Ælfflæd of Mercia

For other people with the same name, see Ælfflæd.

Ælfflæd
Queen consort of Northumbria
Tenure	792–796
Spouse	Æthelred I of Northumbria (m. 792)
Father	Offa of Mercia
Mother	Cynethryth

A mention of Ælfflæd in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Ælfflæd was a daughter of Offa of Mercia and Cynethryth.

She may have witnessed a charter with her father, mother, and brother Ecgfrith in the 770s. She certainly witnessed a charter in 787 with her mother, father, brother, and two sisters; here she is described as virgo—unmarried.

It is possible that she was the daughter of Offa whose proposed marriage to Charles the Younger caused a dispute between Charlemagne and Offa in around 789–790.

In 792 she married Æthelred I of Northumbria at Catterick. Here she is described as "queen", which has suggested to some historians that she had been previously married, and to a king, perhaps to one of Æthelred's predecessors.

Further reading

• Kirby, D. P. (1991), The Earliest English Kings, London: Unwin, ISBN 0-04-445692-1
• Stafford, Pauline (2005) [2001], "Political Women in Mercia, Eighth to Early Tenth Centuries", in Brown, Michelle P.; Farr, Carol A. (eds.), Mercia, an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Europe, Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 35–49, ISBN 0-8264-7765-8
• Woolf, Alex (2007), From Pictland to Alba, 789–1070, The New Edinburgh History of Scotland, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 978-0-7486-1234-5

External links

• Ælfflæd 5 at Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England