Ælfflæd of Mercia
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, and again 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.
References
- Kirby, D. P. (1991), The Earliest English Kings, London: Unwin, ISBN 0-04-445692-1
- Stafford, Pauline (2005), "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