Editing Ælfgifu of Northampton (section)

===Marriage to Cnut===
When Swein invaded, northern peoples, some of them of Scandinavian descent, immediately submitted to him. He then married his young son Cnut to Ælfgifu to seal their loyalty. Swein went on to conquer the whole of England and was accepted as King, but he died in February 1014 after a reign of only five weeks. Æthelred then sent an army which forced Cnut to flee back to Denmark, and in the opinion of historian Ian Howard, he left his wife and their baby son, [[Svein Knutsson|Svein]], the future King of Norway, behind with her family. They were anxious to make their peace with Æthelred, but unwilling to hand Ælfgifu and her son over to Æthelred to be killed, so they sent the mother and child with King Swein's body to Denmark. There she became pregnant again, and in 1015 or 1016 she gave birth to [[Harold Harefoot]].<ref>Ian Howard, ''Harthacnut: The Last Danish King of England'', The History Press, 2008, pp. 13–4. Pauline Stafford, in her [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/180 Online DNB article on Ælfgifu] states only that the marriage took place between 1013 and 1016, but she also states that the marriage was part of Swein's effort to establish himself first in the north Midlands, and as he died in February 1014 it seems likely that the 1013 date is correct.</ref> In the period immediately following, she may have been given authority over some region of Denmark, perhaps that of a Danish-controlled area of the Baltic coastline.<ref>Timothy Bolton, 'Ælfgifu of Northampton: Cnut the Great's other woman', Nottingham Medieval Studies LI (2007), pp. 260–261</ref>

Her two sons were to figure prominently in the empire which their father built in northern Europe, though not without opposition. After his conquest of England in 1016, Cnut married [[Emma of Normandy]], the widow of [[Æthelred the Unready|King Æthelred]]. It was then regarded as acceptable to put aside one wife and take another if the first wife was acquired through the non-Christian pagan ceremony of "[[handfasting]]" and nearly always for reasons of political advantage, a practice which might be described as "serial monogamy"; this was the case with the marriage of Ælfgifu to Cnut.<ref>{{cite book |last=Stenton |first=Frank |author-link=Frank Stenton |title=Anglo-Saxon England |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |location=Oxford |year=1971 |pages=397 |isbn=0-19-280139-2}}</ref><ref>Howard, op. cit., p. 15</ref> The status of Cnut's two marriages and their social context in England and Scandinavia has been discussed recently by Timothy Bolton.<ref>Timothy Bolton, "Ælfgifu of Northampton: Cnut the Great's other woman", Nottingham Medieval Studies LI (2007), pp. 253–258</ref> Emma's sons, [[Edward the Confessor|Edward]] and [[Alfred Atheling|Ælfred]] by Æthelred and [[Harthacnut]] by Cnut, were also claimants to the throne of her husband. Exactly how the second marriage affected Ælfgifu's status as Cnut's first consort is unknown, but there is no evidence to suggest that she was repudiated.