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By Root 672 0

were Edward, Alfred and Godgifu; and Edward, of course, was later to reign as Edward the Confessor. Æthelred died in 1016. Following the Danish conquest of England, and the flight of her children by Æthelred to Normandy, Ælfgifu-Emma retained her position as queen by marrying the new all-powerful King Canute. The vast empire of her Danish husband included at its height England, Denmark and Norway. She now despised Æthelred. By Canute, she had a son Harthacanute and a daughter Gunnhildr; Harthacanute would reign as king of Denmark (1035-42) and as king of England (1040-42). Ælfgifu-Emma's Norman parentage also provided the tenuous blood link that gave William the Conqueror part of his justification for invading the country in 1066; she was William's great-aunt. In these ways, Ælfgifu-Emma was a pivotal person in the great struggles for England, both Scandinavian and Norman, that marked the eleventh century.

When Ælfgifu-Emma married Canute in 1017 she found that he already had an English mistress, a mistress, moreover, who had already borne him two sons. The mistress turned out to be a strong-minded lady intent on following her own agenda. Her name - could it be anything else? - was Ælfgifu. 'The other Ælfgifu' is how the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes her. But in modern history books Canute's mistress is most commonly called Ællfgifu of Northampton. In the circumstances, Ælfgifu of Northampton and Emma were at odds from the start. Indeed, the next twenty-five years of English, Danish and Norwegian history were to be profoundly affected by the personal jealousy and bitter rivalry that existed between these two able and ambitious women. Ælfgifu of Northampton succeeded in placing one of her sons by Canute on the English throne, Harold Harefoot (king, 1037-40); and she was also the mother of Sveyn 'Alfifasson', who ruled as king of Norway under her own regency between 1030 and 1035. She died at some point after 1040, although exactly when is not known. Could she be the eponymous lady depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry?

Most commentators take sexual scandal to be the point of the Ælfgyva scene. Some, however, have argued that what is being represented is not a sexual scandal at all. We learn from William of Poitiers that in 1064/5 one of the undertakings made, and later repudiated, by the captive Harold was to marry one of Duke William's daughters (the fiancee may have been called either Agatha or Adelaide).3 It has been suggested that the lady named as Ælfgyva. in the tapestry is in fact this Norman lady; and that what we see is some ceremony of betrothal. Thus, according to this theory, there is no scandal; it is said that the priest is actually placing a veil over the bride-to-be's head, this apparently being part of the formalities of engagement.4 (Alternatively, it is said that the priest is removing her veil, which, according to another theory, was what was involved in the formalities of engagement).5 William's daughter is called by the English name Ælfgyva because, so the theory goes, she would have taken that name upon her marriage to Harold - just as her great-great-aunt Emma had done when she adopted the English name Ælfgifu in 1002 upon her own marriage to King Æthelred the Unready. This theory has the great advantage of allowing us to place the Ælfgyva scene not only in Rouen, but also neatly within the thread of the story line. It is suggested that in the immediately preceding panel Harold and William are meant to be discussing the planned marriage. The formal indication of betrothal thus follows; and there would otherwise be no mention of Harold's betrothal.

There are nonetheless considerable difficulties with this theory. For one thing, it is a matter of conjecture that William's daughter would have taken the name Ælfgyva on her marriage; Harold repudiated the engagement and it never took place. And can we really take the designer of the tapestry, working most probably in the 1070s, as referring to the king's very daughter by a purely hypothetical name, a name by which she was not known in the 1070s and indeed