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.

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.

No children of Æthelwald and Ælfthryth are known.

In addition to this, and her link with the family of Æthelstan Half-King, Ælfthryth also appears to have been connected to the family of Ælfhere, Ealdorman of Mercia.

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 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.

* Ælfthryth, second or third wife of Edgar of England

A charter of 966 describes Ælfthryth, whom Edgar had married in 964, as the king's " lawful wife ", and their eldest son Edmund as the legitimate son of the king.

Ælfthryth is more reliably established as Coenwulf's wife, again from charter evidence ; she is recorded on charters dated between 804 and 817.

In 979, Queen Ælfthryth, wife of King Edgar of England, founded a royal nunnery on the site as an act of repentance for the murder of her stepson, King Edward the Martyr.

He had the strong support of Edgar and his wife, Ælfthryth, and his works emphasise the role of Edgar, who he saw as Christ's representative, in restoring the monasteries.

They had five or six children together, including Edward the Elder, who succeeded his father as king, Æthelflæd, who would become Queen of Mercia in her own right, and Ælfthryth who married Baldwin II the Count of Flanders.

She received properties that had belonged to Queen Ælfthryth in Winchester and Rutland, and also controlled the city of Exeter, parts of Devonshire, Suffolk and Oxfordshire.

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

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.

In 884 Baldwin married Ælfthryth ( Ælfthryth, Elftrude, Elfrida ), a daughter of King Alfred the Great of England.

He married Ælfthryth, a daughter of Alfred the Great, King of England.

She was Ellen Aldridge, a widow of good repute who was employed by Gorton's wife and lived with the family.

After complimenting Morgan and the riflemen and saying he was praising them to Congress, too, the ardent Frenchman added he felt that Congress should make some financial restitution to the widow and family of Morris, but that he knew Morgan realized how long such action usually required, if it was done at all.

Mr. Bushell was mentioned in 1602 in the will of Joyce Hobday, widow of a Stratford glover.

She was the widow of a writer who had died in an airplane crash, and Mickie had found her a job as head of the historical section of the Treasury.

Twenty years ago, she would have been known as a golf widow, and the sum of her manner was perhaps one of bereavement.

Ace of spades -- a widow, that was what they called a widow, these low-class crooks remembered Mr. Skyros distractedly.

Petitions asking for a jail term for Norristown attorney Julian W. Barnard will be presented to the Montgomery County Court Friday, it was disclosed Tuesday by Horace A. Davenport, counsel for the widow of the man killed last Nov. 1 by Barnard's hit-run car.

His widow started the circulation of petitions after Barnard was reprimanded for violating the probation.

He had promised cheaper housing: arbitrarily he cut all rents in half, whether the landlord was a millionaire speculator or a widow whose only income was the rental of a spare room.

But Myra was the merriest widow I ever saw ''.

Thomas Lincoln's new wife was the widow Sarah Bush Johnston, the mother of three children.

When Darnley died in 1927 his widow presented the urn to the Marylebone Cricket Club and that was the key event in establishing the urn as the physical embodiment of the legendary ashes.

Roser Segimon was the wealthy widow of Josep Guardiola, an Indiano, a term applied locally to the Catalans returning from the American colonies with tremendous wealth.

Her second husband, Pere Milà, was a developer who was criticized for his flamboyant lifestyle and ridiculed by the contemporary residents of Barcelona, when they joked about his love of money and opulence, wondering if he was not rather more interested in " the widow ’ s guardiola " ( piggy bank ), than in " Guardiola ’ s widow ".

A passionate fighting-man ( he fought twenty-nine battles against Christian or Moor ), he was married ( when well over 30 years and a habitual bachelor ) in 1109 to the ambitious Queen Urraca of León, widow of Raymond of Burgundy, a passionate woman unsuited for a subordinate role.

His first wife was the widow of his patron Damas by whom he had two sons: Archagathus and Agathocles, whom they were both murdered in 307 BC.