“On the death of Edred, Eadwig [or Edwy] succeeded to the kingdom. Two years afterwards, his younger brother Edgar succeeded to the kingdom of the Mercians.”
“In 958, Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury, separated King Edwy from his wife Elfgyfu, because they were too near akin.”
“In 959, King Edwy died on the 1st of October, and Edgar his brother succeeded to the kingdom as well of the West Saxons as of the Northumbrians and Mercians, being then about sixteen years old.”
Such is the only information (with one important exception) vouchsafed us in the Chronicle concerning the short reign of the unfortunate Edwy, who when about fifteen years of age succeeded his father Edmund. These sentences suggest much—internal discord, fraternal rivalry, a matrimonial union condemned by the Church, the early death of a broken-hearted husband—but they tell us nothing as to the causes of these events. Later historians have believed that they found the clue to the mystery in the one sentence which has not yet been quoted. “And in the same year [957] Abbot Dunstan was driven away over sea.” However this may be, the story of Edwy’s reign is so inextricably intertwined with the life of this man, the most famous English saint between Cuthbert and Becket, that for a little space history must give place to biography.
Dunstan was born about the year 925, near the commencement of the reign of Athelstan. His birthplace was in the immediate neighbourhood of the great Abbey of Glastonbury; his parents must have belonged to the higher ranks of Anglo-Saxon society, since he numbered two bishops and certain members of the royal household among his near kinsmen and was in some way related to a niece of Athelstan’s. Glastonbury was probably the only great sanctuary in which the religious life of the Celt had flowed on without interruption into a Teutonic channel; and it may have been on account of its old British traditions that it became the resort of “certain Irish pilgrims who looked on that place with great affection, especially on account of their reverence for the younger Patrick, who is said to be there resting in the Lord”.175 Taught by these men, the boy early acquired great familiarity with Scripture; he received the tonsure and performed some of an acolyte’s duties in the church of the Virgin, but was not as yet definitely vowed to a religious life. He seems to have been admitted as a lad to some place about the court of King Athelstan, who probably often visited the royal estate of his own great ancestor at Wedmore, a few miles from Glastonbury. But the future archbishop’s experience of court life was not a pleasant one. He was evidently a lad of quick intelligence with a nervous and sensitive frame, a soul much exercised by the joys and the terrors of the world of spirits. He had already seen some visions, and in the delirium of fever had climbed to the roof of the church at Glastonbury, his safe descent wherefrom was accounted a miracle. His young kinsmen, the pages of the court, with their rough and fleshly natures, could not tolerate this pale and pious playfellow, and they treated him as bullying schoolboys in later generations have often treated an unpopular comrade. At last, by an accusation of extracting from Latin books a knowledge of unholy arts, they obtained an order for his expulsion from court, which they emphasised in their own brutal way by throwing him into a marshy pool, and then trampling him down into the stinking mud. The poor victim escaped to the neighbouring house of one of his friends, but on arriving there was set upon by the dogs, who in his besmirched figure scarcely recognised a human being, much less one of their master’s friends. When they heard his voice, however, they at once gave him a warm canine greeting, whereupon the young saint wept at the contrast between the friendliness of the dog and the cruel animosity of man.
At this point Dunstan had come to the parting of the ways. “The ancient enemy of mankind,” says his biographer, “sorely tempted him with suggestions of the delightfulness of family life, and the love of woman,” but, on the other hand, his kinsman, Elphege, Bishop of Winchester, strongly urged him to become a monk, and to this advice he yielded after a sharp attack of some sickness, in the nature of bubonic plague, from which he was like to have died. It was no doubt the great monastery of Glastonbury in which he made his profession. Near to that monastery was the dwelling of an elderly lady named Ethelfled, a relative and patroness of Dunstan. The saint in his old age sometimes told the story of the barrel of mead which in answer to Ethelfled’s prayers was miraculously replenished, when a sudden visit from her uncle Athelstan found her without sufficient provision of liquor for all his thirsty courtiers. He told too of the white dove which he saw alighting on the roof of the blessed matron’s house when she lay a-dying, and of the converse which on his entering her room he found her holding with an invisible heavenly visitor.
In Dunstan’s monastic life, both now and later on when he had attained to high office in the Church, there was always room left for other occupations besides prayer and psalmody. We are told that “in the intervals of his study of sacred literature, he diligently cultivated his talent for playing on the harp, as well as for painting, and that he became a skilful judge of all articles used in the household”. At the request of a devout lady who was his friend, he sketched out for her a design for a stole with various kinds of patterns, which she could afterwards embroider with gold and gems. A bell was long preserved at Canterbury fashioned by the saint’s own fingers; and late in life he presented to Malmesbury Abbey an organ, bells and stoup for holy water, all of his own manufacture.
After the accession of Edmund, Dunstan, who was still but a youth, was recalled to court, and probably on account of his literary qualifications “was numbered among the royal chiefs and princes of the palace”. What precise official rank these words betoken it would be difficult to say; but whatever it may have been, he soon lost it through the machinations of his enemies, who probably again whispered in Edmund’s ear the old accusation, “Dunstan traffics with the powers of darkness”. Bowing his head to the storm, Dunstan prepared to quit the realm, and taking advantage of the presence at court of certain messengers from “the eastern kingdom,” he begged them to procure him an asylum in that land. What is the meaning of these words “the eastern kingdom” is by no means clear. Germany has been suggested, but on the whole it is perhaps slightly more probable that the biographer—not a very accurate writer—means by these words to describe East Anglia. That region, though not strictly a kingdom, was still bound by a somewhat loose tie to Wessex, and was at this time ruled by a great noble named Athelstan, who, though properly speaking he was only an ealdorman, was known in the common speech of men as “the half-king”.
Whatever may have been the exact name of Dunstan’s intended place of refuge, it was not, in fact, necessary for him to betake himself thither. The court was at this time staying at Cheddar, that well-known and beautiful village at the foot of the Mendips, where steep cliffs and stalactite caves attest the wonder-working presence of the limestone formation. One day Edmund, while hunting, became separated from his companions, and found himself following the hounds and the stag alone. In its desperation the hunted animal made for the cliffs, leaped from the top and was dashed to pieces. The hounds followed, and the king followed also, pulling in vain at the bridle of a hard-mouthed horse, and seeing a terrible death immediately before him. In that moment Edmund reviewed his past life, and thought with satisfaction: “I do not remember to have ever wittingly injured any man”. But then Dunstan’s name came into his mind. “Too true! I have injured Dunstan. O God, if Thou wilt preserve my life, I will be reconciled to Thy servant.” The horse stopped, on the very edge of the precipice, and the king’s life was saved.
Meanwhile, however, the first act of the delivered king was to send for Dunstan, provide him with a horse and ride with him to Glastonbury. After offering prayer, the king took the monk’s right hand, gave him the kiss of peace, led him up to the abbot’s chair and seated him thereon, saying: “Be thou occupant of this seat and a faithful abbot of this church. Whatever may be lacking for the performance of divine service and the due observance of your holy rule, I will supply it from my royal bounty.” Thus was Dunstan, still in very early manhood, installed as abbot in the great historic house of Glastonbury. The Benedictine rule, if it had been adopted in this monastery, had become much relaxed, but Dunstan at once set to work to restore the discipline of the brotherhood. He enlarged the buildings, and collected round him a crowd of young followers, whom he instructed in Holy Scripture, so that from this monastery, as from a school of the prophets, many deans, abbots, bishops, even some archbishops went forth to guide and govern the English Church. At this point of the story we hear much of Dunstan’s conflicts with the Powers of Darkness, conflicts which were believed to endure throughout his monastic life. Now the Evil One appeared to him in the form of a bear, now as a dog, now as a fox, shaking his tail in terror and shrinking from the keen glance of the holy man. All these appearances and others like them, which later ages delighted to record and to magnify, belong to the intellectual pathology of the cloister and are not to be specially attributed to the spiritual discernment or the cerebral excitability of this particular recluse, though we may be permitted to observe that they occupy a more prominent place and are of a more grotesque character in the authentic Lives of Dunstan than in the pages of Bede. Unfortunately they have, by their frequent repetition, somewhat obscured the real greatness of the alleged devil-fighter, both as ecclesiastic and as statesman.176
After the death of Edmund (of which the saint is said to have had supernatural warnings) his successor Edred took Dunstan into high favour and committed to him the charge of his treasure and of many of the deeds relating to his various estates, besides the precious things accumulated by the old kings his predecessors. All these were deposited at Glastonbury. Moreover, Edred desired to make his friend bishop of Crediton, but Dunstan refused, nor could even the entreaties of the king’s mother, Edgiva, though she had great influence with him, prevail upon him to consent to take the nominal charge of so distant a diocese. When Edred’s long struggle with disease was nearing its end, he ordered Dunstan to bring to him the treasures committed to his charge that he might make a death-bed division of them among his kinsfolk. The saint complied with the order, visited Glastonbury and had gone several stages on the return journey, when he heard a voice from heaven saying: “Behold! now King Edred has departed in peace”. A yet greater marvel! his horse, hearing the same voice and “being unable to bear the presence of the angelic sublimity,” fell down and died on the road. When Dunstan reached the palace he found that his patron’s death had taken place at the very same hour at which he had received the heavenly communication.
We have now reached the same point in Dunstan’s life at which we had already arrived in the history of the kingdom. Edred dead, and the boy-king Edwy seated on the throne (955), we come to the well-known scene at the coronation banquet. Dunstan’s biographer tells us that after the great ceremony had been performed, when according to the unanimous choice of all the English nobles, Edwy had been anointed and hallowed as king, he suddenly leaped up and left the merry banquet and the company of his own nobles, whom he forsook for the companionship of two high-born dames, Ethelgiva and her daughter Elfgiva. These ladies were of royal descent, Edwy’s near relations; and it is a plausible conjecture, though only a conjecture, that the elder lady may have acted as foster-mother to the king, who had lost his own mother in childhood. It was natural, if not politic, for the boy-king (still scarcely fifteen years of age) to leave the company of the grim warriors and hoary churchmen who composed his witan, and to refresh himself with the livelier talk of his child-sweetheart and her mother. But the nobles of the witan felt themselves insulted by the king’s departure, and Oda, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had Danish blood in his veins, in a loud and angry voice gave utterance to the general discontent. “Let some one,” he said, “be chosen who shall bring back the king to take his place, as is fitting, at our merry banquet.” All others refused, not liking to face the women’s wrath, but at last Abbot Dunstan and his relative Kinsige, Bishop of Lichfield, were chosen for the disagreeable task. When they entered the royal apartment they found the crown cast carelessly on the ground and the king seated on a couch between the two ladies. “We are sent,” said they, “by the nobles to beg you to return at once to your fitting place at the board and not to disdain to mingle in the joyous feast of your thegns.” The boy at first refused and the women scolded, but Dunstan raised the king from the couch, put his crown becomingly on his head and led him back, an obviously reluctant banqueter, to the company of his nobles. Such was the scene, natural and intelligible enough and worth studying for the sake of the light thrown by it on the habits of our forefathers in the tenth century, but by no means justifying either the praise or the blame which have been bestowed on the chief actors therein, especially the foul imputations which the monkish biographer has cast upon the characters of “the two she-wolves,” as he terms them, the ladies Ethelgiva and Elfgiva.177
Dunstan’s intervention at such a time was not likely to recommend him to royal favour, and it is with no surprise that we read the Chronicle’s entry for the year 957: “In this year abbot Dunstan was driven away over sea”. Even his own friends were partially alienated from him, for his biographer lays the blame of his banishment and the confiscation of his goods not only on “the impudent virago, that Jezebel,” Ethelgiva, but also on “the secret machinations of his own disciples, whom he himself had nurtured in their tender years with the nectareous sweetness of his teaching”. This is one of several indications that the struggle, a very obscure one and difficult to understand, which took place during Edwy’s short reign, was not, as was formerly supposed, a struggle between the boy-king on the one hand and an arrogant and united Church-party on the other. There were ecclesiastics on both sides, and Edwy, at any rate, was no declared enemy of the Anglo-Saxon Church. There are in the Saxon Cartulary copies of grants made by him to Glastonbury, to Bath, to Worcester, to Abingdon and many other monasteries. But there are also grants made by him in surprising numbers to the thegns of his court, and this lavish generosity looks like a sign of weakness and may have had something to do with the revolt against his authority.178
Notwithstanding the uproar at Edwy’s coronation, the lady Elfgiva, who was one of the persons blamed for his absence from the feast, became soon afterwards his wife. To one document which is assigned to the year 956 the names of Elfgiva, “king’s wife,” and Ethelgiva, “king’s wife’s mother,” are attached as witnesses. It was not till two years after this time that, according to the Chronicle, “Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury, separated King Edwy from his wife Elfgiva because they were too near akin” (958). At this point Edwy’s wife and her mother disappear from authentic history. Writers of little judgment, the earliest of whom lived a century and a half after the event, tell us distressing stories of the branding of Elfgiva’s face with a hot iron, of her or her mother’s flight into Ireland, return and miserable death under the cruel operation of ham-stringing. The authority for these tales is poor, their style legendary, the confusion which they make between Ethelgiva and Elfgiva an additional reason for distrust. On the whole, though a painful suspicion may rest on our minds that there was some basis of fact underlying these ghastly traditions, we are not bound to accept them as history. In any case no one has a right to impute these cruelties, if ever committed, to Dunstan, who was almost certainly still in exile at the alleged date of their infliction.
The cartularies further show us that under the reign of Edwy his venerable grandmother Edgiva, widow of Edward the Elder, was deprived of some portion of her property, which she recovered after the accession of Edgar. It is evident, from this and other indications, that many personal and political questions were involved in the revolution which has next to be described; and it is probable that the great ecclesiastical controversy which sounded so loud through the next twenty years had no connexion therewith. Of that revolution itself we have most scanty details. The chiefs of the realm, we are told, dissatisfied with Edwy’s government, proclaimed as king his brother Edgar, a boy of some thirteen years old. We hear of no battles. A compromise was soon arranged, by the terms of which Edgar reigned in the lands north of the Thames, and Edwy south of that boundary. We may probably trace here some remains of the old jealousy between the kingdoms. Edwy retained the allegiance of loyal Wessex, while Mercia, glad of any pretext for recovering her lost independence, rallied round the standard of his brother and was joined by East Anglia, under whose “half-king” Athelstan and his wife Elfwen, Edgar had been reared from infancy. This compromise was arranged in 957, and in the following year, or in 959, Edwy died and Edgar reigned alone over the whole kingdom. There is no suggestion of foul play, but it is natural to conjecture that Edwy’s early death was caused by worry and disappointment at the unfortunate turn which his affairs had taken both in his household and in his kingdom.
The accession of Edgar to the Mercian throne was speedily followed by the recall of Dunstan from exile.179 When the young abbot was sent away “over-sea” by the offended Edwy, he sought shelter in Flanders, then ruled by a grandson of Alfred the Great, Count Arnulf the Old. His temporary home was the great monastery of St. Peter’s at Ghent, and his observation of the strict discipline there maintained by the abbot doubtless stirred his emulation to begin similar reforms in the monasteries of England. On his return from banishment he was promoted to the office of bishop of the Mercian see of Worcester. To Worcester in 959 the see of London was added, a strange instance of plurality but probably a temporary expedient resulting from the determination of the old queen Edgiva and the other advisers of Edgar that the highest place in the English Church should eventually be filled by the great reformer. The old Danish archbishop Oda died, probably in 958. His immediate successor, Elfsige, of whom it was related that he spake vaunting and contemptuous words of the late archbishop, striking with a staff insultingly on his grave, was soon punished for his irreverence. On his way to Rome to receive the pallium, he caught so severe a chill in the snows of St. Bernard that he died in the land of the stranger. A second successor, Beorhthelm, was appointed in 959, immediately before Edwy’s death, but was unceremoniously deposed by Edgar in the following year to make room for Dunstan. This great saint, who had now reached the zenith of his orbit, ruled the Church of England with eminent wisdom and success for twenty-eight years, from 960 to 988, but evidently his sphere of action was not confined to the Church. It is probable that much of the success of the undoubtedly successful reign of Edgar was due to the advice of Dunstan, and if the saint’s biographers would but have retrenched one half of the miracles which they have recorded in his honour, and would have described some of the affairs of state which he guided to a right issue, they would have conferred a great benefit on history, and they would probably have placed their favourite’s name high beyond the reach of doubt among the Christian statesmen of England. At present that reputation, great as it is and much as it has grown of recent years, is rather a matter of highly probable inference than of actual proof.
Politically the reign of Edgar the Peaceful, as we know it, is somewhat barren of events and seems to have been characterised by almost unbroken tranquillity. Save for the facts that in 966 “Thored son of Gunner harried Westmorland,” and that three years later “King Edgar commanded the land of Thanet to be ravaged,” no military operations are recorded in the Chronicle; and so great is the obscurity that we do not even know whether the first operation was undertaken in obedience to, or in defiance of, the orders of the king. Nor can we tell whether the ravage of the Isle of Thanet was a penalty for some movement of revolt or a precaution against its occupation by the Danes. On the whole, the latter hypothesis is perhaps somewhat the more probable.
But by far the most memorable event in Edgar’s reign, and the event with which his name and Dunstan’s are chiefly connected, was of an ecclesiastical kind, the famous monastic reform. This movement was not, as it used sometimes to be considered, primarily a struggle like Hildebrand’s on behalf of the celibacy of the clergy: it was essentially a struggle for the reform of the relaxed discipline of the convents, and the restoration to monks, strictly so called, of houses and lands which had been gradually filched from them by the hybrid order of canonici. These men may be considered as occupying a half-way position between the parish priest and the professed monk. Following the canon, the rule framed by Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, in the latter part of the eighth century, these canonici, priests leading a collegiate life, were bound to chastity and obedience but not to the renunciation of all private property. Thus their standard was in some respects lower than that of the regular monks, and if their rivals are to be trusted—which is perhaps doubtful—they fell far below even that lowered standard. The staid and decorous William of Malmesbury laments that his beloved monastery had been turned into “a stable of clerics”. Florence of Worcester says that Edgar “cast out from the convents the impostures of clerics,” and many similar passages might be quoted, in which the monks speak with the utmost bitterness of their canonical rivals.
The great reform, however, with which the names of Edgar and Dunstan are associated, consisted not merely in the casting forth of the canons and the restoration of Benedictine regulars to their homes. It was also part of a great general movement for the purification of conventual life and the uplifting of the standard of morals in the whole Christian community; a movement which began in Eastern France, spread thence over Flanders, Germany and Italy, and will be for ever associated with the venerable name of the monastery of Cluny, founded in 910 by William, Duke of Aquitaine. In the monastery of Cluny and the religious houses which followed its example, the rule of St. Benedict was restored in more than its old strictness. The chanting of the whole Psalter every twenty-four hours; silence so nearly total that the monks almost lost the habit of speech; the entire prohibition of the flesh of four-footed animals for food; coarse clothing of a dun colour; absolute obedience to the ecclesiastical superior, and the entire prohibition of private property; these were the chief points of the restored monastic discipline which Dunstan brought back with him from the Continent.
Three other ecclesiastics besides Dunstan threw their weight into the reforming scale. The first was the venerable archbishop, Oda the Dane, who, however, died in 958 or 959 while the movement was still in its infancy. His nephew Oswald, who was consecrated bishop of Worcester in 961, and who eleven years later received in addition to that dignity the archiepiscopal mitre of York, was after Dunstan the most eminent churchman of the age, and zealously seconded the efforts of his brother of Canterbury. The most active, however, as well as the harshest and most unpitying of the reformers, was Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, who was, like his teacher Dunstan, of noble birth and had served as a lad in Athelstan’s palace. He was also like Dunstan skilful with his hands, and left behind him bells and other implements of religious service, the products of his own cunning handicraft. After ruling the monastery of Abingdon he was, in 963, consecrated to the see of Winchester, where he carried out the work of reform with a high hand. Both the Old and New Minsters at Winchester had been filled with canonici many of whom were married. To all Ethelwold offered but one choice: “Assume the monastic habit or depart hence”. All but three departed, and Chertsey and Milton Abbas in Dorsetshire were then similarly purged. The last monastery was situated without the bounds of Ethelwold’s diocese, but he seems to have held from the king a kind of roving commission to rebuild and reform monasteries wherever he would. In pursuance of this commission Ethelwold next visited the great monasteries of the fen country, Ely and Medeshamstede (now known as Peterborough). In their most flourishing time these monasteries must have worn a somewhat desolate appearance, standing as they did in the midst of the waste of waters which then covered half Cambridgeshire. Of Peterborough the chronicler expressly tells us that owing to its having been “fore-done by heathen folk, Ethelwold found nothing but old walls and wild woods”. Here then no extrusion was necessary; all that the reformer had to do was to rebuild the fabrics and once more to instal in the restored abbeys the industrious monks, who would again make these oases in the fen lands to blossom as the rose.
The Abingdon chronicler tells us of these good deeds of Ethelwold, naturally magnifying the glory of his convent’s most famous abbot. Strangely enough we do not hear of any actual foundation of a new monastery at Canterbury, or expulsion of canonici from the precincts of the old one, by Dunstan himself, though we know that he was heart and soul with the new movement. In fact, Dunstan’s tolerance of the canons, even at Canterbury, and his abstention from deeds of violence in furtherance of the reform, are singularly at variance with the character for persecuting harshness which he has somehow acquired in English history. So, too, his fellow archbishop, Oswald, far gentler than Ethelwold, if a little more energetic than Dunstan, seems always to have preferred persuasion to force. At Worcester, instead of expelling the canons from the cathedral church of SS. Mary and Peter, he founded a new monastery which he attached to a new cathedral, and these younger institutions gradually supplanted the old in popular favour.
Next to ecclesiastical affairs the pageants of the peaceful king’s reign seem most to have attracted the attention of his contemporaries. When he had been already reigning as sole king for more than thirteen years and had attained the thirtieth year of his age, he was solemnly “hallowed” as king on Whitsunday in the old Roman city of Bath (973). The reason for this long delay in the king’s coronation is not obvious, but possibly, as the words of the coronation service seem to have expressly hailed him as “King of the Saxons, Mercians and Northumbrians,”180 the ceremony may have been postponed till some unrecorded transactions, peaceful or warlike, with the chiefs of the Danelaw secured their presence at the pageant and showed that the words of the coronation service were not an idle vaunt. “And straightway after the hallowing,” says the Chronicle, “the king led all his naval force to Laegeceaster [Chester], and there came unto him six kings to meet him, and all plighted faith with him that they would be his fellow-workers on sea and on land.” This is that celebrated meeting of Edgar with his British under-kings of which later chroniclers are so proud. Both Florence of Worcester and William of Malmesbury, writing in the early part of the twelfth century, record that eight kings were constrained by Edgar to come to his Witenagemot, to bind themselves to him by an oath of perpetual fidelity, and then to row him in solemn pomp upon the river Dee, while he sat in the barge’s prow in regal magnificence. “He is reported to have said that now at last his successors might boast that they were truly kings of the English since they would inherit the honourable precedence which was thus accorded him.” The two historians give us the names of these eight kings: Kenneth of Scotland, Malcolm of Cumberland, Maccus, “the archpirate” (that is, the Viking), “king of many islands” (possibly Man and the Hebrides), and five Welsh kings whose names need not here be recorded, especially as one at least of them is incorrectly reported. It is interesting, however, to find this act of vassalage admitted by a Welsh annalist, though the scene of it is transferred, with much probability, from Chester to Caerleon-upon-Usk—much nearer than the former city to the scene of Edgar’s coronation. “And five kings from Cymry,” says the Brut-y-Tywysogion, “Edgar compelled to come to his court, and in Kaerllion-ar-Wyse he commanded them to row him in a bark while he himself sat at its prow.” Upon the whole, this celebrated water procession seems to be attested upon sufficient and trustworthy authority.181
In this connexion a romantic legend may be related which meets us in the pages of William of Malmesbury. He tells us that Edgar, though strong and wiry, was of small stature, and that this caused Kenneth of Scotland to remark that he marvelled why such great territories should be willing to be subject to such a pigmy of a king. The saying was carried by tale-bearers to Edgar, who sent for Kenneth as if he were about to consult him on some most important secret of state. He drew him apart into a lonely wood, offered him his choice of two swords which he had brought with him, and called upon him to prove his strength in a hand-to-hand encounter. “For it is a base thing for a king to babble at a banquet and not be willing to prove his words in fight.” Hereupon Kenneth fell at Edgar’s feet and implored his forgiveness for words which, as he protested, had only been spoken in jest.
From the same source—one, it must be admitted, of secondary authority—we derive the well-known story of the yearly tribute of 300 wolves’ heads which he imposed on the Welsh king, Juthwal, a tribute which is said to have been paid for three years and then of necessity discontinued because the breed of wolves was exterminated. Magnifying in similar fashion the resources and the renown of the peaceful king, Florence of Worcester tells us that he collected a fleet of 3,600 strong ships, one-third of which, when Easter was past, were ordered to muster in the north of the island and sail to the Straits of Dover, one-third on the east for a voyage to the Land’s End, and one-third on the west which sailed to Cape Wrath. Thus was the whole island circumnavigated and safeguarded against invasion by a foreign foe. There is probably some historic fact at the bottom of this story, but no one need accept the enormous numbers vouched for by Florence.
The chief characteristic of Edgar’s reign was the peace which he maintained in the land and which contrasted so painfully with the troubled reign of his son. Hence, doubtless, was derived the surname of the Peaceful, which is that by which he is known in the pages of Florence of Worcester There was something brilliant and attractive in his personality, and the staunch support which he gave to the victorious party in the Church was sufficient guarantee that his good deeds would not be forgotten. Yet even the monastic chronicler, as an honest man, could not dissemble the fact that the bright and comely little king was no saint. He quotes from a poem which after praising the piety of Edgar and magnifying his power “before whom mighty kings and earls gladly bowed” concludes thus:—
It will be seen that the poet speaks of introducing foreign vices and hurtful heathenish customs, but does not distinctly charge Edgar with personal immorality. Later historians, more out-spoken, tell a story, which seems to have some foundation in fact, about his seduction of a novice named Wulfthryth, whom he is said to have carried off from the abbey of Wilton, and by whom he had a daughter named Edith, who took the vows of a nun and died an abbess. The long delay of Edgar’s coronation (which happened, as we have seen, in the fourteenth year of his reign) has been connected by later writers with this intrigue, and with an alleged penance inflicted on the king by Dunstan, who is said to have forbidden him to wear his crown for seven years. Chronological arguments, however, prove the untruth of this theory.182 Edgar’s first wedded wife was apparently Ethelfled the Fair, who was known also by the epithet of “the Duck”. She was the daughter of a certain Ordmaer whom Edgar seems to have ennobled by bestowing upon him forty hides of land at Hatfield, thus giving him the appanage of an earl, though his birth would appear to have been insufficient to qualify him for exalted office.183 By this lady Edgar was the father of a son known in English history as Edward the Martyr. The married life of the beautiful Ethelfled, however terminated, whether by her death or divorce, must have been a short one, for in 964 Edgar married another woman celebrated for her beauty, Elfthryth or Elfrida, daughter of the Earl Ordgar, who became ealdorman of Devon and possibly of the two adjoining counties of Somerset and Dorset.184 Elfrida, however, had been previously married, her first husband being Ethelwold, ealdorman of East Anglia and son of “the half-king” Athelstan. Elfrida exercised undoubtedly a baneful influence on English history throughout the closing years of the tenth century; and arguing perhaps from these known tendencies of her character and from Edgar’s evil record for sexual immorality, later writers, especially the poetical historian, Geoffrey Gaimar, have constructed a long and unsavoury romance, according to which Ethelwold, having first deceived his master as to Elfrida’s beauty and thus secured her for himself, was afterwards murdered like Uriah the Hittite in order to make way for his royal rival. This story, also, though long accepted by historians, vanishes at the touch of criticism which clearly shows that Elfrida’s first husband died at least two years before her marriage with Edgar.185 But however innocent may have been the story of the peaceful king’s courtship of his second wife, there can be no doubt that when she was once seated in the palace her influence on the lives of its inmates was disastrous.
Edgar survived his coronation but two years. He died in the thirty-third year of his age, July 8, 975, and was buried in the Abbey of Glastonbury, which he and his father had so highly favoured.