red's sister's son (Henry of Huntingdon). By his second wife, Emma, he had two sons, Eadward, who came to the throne; and Ælfred [q. v.], who was slain in 1036; and a daughter, Godgifu, who married, first, Drogo, count of Mantes; and, afterwards, Eustace, count of Boulogne.
[Little can be added to Dr. Freeman's account of Æthelred in his Norman Conquest, i. 285–417; Green's notices (Conquest of England) are chiefly valuable when they bear on the intrigues of the court, but some of his statements appear fanciful; Lappenberg's Anglo-Saxon Kings, trans. Thorpe, ii. 150 sq.; Anglo-Saxon Chron.; Florence of Worcester; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum; Kemble's Codex Dipl. vol. iii. (all Engl. Hist. Soc.); Henry of Huntingdon, Mon. Hist. Brit.; Adam of Bremen; Encomium Emmæ, both Rer. Germ. Scriptt., Pertz; William of Jumièges, Duchesne; Parker's Early Hist. of Oxford (Oxford Hist. Soc.); Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus Poet. Boreale; Tryal of John Hambden, Esq., 1719; Stubbs's Constitutional Hist.]
ETHELRED, ÆTHELRED, AILRED, or AELRED (1109?–1166), historical writer, though a Durham man by family—for he was the grandson of Elfred, son of Weston, sacristan of Durham, a famous collector of relics, who was living in 1056 (Reginald, B. Cuthbert; Simeona of Durham Hist. Dunelm. Eccl. iii. c. 7)—was born at Hexham in 1109, and was the son of Eilau, a priest, who was the deputy of the non-resident provost of the church of Hexham (Richard of Hexham, c. 9; Fasti Ebor. 168–9). As a child he is said to have given promise of his future sanctity, and to have prophesied the death of a bad archbishop of York. The editors of Æthelred's life in ‘Acta SS. Bolland.’ find a difficulty in this story; for the only archbishop whom it would fit in point of date is Thomas II (d. 1114), and he was by no means a bad man; while Archbishop Gerard, who certainly was not a good man, died in 1108; and they suggest that Æthelred may have been born some years before 1109, the date at which the anonymous biographer places his birth by his assertion that he lived to the age of fifty-seven. It is, however, quite possible that the biographer may have had an imperfect knowledge of the dealings of Thomas with Æthelred's father, whom he induced to give up his post at Hexham (ib.), and may therefore have given the archbishop a bad character. Æthelred spent his youth in the court of David, king of Scotland, as one of the attendants of his son Henry, and while there gave a remarkable instance of his sweetness of character by forgiving one of his enemies who had slandered him. David was much attached to him, and would have made him a bishop, but he preferred to become a monk, and entered the Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, founded by Walter Espec [q. v.] in 1131. There he held the office of master of the novices, and showed great tenderness and patience in dealing with those under his charge. He became abbot of Revesby in Lincolnshire (John of Peterborough, p. 78), another Cistercian house, founded in 1142, where he was probably the first abbot. In 1146 he was chosen abbot of Rievaulx, and returned thither (John of Hexham, col. 274). He evidently stood well with Henry II, for it was largely due to his exhortations that the king joined Lewis VII of France in meeting Alexander III at Touci in September 1162 (John of Peterborough, p. 79; for the interview, Robert de Monte, Bouquet, xiii. 307). Although suffering from ill-health, he attended the chapter of his order at Citeaux, and on his way thither began to compose a rhythmical prose eulogy of St. Cuthbert, for whom he, as a member of a Durham family, had a special veneration. When at Citeaux he laid aside this work. On his homeward journey he was accompanied by several other abbots, and the party was delayed fifteen days by contrary winds, which prevented them from embarking to cross the Channel. Declaring that his neglect of St. Cuthbert was the cause of this delay, he resumed his work, and the wind at once became favourable (Reginald, B. Cuthbert, p. 176). Nothing more is known of the composition. He was a friend of Reginald, the monk of Durham, and sent him to visit the hermit Godric, in order to gain materials for writing his life, a work in which Æthelred assisted him. Reginald also wrote his ‘Life of St. Cuthbert’ at his request and with his help, and cites him as his authority for several of the legends it contains (ib. pp. 32, 57, 60). On 13 Oct. 1163 he was present at the translation of Eadward the Confessor at Westminster, and offered his ‘Life of the Confessor’ and a homily on the words ‘Nemo accendit lumen,’ written in his praise (John of Peterborough, p. 79). The next year he went on a mission to the Picts of Galloway, who were then in a wild and uncivilised condition, constantly fighting among themselves, and sunk in vice and ignorance. He was at Kirkcudbright on 20 March. He induced the chief of the Picts to become a monk. He also visited Melrose in the present Roxburghshire, and Lauderdale in the present Berwickshire (B. Cuthbert, pp. 178, 188). During the last ten years of his life he suffered much from both gout and stone, but in spite of his bodily weakness continued to eat so sparingly that he was ‘more like a
