Henry I weds Matilda of Scotland

November 11, 1100

To bind his shaky Norman throne to the old Anglo-Saxon bloodline, Henry married the Scottish princess Edith, who took the Norman name Matilda. Chroniclers sniped that he had wedded a nun. The English saw a queen descended from Alfred the Great, and the union gave the crown a legitimacy among the conquered English population that no purely Norman dynasty could have claimed.