He seems to have been born at Bristol in either 1030 or 1035.
According the one source, he married Rissa De Montgomery at Berkeley, England, in 1049. She is listed as having been born in 1044 at St. Germain Montgommery, Normandy, France, (Grubb) or perhaps at Dursley, Gloucestershire (Hamrick), and died either in 1069 or 1090 at Berkeley. (The Hamrick page, however, also has Eadnoth dying at Stamford Bridge two years after the battle there in 1066.)
If both her birthdate and marriage date are correct, she was four or five years old when married, not impossible if the marriage was undertaken for political and economic purposes. She would have been, given these dates, fifteen or sixteen when her child Harding Fitz-Eadnoth was born in about 1060, and her husband would have been between twenty-four and thirty-one.
Eadnoth the Constable (died 1068)[1], also known as Eadnoth the Staller, was an Anglo-Saxon landowner and steward to Edward the Confessor and Harold II, mentioned in Domesday Book as having thirty holdings in Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire before the Norman conquest.[2] He may also have been the same person as Eadnoth of Ugford, also known as Alnoth.[3] [A son was known as Harding fitz Alnoth, that is, son of Alnoth.] Eadnoth was killed at Bleadon in 1068 leading a force against the two sons of Harold II, who had invaded Somerset. His son Harding became sheriff reeve of Bristol and one of his grandsons was Robert Fitzharding, who became lord of Berkeley.[1]
References
1. Williams, Ann (2004). "Eadnoth the Staller" (Subscription required). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 15 July 2011.
2. Palmer, John. "Ednoth the Constable." Domesday Map. University of Hull. Retrieved 15 July 2011.
3. Palmer, John. "Domesday Book: Berkshire Notes" (RTF). Domesday Map. University of Hull. p. 14. Retrieved 15 July 2011.
"Amidst this came one of Harold's sons from Ireland with a naval force into the mouth of the Avon unawares, and plundered soon over all that quarter; whence they went to Bristol, and would have stormed the town; but the people bravely withstood them. When they could gain nothing from the town, they went to their ships with the booty which they had acquired by plunder; and then they advanced upon Somersetshire, and there went up; and Eadnoth, the staller, fought with them; but he was there slain, and many good men on either side; and those that were left departed thence."
Eadnoth the Staller (d. 1068), landowner and administrator, is addressed in a writ of Edward the Confessor, relating to Hampshire and dated between 1053 and 1066 ...; his attestation is also found on two spurious charters for 1065 and he was probably at the beginning of his career in the 1060s.
Stallers were members of the royal household and Eadnoth is elsewhere identified as the Confessor's steward; he seems also to have served as a royal justice. He continued in the service of Harold II and then of William I until he was killed in 1068 at Bleadon at the head of a force defending Somerset against an invasion by the sons of Harold.
His estates, in Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon, and Gloucestershire, passed to Hugh d'Avranches, earl of Chester. He may have held some 65 hides of land in all, but there is some doubt as to whether he should be identified with another of Earl Hugh's predecessors, Alnoth the Staller. The names are distinct, but Alnoth could represent Old English Ealdnoth, and the Domesday scribe occasionally confuses the name elements Eald- and Ead-; alternatively Alnoth and Eadnoth may have been brothers.
Eadnoth has been identified as the father of Harding son of Eadnoth, who by 1086 was a substantial landowner in Somerset, probably by virtue of service to the king; he was a royal justice in the time of William II and was still living in the early 1120s. Harding's Somerset lands went to his son, Nicholas of Meriott; another son was Robert fitz Harding, the Bristol burgess and founder of the second house of Berkeley.