edward the Martyr ), and ( 4 ) her closest relatives ( her two brothers, her sister and her brother's wife ).

When they reached their neighbor's house, Pamela said a few polite words to Grace and kissed Melissa lightly on the forehead, the impulse prompted by a stray thought -- of the type to which she was frequently subject these days -- that they might never see one another again.

It became the sole `` subject '' of `` international law '' ( a term which, it is pertinent to remember, was coined by Bentham ), a body of legal principle which by and large was made up of what Western nations could do in the world arena.

Dr. Isaacs was so pleased with the quality of her biographical study of Sara Sullam that he considered submitting it to the Century Magazine or Harper's but he decided that its Jewish subject probably would not interest them and published it in The Messenger, `` so our readers will be benefited instead ''.

He was right, and Peter Marshall could not help but recall Andrew Cordier's words on the subject, `` Well, it seemed as good a place as any to do the job ''.

Richard Peters, Secretary of the Board of War, thought Morgan was so extreme on the subject that he accused him of trying to pick a quarrel.

In summary, Brooks Adams felt that the nature of history was order and that the order so discovered was as much subject to historical laws as the forces of nature.

Sam Rayburn took unnumbered secrets with him to the grave, for he was never loquacious, and his word, once given, was not subject to retraction.

The subject he liked most was the female body, which he painted in every state -- naked, half-dressed, muffled to the ears, sitting primly in a chair, lying tauntingly on a bed or locked in an embrace.

It was hardly possible to get any argument on the subject.

The wording of the question was quite general and may have been subject to different interpretations.

It was recognized that skywave signals, because of their reflected nature, are of great variability and subject to wide fluctuations in strength.

Alcohol ingestion succeeded in changing immobility to mobility quite strikingly in one pilot subject ( the only one with whom this technique was tried ).

There was evident delight on the part of the subject in response to her experience of the freedom of movement.

One subject spontaneously asked ( after her arm had finally risen ), `` Do you suppose I was unconsciously keeping it down before ''??

This subject was one who gave an arm-elevation on the second trial in the naive state but not in the first.

More time was spent in trying to marry these incompatibles than over any subject discussed at Yalta.

and as the aspect of the subject was transposed into those clusters of more or less interchangeable and contour-obliterating facet-planes by which plasticity was isolated under the Cubist method, the subject itself became largely unrecognizable.

With this seven-word sentence -- though the speaker undoubtedly thought he was dealing only with the subject of food -- he was telling things about himself and, in the last two examples, revealing that he had departed from the customs of his culture.