CHAP. VI. all Cumberland." But he turned his new conquest Wessex and adroitly to account by using it to bind to himself the the Danelaw. 937955. The feud. most dangerous among his foes; for he granted the greater part of it to the Scottish king on the terms that Malcolm should be "his fellow-worker by sea and land." In the erection of this northern dependency we see the same forces acting, though on a more distant field, which had already begun the disintegration of the English realm in the formation of the great ealdormanries of the eastern coast. Its immediate results, however, were advantageous enough. Scot and Welshman, whose league had till now formed the chief force of opposition to English supremacy in the north, were set at variance; the road of the Ostmen was closed; while the fidelity of the Scot-king seemed to be secured by the impossibility of holding Cumbria against revolt without the support of his "fellowworker" in the south. Hard as Eadmund had been pressed by these outer troubles, he had been far from neglecting the work of government at home. While the efforts of Æthelstan had been mainly directed to the security of order and of property, Eadmund dealt with the more formidable difficulty of the right of feud. The evil with which he dealt, and his attempts to reform it, have been already noticed in the sketch given of the history of English justice. In spite of all bounds and limitations by which the rights of private vengeance had been restrained, the feud in Eadmund's day remained wholly incompatible with the new social order that 1 Eng. Chron. (Winch.), a. 945. 2 2 See ch. i. pp. 24-28. CHAP. VI. the Danelaw. 937 955. had been developed alike by Christianity and by the growing sense of a common national life. Early Wessex and justice had rested on the family bond, on the theory of the kinsfolk bound together by ties of mutual responsibility for vengeance and aid in self-defence. But as society became more complex it outgrew in great measure these earlier ties of blood; and the conception of personal responsibility which Christianity had taught helped to weaken the bonds of kinship. Eadmund shared in the "horror of the unrighteous and manifold fightings" which was felt in his day, and in his attempt to lay on the man-slayer himself the whole burden of his deed, to free his kinsfolk from the obligation of bearing the feud, and to protect them from the vengeance of the slain man's kin,' he not only attacked the custom of the feud, but struck a heavy blow at the old theory of kinship with its traditional responsibilities. From questions of home government, however, the young king was soon called back to outer affairs. For the moment the triumphs of the two cousins on either side of the Channel seemed to have realized the hopes of Æthelstan. In England and France alike the men of the north lay at the feet of Lewis and Eadmund, for the presence of the northern primate and northern Jarls at the English court for the first time since Brunanburh, showed that the Danelaw was again subdued. But the Danelaw had hardly given its allegiance to Eadmund when 1 Ll. Eadmund. Thorpe, "Anc. Laws,” i. 249. 2 For Wulfstan, see Cod. Dip. 409. For the Jarls "Scule " and "Halfdene," Cod. Dip. 410. Death of Eadmund. CHAP. VI a sudden revolution wrested Normandy from his Wessex and cousin's grasp. A fleet under the King of Denmark, the Danelaw. 937 955. Harald Blaatand, moored off the Cotentin and called the country to arms. The Normans gathered round the Danish host, while Duke Hugh, jealous of the power Lewis had won from his conquest on the Seine, joined the king's foes; and in 945 a victory of their united forces on the Dive broke the Frankish yoke. Not only was the king's army defeated, but Lewis himself was taken in the fight and given as a prisoner into the hands of Duke Hugh. The demand of Eadmund for his cousin's liberation shows that the two kings had been acting in concert against the northmen, while the answer of Hugh is notable as the first of a series of such defiances which from that day to this have passed between the lands on either side of the Channel. "I will do nothing for the Englishmen's threats!" said the duke. "Let them come and they will soon find what men of the Franks are worth in fight! or if they fear to come, they shall know at some time or other the might of the Franks and pay for their arrogance!" Master of all England at twenty-four, Eadmund could hardly have passed by a challenge such as this. But the quarrel was suddenly hushed by his death.' As he feasted at Pucklechurch in the May of 946, Leofa, a robber whom the king had banished from the land, entered the hall, seated himself at the royal board, and drew his sword on the cup-bearer when he bade him retire. Eadmund sprang in wrath to his thegn's aid, and, seizing Leofa by the 1 Eng. Chron. (Winch.), a. 496. Will. Malm. "Gest. Reg." (Hardy), i. 228. hair, flung him to the ground, but in the struggle the robber drove his dagger to the king's heart. With the death of Eadmund a new figure comes to the front of English affairs, and the story of Abbot Dunstan of Glastonbury gives us a welcome glimpse into the inner life of England at a time when history hides it from us beneath the weary details of wars with the Danes. In the heart of Somerset, at the 1 The primary authority for Dunstan's life is an anonymous biography, written about A.D. 1000, a few years after his death, by a Saxon priest. Professor Stubbs, who has collected the various biographies in his "Memorials of S. Dunstan," has made it probable that this is a work of an exiled scholar from Liège, who was present in England at the archbishop's death, and was living under his protection. A second work, by Adelard of Ghent, was drawn up in the form of lessons to be read in the service of the monastery at Canterbury, and is hardly of later date than the first. After the Conquest a third life, much expanded, was drawn up by Osbern, and a fourth by Eadmer, both monks of Canterbury, while a little later on William of Malmesbury compiled a fifth, whose purpose was to bring out more fully Dunstan's connexion with Glastonbury. Even in the few years that passed between Dunstan's death and the life by Adelard a luxuriant growth of legend had taken place; but it is to the three last biographers that the wilder stories which gathered round the archbishop's name are mainly due. The life by the priest of Liège is simply disfigured by verbosity, and bears traces of deriving most of the earlier biographic details from the talk of Dunstan himself; its information and its silences (as in the history of Eadgar) are both probably due to this source. But even this antedates the monastic struggle, which had become so important at the time of its composition, by confusing it with the strife in Eadwig's reign. ("Memor. of Dunstan," Intro. p. vii.) Such as they are however, all these lives are of value for a time when we have, save in the meagre annals of the Chronicle, no contemporary materials but these and a few other hagiographies. (Stubbs, "Memorials of Dunstan," Intro. p. ix.) CHAP. VI. Wessex and the Danelaw. 937955. Dunstan. CHAP. VI. the Danelaw. 937 955. base of the Tor, a hill that rose out of the waste of Wessex and flood-drowned fen which then filled the valley of Glastonbury, lay in Ethelstan's day the estate of Heorstan, a man of wealth and noble blood, the kinsman of three bishops of the time and of many thegns of the court, if not of the king himself. It was in Heorstan's hall that his son Dunstan, as yet a fair diminutive child with scant but beautiful hair, caught the passion for music that showed itself in his habit of carrying harp in hand on journey or visit, as in his love for the "vain songs of ancient heathendom, the trifling legends, and funeral chants," " relics doubtless of a mass of older poetry that time has reft from us. But nobler strains than those of ancient heathendom were round the child as he grew to boyhood. Elfred's strife with the north 2 1 Bishop Elfege of Winchester and Kynsige of Lichfield were his kinsmen (see Saxon biographer, "Memorials," pp. 13, 32). So, says Adelard, (ibid. 55) was Archbishop Ethelm of Canterbury, but this may be a mistake for Bishop Æthelgar of Crediton. For his kin among the "Palatini," see Saxon Biogr. "Memor." p. 11. Æthelflæd, Æthelstan's niece, was also related to him (ibid. p. 17). 2 Sax. Biog. (" Memor." p. 11), "avitæ gentilitatis vanissima didicisse carmina, et historiarum frivolas colere incantationum nænias." "Hujus 3 The date of his birth is a vexed question. (Ethelstani) imperii temporibus oritur puer," says the Saxon biographer ("Memor." p. 6). The English Chronicle (though in what is probably a later insertion) takes "oritur" for "is born," and with all after-writers places his birth in Ethelstan's first year, 924 or 925. But if so, his appearance and expulsion from Æthelstan's court must have been before he was sixteen; his appointment as Abbot of Glastonbury at any rate before Eadmund's death in 946, when he was still but twenty-two; and |