The Godwins were the family of the last Anglo-Saxon King of England, Harold II. The family is named after Harold’s father, Earl Godwin, who had risen to a position of wealth and influence in the 1020s under Danish King Cnut the Great. Godwin’s origin is obscure. Historians think that he was probably the son of the outlawed South Saxon thegn Wulfnoth Cild.
About Ancestry of the Godwins in brief
The Godwins were the family of the last Anglo-Saxon King of England, Harold II. The family is named after Harold’s father, Earl Godwin, who had risen to a position of wealth and influence in the 1020s under Danish King Cnut the Great. By the mid-1050s Harold and his brothers had become dominant, almost monopolising the English earldoms. Godwin’s origin is obscure. Historians think that he was probably the son of the outlawed South Saxon thegn Wulfnoth Cild. The Life of Edward the Confessor, commissioned by his widow Edith, who was Harold’s sister, is silent on her family’s origin. A few genealogists and historians argue that Godwin was descended from Alfred the Great’s elder brother, King Æthelred I, but almost all historians of Anglo- Saxon England reject this theory. In the view of the historian Frank Barlow: ‘There is massive evasion here.’ Harold was the head of the most powerful family in England and Edward’s brother-in-law, and he became king.
In September 1066 Harold defeated and killed King Harald Hardrada of Norway at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, and Harold was himself killed the following month by William the Conqueror at theBattle of Hastings. In a section designed to eulogise her family, Godwin is described as ‘blessed in his ancestral stock’ but nothing further is said of this stock. In her article on Godwin’s son, Robin Fleming says: “The origins of this paru of Godwin are extremely obscure. He was the quintessential new man’.” A few scholars have put forward a genealogical reconstruction of the Godwin family, but few have put the reconstruction forward making it more likely than not that the family was of aristocratic aristocratic origin.
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This page is based on the article Ancestry of the Godwins published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
