A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Emma, daughter of Richard the Second, Duke of Normandy
EMMA,
Daughter of Richard the Second, Duke of Normandy, married Ethelred, King of England, with whom she fled, on the invasion of the Danes. She afterwards married Canute; and when her son Edward, called the Confessor, ascended the throne, she reigned conjointly with him. Her enemy, the Earl of Kent, opposed her; and when she appealed for assistance to her relation, the Bishop of Winchester, she was accused of criminal intercourse with that prelate; a charge from which she extricated herself by walking barefoot and unhurt over nine red-hot ploughshares, after the manner of the times. She passed the night previous to her trial in prayer, before the tomb of St. Swithin; and the next day, she appeared plainly dressed, her feet and legs bare to the knee, and underwent the ordeal, in the presence of the king, her son, Edward the Confessor, the nobility, clergy, and people, in the cathedral church at Winchester. Her innocence proved so miraculous a preservation that, walking with her eyes raised to heaven, she did not even perceive the least reflection from the heated irons, (if the old chronicle be true,) but inquired, after having passed over them, when they designed to bring her to the test.
The king, struck with the miracle, fell on his knees before his mother, and implored her pardon; while, to expiate the injury done to her and her relation, the reverend prelate, he devoutly laid bare his shoulders before the bishop, whom he ordered to inflict on him the discipline of the scourge.
Emma, however, stripped by Edward of the immense treasures she had amassed, spent the last ten years of her life in misery, in a kind of prison or convent at Winchester, where she died in 1502.