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Æthelbald, King of Wessex
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== Reputation == In the 890s, Bishop Asser gave the only surviving contemporary assessment of Æthelbald. Asser, who was hostile to him both because of his revolt against his father and because of his uncanonical marriage, described him as "iniquitous and grasping" and his reign as "two and a half lawless years", adding that many people attributed the rebellion "solely to arrogance on the part of King Æthelbald because he was grasping in this affair and many other wrongdoings".{{sfn|Keynes and Lapidge|1983| pp= 70, 73}} Post-[[Norman conquest of England|Conquest]] clerical chroniclers adopted Asser's views. [[William of Malmesbury]] wrote that "Æthelbald, who was worthless and disloyal to his father, defiled his father's marriage-bed, for after his father's death he sank so low as to marry his stepmother Judith."{{sfn |Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom|1998|p=177}} According to [[John of Worcester]], "Æthelbald, in defiance of God's prohibition and Christian dignity, and even against all pagan customs, climbed into his father's marriage-bed, married Judith, daughter of Charles, king of the Franks, and held the government of the kingdom of the West Saxons without restraint for two and half years after his father's death".{{sfn|Darlington, McGurk and Bray|1995|p=275}} [[Roger of Wendover]] condemned Æthelbald in similar terms, but claimed that in 859 he repented of his error, put aside Judith and ruled thereafter "in peace and righteousness".{{sfn|Giles|1849|p=187}} The exception was [[Henry of Huntingdon]], who stated that Æthelbald and Æthelberht, "young men of superlative natural quality, possessed their kingdoms very prosperously as long as they each lived. When Æthelbald, King of Wessex, had held his kingdom peacefully for five years, he was carried off by a premature death. All England lamented King Æthelbald's youth and there was great sorrow over him. And they buried him at Sherborne. After this England was conscious of what it had lost in him."{{sfn|Greenway|1996|p=281}} [[Robert Howard Hodgkin]] also adopted Asser's views in his 1935 ''History of the Anglo-Saxons'',{{sfn|Hodgkin|1935|p=516}} but later historians have been more circumspect. [[Frank Stenton]] in ''Anglo-Saxon England'' does not give any opinion on Æthelbald, and observes that his marriage to Judith does not appear to have aroused any scandal among the churchmen of her country,{{sfn|Stenton|1971|p=245}} while Sean Miller in his ''[[Dictionary of National Biography]]'' article on Æthelbald says that very little is known of his reign after his marriage, but he appears to have been on good terms with Æthelberht.{{sfn|Miller|2004}}
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