Edward the Confessor

Edward the Confessor or Eadweard III (c. 1004–January 4/5, 1066) was the penultimate Anglo-Saxon king of England and the last of the House of Wessex, ruling from 1042 until his death.1 His reign marked the continuing disintegration of royal power in England and the aggrandizement of the great territorial earls, and it foreshadowed the country's later connection with Normandy, whose duke William I was to supplant Edward's successors Harold and Edgar Ætheling as England's ruler.

Further reading

• Aelred of Rievaulx, Life of St Edward the Confessor,translated Fr. Jerome Bertram (first English translation) St Austin Press ISBN 1 901157 75 X