Ancestry of the Godwins

When King Edward the Confessor died in January 1066 his closest relative was his great-nephew, Edgar the Ætheling, but he was young and lacked powerful supporters.

The family is named after Harold's father, Earl Godwin, who had risen to a position of wealth and influence in the 1020s under Danish King Cnut the Great.

In 1045 Godwin's daughter, Edith, married King Edward the Confessor, and by the mid-1050s Harold and his brothers had become dominant, almost monopolising the English earldoms.

In 1009 Wulfnoth was accused of unknown crimes at a muster of King Æthelred's fleet, and fled with twenty ships; a force sent in pursuit was destroyed in a storm.

[3][4] If the relationship were true, the pedigree would result in a significant generational displacement, with two children of Æthelred the Unready marrying the son and great-great-granddaughter of Æthelric.

[8] A few scholars have put forward a genealogical reconstruction making the Godwins descend from Alfred the Great's elder brother, King Æthelred I of Wessex.

[17] Anscombe also cites in support of his thesis John of Worcester's pedigree showing Godwin's father Wulfnoth as son of Agelmær, a brother of Eadric Streona.

[18] Æthelmær was the son of the late tenth-century chronicler and ealdorman Æthelweard, whose own writings record that he was descended from Æthelred I, although the exact nature of this descent has been debated.

He included a family tree based on their work, showing Godwin's descent from Æthelred I, and at one point described Wulfnoth Cild as the son of Æthelmær the Stout.

Peter Rex, in his biography of Harold, describes Godwin as one of Cnut's new men, and dismisses claims that the family had aristocratic ancestry.

According to David Dumville: "The Anglo-Saxon ætheling in the period from the ninth-century Scandinavian settlements to the Norman Conquest was a prince of the royal house.