Edmund I

Edmund I, known in Old English as Eadmund and later called Edmund the Magnificent or Edmund the Elder, was King of the English from 939 until his death in 946. He was born about 921, the son of King Edward the Elder and of Edward's third wife, Eadgifu, daughter of Sigehelm, ealdorman of Kent. He was thus a half-brother of King Æthelstan, under whom a large part of Britain had been brought under English overlordship, and a full brother of Eadred, who later succeeded him. Surviving sources say little about his upbringing. He attested charters in the later years of Æthelstan's reign and, according to the Old English poem on the Battle of Brunanburh, fought beside his half-brother in 937 against a coalition of Dublin Norse, Scots, and Strathclyde Britons. When Æthelstan died in October 939, Edmund, then about eighteen, inherited a newly unified but still fragile kingdom.

The first years of the reign were dominated by a Viking resurgence. Olaf Guthfrithson, king of Dublin, occupied York and overran the Five Boroughs of the north-eastern Midlands, lands that Æthelstan had previously secured. Edmund was obliged for a time to accept the loss of these territories. After Olaf's death in 941, English recovery followed. In 942 Edmund recaptured the Five Boroughs, an event commemorated by a short poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In 944 he expelled the Scandinavian kings Olaf Sihtricson and Ragnall Guthfrithson from Northumbria and restored royal authority at York. In 945 he laid waste the British kingdom of Strathclyde and then granted it to Malcolm I of Scotland, apparently in exchange for a compact of peace and mutual military aid. These campaigns re-established the northern settlement associated with Æthelstan and reduced the immediate Norse threat to the English realm.

Edmund was an early royal patron of the tenth-century Benedictine reform. He installed Dunstan, later archbishop of Canterbury, as abbot of Glastonbury, turning that monastery into a leading centre of revived monastic life. He also supported Oda, who became archbishop of Canterbury in 941. Edmund's first wife was Ælfgifu, afterwards honoured as a saint and connected with Shaftesbury Abbey; she died in 944. Their sons Eadwig and Edgar both became kings of the English in due course. After Ælfgifu's death Edmund married Æthelflæd of Damerham, daughter of ealdorman Ælfgar; no children of the second marriage are known.

On 26 May 946 the king was at the royal residence of Pucklechurch in Gloucestershire. Later chroniclers, including John of Worcester and William of Malmesbury, relate that an outlawed thief named Leofa was present at a feast, that a brawl erupted, and that Edmund was fatally stabbed, either in attempting to restrain the man or in attacking him. He was still in his mid-twenties. He was buried at Glastonbury Abbey, a house he had favoured. Because his sons were minors, the crown passed to his brother Eadred. Although his reign lasted fewer than seven years, Edmund recovered the Danelaw boroughs, settled the northern border through the grant of Strathclyde, and gave decisive early support to the monastic movement that would reach its height under his son Edgar.