The Runaway Nun & the Exiled Princess
Tudors Dynasty & Beyond
RedTop Media / Rebecca Larson
4.4 • 869 Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2026
⏱️ 58 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
What happens to the daughters of a king after everything falls apart?
In this episode, we step into the turbulent aftermath of 1066 and follow the extraordinary—and often overlooked—lives of Gunhild of Wessex and Gytha of Wessex, daughters of Harold Godwinson—the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.
Their stories are anything but quiet.
One becomes a royal nun… who doesn’t quite stay that way. The other is swept into exile, navigating a world far beyond England’s shores, eventually tied to powerful dynasties abroad. These are women born into privilege, thrust into chaos, and forced to reinvent themselves in the shadow of conquest.
From cloisters to courts, scandal to survival, we uncover how these sisters carved out lives that were anything but ordinary—and why their stories deserve far more attention.
Because history didn’t end for Harold’s daughters at Hastings…
it only got more interesting.
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Website (and books): https://historytheinterestingbits.com/
A Slice of Medieval Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@DerekBirks-t3o (wherever you get podcasts)
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Host: Rebecca Larson
Guest: Sharon Bennett Connolly
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Tudors Dynasty and Beyond podcast, history with a twist. |
| 0:07.2 | And now your host, Rebecca Larson. |
| 0:11.7 | Hello and welcome back. |
| 0:13.9 | I'm Rebecca Larson, and well, look who's back again. |
| 0:17.5 | It's my good friend Sharon Bennett Connolly. |
| 0:19.8 | Welcome. |
| 0:23.6 | Hello. Thank you for having me back. |
| 0:28.5 | I feel like I should never been away. I know. I feel like I should say welcome home. |
| 0:36.7 | And we're starting as we mean to go on already laughing our heads off. Every time. Every time we're together, we end up just laughing |
| 0:38.1 | through the whole show. And by the end, our face hurts and bellies hurt. It's a good exercise, |
| 0:43.5 | actually. It is. I'm really, I'm kind of excited about today's topic. And you actually |
| 0:49.8 | recommended this one. And it's way outside my comfort zone. There's going to be a lot of |
| 0:57.4 | mispronouncing names, I think, at least on my part. Hopefully Sharon might have better luck with it than |
| 1:04.7 | I do, but we got a lot of names that are not common today. Wouldn't that be right? Yes, yes. |
| 1:12.3 | So to start, we're talking today about, here we go, we're going to get started. |
| 1:18.2 | We're going to talk about Gita and Gunghild, or some variation of those names. |
| 1:26.7 | And before we get into the questions, I just want to like pose a |
| 1:30.2 | question to everyone to kind of think about as we go. So after 1066, Harold Godwinson's daughters |
| 1:37.6 | lost everything overnight, status, security, even their country. So why does one end up as a queen of Kiev and the other as a |
| 1:48.4 | scandalous runaway nun in Norman England? I love this story about them. I'm so excited. |
| 1:55.9 | Okay, so let's start with their parents because their father is famous. |
| 2:01.1 | I think even Americans who study English history know the name Harold Godwinson, |
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