flowed in so sparkling a stream-whose rich voice was the very soul of music; who could make bells, stain glass, and carve crucifixes-was just the man to become popular at a court where intellect and refined taste were rare. Five kings of England owned his sway, and more than one owed to him the crown. In truth he deserved the title of " Kingmaker" fully as well as that stern soldier of a later day who died on the bloody field of Barnet.

Under the sickly Edred, who reigned from 946 to 955, Dunstan's power grew steadily. Though Abbot of Glastonbury, he spent most of his time at court, engaged in ecclesiastical and political schemes. The king devoted himself to a religious life, and left the management of public affairs to Dunstan, who became in effect prime minister. To his efforts mainly was it due that the repeated attempts of the Northumbrians to set up an independent monarchy signally failed.

955

The story of his quarrel with King Edwy, as told by the monkish chroniclers, represents him only as a zealous and cruel ecclesiastic. It was the day of the coronation, which had just been performed at Kingston-upon Thames by Odo the Dane, Archbishop of Canterbury. Around the royal board the leading clergy of the realm were assembled, prominent among whom sat the Abbot of Glastonbury. Edwy, a handsome bridegroom of eighteen, slipped away from the festive scene to tell his wife and her mother how the coronation ceremony had passed off. Tossing the crown aside, he was rejoicing in the thought that all was over, when the door, flung rudely back, admitted two boisterous priests, who desired the king to return at once to the hall, as Archbishop Odo was annoyed at his absence. Edwy's kingly spirit took fire, and he refused to stir, until Dunstan, picking up the crown, placed it on his head, and dragged the royal captive back to the banquet-hall.

Such an insult burned deep into Edwy's heart, nor did he rest until he got revenge. Edred, the late king, having con

fided the royal treasures to Dunstan's care, Edwy demanded that the money should be accounted for at once. On Dunstan's refusal, soldiers were sent to Glastonbury, who seized the daring abbot's wealth and drove him from the shelter of the abbey. Fearful of losing his eyes, or of some such barbarous treatment, he fled across the sea to Flanders, where he resided for some time. Such is the traditional story, in which there are probably very few points that are true, except the general fact that Edwy quarrelled with Dunstan, and that the latter spent some months abroad. During his absence, Mercia and Northumbria, instigated by Archbishop Odo, the Dane, unfurled the banner of revolt in favour of young Edgar, a brother of the king. Edwy the Fair, shorn of more than half his realm, and deprived of his wife Elgiva, who was divorced from him by Odo "because they were too nearly related," died a few months later, not improbably by violent means. Meanwhile Dunstan had returned at the summons of Edgar

958

to receive the mitres of Worcester and London-honours 959 which he soon exchanged for the Primacy of England. Dunstan was now the most powerful man in the realm. King Edgar was in entire sympathy with his ecclesiastical policy, and also with his reforms in the State, and he gave his minister a free hand. In politics, Dunstan pursued a national as distinguished from a tribal policy. He wished to weld Saxons, Angles, and Danes into one nation, with the King of Wessex at its head. In this he succeeded to a great extent. He broke the power of Northumbria by dividing it into three earldoms-York, Northumberland, and Lothian-the 966 last of which was granted to the King of Scots as a fief. When he had secured the supremacy of Edgar, Dunstan conciliated the Danes and the Anglians by allowing them a large amount of freedom in matters of local government. Not until he had been made in fact "King of the Angles and of all the nations round about" was Edgar crowned. The ceremony

took place at Bath in 973. His position is symbolized by the common story which tells how, at Chester, he received the homage of six kings, who rowed his barge up the river Dee, he holding the helm. This consolidation of England was mainly the work of Dunstan the priest.

His ecclesiastical policy, as already mentioned, aimed at the restoration of monasticism in England. When in Flanders he had seen and had admired the strict discipline of the Benedictine Order, and he resolved to introduce that Order into England. During Edgar's reign the minsters of Ely and Peterborough were rebuilt, and in all forty Benedictine con- 963 vents were founded or restored. The secular clergy were driven out of many monasteries, and the regular clergy were put in their places. Dunstan's object in these reforms was not merely to establish the supremacy of Rome, but also to promote education through the monasteries, which were also schools, and to purify the life both of the clergy and of the people. There were, however, men in England who were jealous of the encroachments and of the arrogance of Rome.

The sight of great abbeys filled with unmarried monks, who lived a life of vicious ease upon the fat of the land, with countless vassals upon their spreading farms, fat beeves on their green pastures, and heaps of coin in their strong-box, stirred up the honest rage of Englishmen, who saw the land groaning under pestilence and famine. By secret plots and open violence, and by the thunders of a fluent and gleaming eloquence, Dunstan fought the battle of his Church and his Order. That his cause triumphed is scarcely wonderful, when we regard the disjointed time and the undeniable genius of the man.

The most remarkable crisis of the struggle took place at Calne in Wiltshire, where the Witan assembled to debate the disputed points. Gathering in a large chamber on the first

* Calne, a borough of Wiltshire, lies on a brook in one of the chalk valleys, thirtyone miles north-west of Salisbury.

floor of the town hall, the earls, thanes, bishops, abbots, and other leading churchmen took their seats in two bodies at

different ends of the room, according to the side which 978 each supported. The wise and eloquent Beornhelm had come from Scotland to plead the cause of the national Church against the interference of Rome. Dunstan rose when the illustrious stranger had spoken, and was in the midst of an address which mingled lamentations over his own decaying years with appeals to Heaven for judgment, when a sudden cracking noise was heard: the opposite end of the flooring, where the national party sat, gave way with a crash, and all but Dunstan and his friends lay far below among the splintered joists in a ghastly heap of dead and maimed. It is impossible to say whether this was a remarkable coincidence or a trick. At any rate, whether Dunstan sawed the beams below or not, the crash at Calne swept off at one terrible stroke his most formidable opponents, and left him master of the field.

His glory, however, was short-lived. The feeble prince for whose sake Edward was murdered in 979--that unhappy Ethelred, whose memory had been branded with the name "Unready," or Redeless (that is to say, weak in counsel)—bent under the iron sway of the great archbishop. But the nation had grown weary of Dunstan, and his influence declined both in the Witan and in the country. To the misery of failing power there was added the worse misery of a failing frame. Retiring to Canterbury sick in body and in mind, he spent the last days of his waning life apart from the stormy world, in whose strife his unbroken spirit had rejoiced; and there he died in 988, closing his eyes on England at a time when once more the sea was beginning to be darkened with Danish keels.

988

CHAPTER VII.

SWEYN AND CANUTE.

Sweyn lands-St. Brice-Revenge-Edric Streona-Treaty of AlneyCanute sole king-His policy-Conquers Norway-His laws-On pilgrimage-Story of the waves-Canute's death.

TH

HE incompetence of the Redeless King Ethelred reached a climax in the fearful massacre of St. Brice.

Already the incursions of the Danes had grown so threatening that recourse was had to the miserable temporary shift of paying

them to go away. Of course they came back, year after year, in fiercer and larger swarms, demanding greater sums of money; and even when the price of departure had been paid, they did not really leave the land, but passed into other quarters, to make new demands with lifted sword and flaming torch. Most active among these Vikings was Sweyn, the fierce son of Harold Bluetooth, who made his first appearance 994 in the Thames in 994, leading, in company with the King of Norway, a fleet of ninety-four sail. Beaten from the walls of London by the brave citizens, they sailed on a voyage of desolation around the southern coast, and wintered at Southampton. A fatal mistake was then made. These Northmen were taken into English pay, and intrusted with the defence of the kingdom. To defray the cost of their maintenance, the tax called Danegeld was levied. And now the cord twisted by her own hand was indeed round the neck of Saxon England.

Fancying that an alliance with the Normans might keep the