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.