Vita Ædwardi Regis

The Vita Ædwardi Regis qui apud Westmonasterium Requiescit (English: Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster) or simply Vita Ædwardi Regis is a Latin biography of King Edward the Confessor completed by an anonymous author c. 1067 and suspected of having been commissioned by Queen Edith, Edward's wife. It survives in one manuscript, dated c. 1100, now in the British Library. The author is unknown, but was a servant of the queen and probably a Fleming. The most likely candidates are Goscelin and Folcard, monks of St Bertin Abbey in St Omer.

It is a two-part text, the first dealing with England in the decades before the Norman Conquest (1066) and the activities of the family of Godwin, Earl of Wessex, and the second dealing with the holiness of King Edward. It is likely that the two parts were originally distinct. The first book is a secular history, not hagiography, although book ii is more hagiographic and was used as the basis of later saints' lives dedicated to the king, such as those by Osbert of Clare and Aelred of Rievaulx. The Vita is very important to historians of England in the eleventh century, because it is one of the few good primary sources still available from the period. Also, it is a transitional piece, showing how England was more closely related to Scandinavia, and how after the Norman Conquest, it shifted south and became more connected to continental Europe, particularly France. The time of the Vita was a time when this crucial shift in England's history was taking place.

There are two modern English translations of the text, those of Henry Richards Luard (1858) and Frank Barlow (1962, 1992).