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.
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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:—
But one misdeed he did, aye all too oft,
The evil customs of strange folk he loved,