Osgifu
Osgifu was married to make a usurper's claim look legitimate, and she signed the letters that survive from his reign. She was a daughter of Eadberht, king of Northumbria, who had reigned for twenty-one years and then resigned the throne to enter the monastery at York - where his brother was archbishop, which is the arrangement that kept that family in power. In 765 a council at Pincanheale deposed Aethelwald Moll and put Alhred on the throne. His descent would not bear much examination, and marrying her supplied what it lacked, since it connected him to the house that had actually ruled. The evidence for her is a correspondence. She and Alhred wrote jointly to Lull, the English archbishop of Mainz, commending envoys, asking for prayers and sending gifts - and those letters, preserved in the German church's archive rather than in England, are among the best evidence anywhere for what a Northumbrian court actually did. She writes as a party to the government rather than as an afterthought. Alhred was driven out at York at Easter 774 and fled to the Picts, and she is generally taken to have gone with him. Their son Osred II took the throne in 788, was deposed within a year, tonsured, exiled, came back, and was killed in 792. Nothing records what became of her. The letters are the reason she is here at all, and they are a useful corrective: the narrative sources for eighth-century Northumbria are annals written by men, listing which king killed which, and the women of those courts appear in them almost solely as marriages. A correspondence preserved abroad because a German church kept its archive better than an English one shows a queen conducting foreign business in her own voice, which the annals would never have told us.
- Nationality: Northumbrian
- Roles: noblewoman
