First Marriage
On 11 November 1100 Henry married Edith, daughter of King Malcolm III of Scotland. Since Edith was also the niece of Edgar the Ætheling and the great-granddaughter of Edmund Ironside (the half-brother of Edward the Confessor) the marriage united the Norman line with the old English line of kings. The marriage greatly displeased the Norman barons, however, and as a concession to their sensibilities Edith changed her name from the very Anglo Saxon "Edith" to the more Norman "Matilda" upon becoming Queen. The other side of this, however, was that Henry, by dint of his marriage, became far more acceptable to the Anglo-Saxon populace.
Read more about this topic: Henry I Of England
Famous quotes containing the word marriage:
“Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.”
—Peter De Vries (20th century)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)