A history of England

by Charles Oman

Edmund. 941-946.—Strathclyde granted as a fief to the Scotch king.

Aethelstan died young, and left no son. He was followed on the throne by his two brothers Edmund and Eadred, who were equally unfortunate in being cut off in the flower of their age. Edmund suppressed more than one rebellion of the Northumbrian Danes, and completely conquered the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde. Instead of incorporating it with England, he bestowed it as a fief on his vassal, Malcolm, King of the Scots, "on condition that he should be his faithful fellow-worker by sea and land." This was the first extension of Scotland to the south of the Clyde and Forth. Up to this time the Scots and the Picts, with whom they had become blended since the Scot Kenneth McAlpine had been elected king of the Picts in 836, had only ruled in the Highlands. Edmund came to a strange and bloody end. As he feasted in his hall at Pucklechurch, in Gloucestershire, he saw to his anger and surprise a notorious outlaw named Leofa enter the hall and seat himself at a table. The servants tried to turn him out, but he held his place, and Edmund grew so wrathful that he sprang from his high seat and rushed down to drag the intruder out with his own hands. He seized Leofa by the hair and threw him down, but the outlaw drew a knife and stabbed him to the heart.

Eadred. 946-955.

Eadred, the next king, was a prince of weak health, fonder of the church than the battle-field. Nevertheless he carried on his brother's policy, and kept a firm hand over the whole island of Britain. He put down the last rising of the Danes of Yorkshire, who had proclaimed Eric-with-the-bloody-axe as their king, and made one last attempt to assert their independence. After this he cut up Northumbria into two earldoms, and gave them both to an Englishman named Oswulf, to be ruled as separate provinces.

Rise of Dunstan.

Eadred was the patron and protector of the wise abbot Dunstan, the first of the great clerical statesmen who made a mark on the history of England. He was a man of great ability and learning, who had risen to be abbot of Glastonbury under Edmund, and became one of the chief advisers of the pious Eadred, who was attracted to him as much by his asceticism as by his eminent mental qualities. Dunstan was a man with a purpose. He wished to reform the English Church in the direction of monastic asceticism, and was most especially anxious to make compulsory the celibacy of the clergy, a practice which had not hitherto been enforced in England. There was undoubtedly much ignorance and a certain amount of ill-living among the secular clergy, and Dunstan, not content with warring against this, tried also to reform the monasteries all over the face of the land, and to enforce the rule of St. Benedict, "poverty, chastity, and obedience," in every place. Dunstan's method of carrying out his views was by winning court influence, which he was very fitted to obtain, for he was the cleverest, most versatile, and most learned man of his day.

Eadwig, 955-959.—Quarrel with Dunstan.

When the pious Eadred died, he was succeeded by his nephew Eadwig (Edwy), the son of his brother Edmund. This prince had been a child when Leofa the outlaw slew his father, and the Witan had put him aside in favour of his uncle, because the rule of a minor was always disliked by the English. But now he was seventeen, and a very rash and headstrong youth.

Eadwig very soon quarrelled with Dunstan and with Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury, because he insisted on taking to wife the Lady Aelfgyfu (Elgiva), who was his near kinswoman, and within the "prohibited degrees" of the mediaeval Church. The churchmen declared her to be no true wife of the king, and treated the royal pair with such insult that Eadwig grew furious. The tale is well known how, when Eadwig at a high feast had retired betimes to his wife's chamber, Oda and another bishop followed him and dragged him back by force to the board where the thegns were feasting.