Edwin, son of Edward the Elder

Who was Edwin, son of Edward the Elder?

Edwin was the younger son of King Edward the Elder and Ælfflæd, his second wife. He drowned at sea in circumstances which are unclear.

Edward the Elder died in 924, leaving five sons by three marriages. Of these, Edmund and Eadred were infants and thus excluded from the succession. Edward's careful work of expansion was undone when the Mercians chose Edward's oldest son Æthelstan—probably raised in Mercia at the court of Æthelflæd—to be their king while the West Saxons picked Ælfweard, elder son of Edward's second wife Ælfflæd, who was perhaps Edward's own choice as successor. Ælfweard's "sudden and convenient" death followed six weeks after that of his father, but Æthelstan appears not to have been recognised as king by the West Saxons until a year after his father's death, suggesting that there was considerable resistance to him and perhaps also support for Edwin.

The contemporary evidence for Edwin's life is very limited. At some point during the reign of his half-brother Æthelstan, Edwin witnessed a charter, S 1417, at New Minster, Winchester, granting lands to one Alfred, a thegn of King Æthelstan. Edwin witnesses the charter immediately after his half-brother and is described as ætheling. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that Edwin drowned at sea in 933. The Francian Annales Bertiniani compiled by Folcuin provide more detail: