The only surviving son of the Danish Lord Siward…

Countess Judith was the wife of Waltheof, the only surviving son of the Danish Lord Siward, who was made the Earl of Northumberland by King Canute. His father died when he was very young. But about the year 1065, he was made Earl of Huntingdon and Northampton by Edward the Confessor. He did not take part in the Battle of Hastings, but afterwards fought valiantly against the Normans. He joined the Danes when they attacked York in 1069, and the Norse sagas credit him with killing a hundred of the followers of William the Conqueror. The following year, he submitted to William. He took the oath of fealty to the king, who restored his titles and lands, and married him to Judith, the
daughter of his sister Adelaide. Two years later, he was made the Earl of Northumberland. Waltheof restored to the Abbey of Crowland near Peterborough the five half acres of land in Barnack, Wellingborough, which had been granted to the abbey by King Edred in the year 948, and must have fallen into the hands of Waltheof’s father in the confusion following the invasion by Canute in 1015. This enabled the abbey to pay for the building of a new church in the abbey. In 1075,
Waltheof was implicated in a plot against William. And after trial, he was executed as a traitor under the old English law at Saint Giles Hill in Winchester on the 15th of May, 1076.

He was buried at Crowland. It is interesting to note that the Normans who were found guilty of taking part in the conspiracy were tried under Norman law, under which the maximum penalty was perpetual imprisonment. As she had not taken part in the conspiracy, his widow, the Countess Judith, inherited Waltheof’s titles and land, including the manor of Yardley, which contains Grendon, Brayford, Denton, Hackleton, Hardingstone, Horton, Quinton, Whiston and Wollaston. She held three hides and two virgates in Grendon. A virgate is a measure of land which, like the hide, varied in extent, but averaged about 30 acres. The arable land she owned in the village was nine carucates. Each carucate was about half a virgate, which were looked after by 12 sokemen, or free farmers. There were also three mills which paid a yearly rent of three shillings and 30 acres of meadow. Judith’s contemporaries accused her of having betrayed her husband in order to marry somebody else, and Ingulfus, a monk of Crowland, termed her “an ungodly Jezebel”.

William the Conqueror then tried to marry her to Simon de St. Lys, but as he was not the man of her choice, she refused to do so. Annoyed at this, the king took her titles and land away and gave them to her daughter Maude, who did marry Simon. After the death of Simon shortly after, Maude married the Scottish Prince David in 1113.

David thus became Earl of Huntingdon through his marriage before he ascended the throne of Scotland as David I in 1124. The earldom of Huntingdon and the lands associated with it were inherited by David’s grandsons, Malcolm and William the Lion, who successively became kings of Scotland. William the Lion ceded the English earldom of Huntingdon and its lands to his younger brother David.