which the leadership in war against a heathen foe invested him, had added to the royal dignity; and new claims to authority had sprung from the gradual up-building of England, and the extent of dominion brought under the king's rule, from the balance of Danish and anti-Danish parties in the realm, and from the king's position as common political centre of the English provinces. Along with the advance thus brought about in the authority of the Crown, there went on a change in the old Teutonic conception of kingship, and an imitation of Imperial claims aided by intercourse with the Imperial court. The solemn coronation of the king, the oath of fidelity, the identification of loyalty with personal troth to the personal king, the doctrine of treason, the haughty claims to a far-reaching supremacy, the vaunting titles assumed in charters, all point to a new conception of royalty. But the royal claims lay still far ahead of the real strength of the Crown. There was a want of administrative machinery in actual connexion with the government, responsible to it, drawing its force directly from it, and working automatically in its name even in moments when the royal power was itself weak or wavering. The king's power was still a personal power. He had to be everywhere and to see for himself that everything he willed was done. Resting on feeling, on tradition, on personal character, the Crown was strong under a king who was strong, whose personal action was felt everywhere "throughout the realm, whose dread lay on every reeve and ealdorman. But with a weak king the Crown was weak. Ealdormen, provincial CHAP. VII. The Great Ealdormen. 955 988. CHAP. VII. The Great Ealdormen. 955988. The Ealdormen. witenagemots, local jurisdictions, ceased to move at the royal bidding the moment direct pressure was loosened or removed. Enfeebled as they were, the old provincial jealousies, the old tendency to severance and isolation lingered on, and woke afresh when the Crown fell to a nerveless ruler or to a child. At the moment we have reached the royal power and the national union it embodied had to battle with the impulse given to these tendencies towards national disintegration by the struggle with the northman. We have seen how the spirit of feudalism was aided and furthered by the Danish wars, by the growth of commendation and the decrease of free allodial owners, and by the importance given to the military temper. In the ealdormen themselves the feudal spirit was strengthened by the memories of provincial independence, and by the continued existence of what had once been older kingdoms and diverse peoples, as well as by the retention of their popular life in the survival of their old judicial and administrative forms. Popular feeling and feudal tendencies went in fact hand in hand. The new ealdormen created by the later West-Saxon kings had hardly taken their place as mere lieutenants of the national sovereign before they again began to rise into petty kings, and in the century which follows we see Mercian or Northumbrian thegns following a Mercian or Northumbrian ealdorman to the field, though it were against the lord of the land. Even the constitutional forms which sprang from the old English freedom tended to invest these higher nobles with a commanding power. In the "great meeting" of the Witenagemot or Assembly of the Wise lay the rule of the realm, but distance and the hardships of travel made the presence of the lesser thegns as rare as that of the free-men; and the ealdormen became of increasing importance in the national council. The old English democracy had thus all but passed into an oligarchy of the narrowest kind. But powerful as they might be, the English ealdormen never succeeded in becoming really hereditary or independent of the Crown. Kings as weak as Ethelred could drive them into exile and replace them by fresh nominees. If the Witenagemot enabled the great nobles to bring their power to bear directly on the Crown, it preserved at any rate a feeling of national unity, and was ready to back the Crown against individual revolt. The Church too never became feudalized. The bishop clung to the Crown, and the bishop remained a great social and political power. As local in area as the ealdorman, for the province was his diocese and he sat by the side of the ealdorman in the local Witenagemot, he furnished a standing check on the independence of the great nobles. The death of Eadred formed the occasion for an immediate outbreak of political strife. The flight of the thegns from his death-bed was the sign of a court revolution. Eadred had died childless, but his brother Eadmund had left two children, Eadwig and Eadgar, and the eldest of these was now called to the throne.1 Mere boy of fifteen 1 As he mounted the throne in November, 955, and died in October, 958, Eadwig's reign covers hardly three years. X CHAP. VII. The Great Ealdormen. 955988. Eadwig. CHAP. VII. Ealdormen. 955 988. 2 1 as he was, we find the new king the centre of an The Great opposition party, hostile to the system of Eadred's reign. In its outset the struggle seems to have been one for influence between the kindred of the king, the leading nobles of Wessex, and the three who had directed affairs in Eadred's name, his mother Eadgifu, the great ealdorman of East-Anglia, and Abbot Dunstan of Glastonbury. In this struggle the first party proved successful. The charters of the time show that the king's kinsmen, Ælfhere, Ælfheah, and Æthelmær, stand at this time first among his counsellors, while Eadgifu was driven from court, as well as bereft of her property." The Half-King, Ealdorman Æthelstan, however, and Dunstan held 1 Stubbs, "Memor. of Dunst." Introd. lxxxviii. 6 2 Stubbs, "Memor. of Dunstan," Introduction, lxxxviii. Robertson," Hist. Essays," 191, conjectures from Dunstan's connection with the East-Anglian house and Eadgifu, as from the combination of "his own disciples " against him at this time, that "he had allied himself with the party in the state opposed to the leading nobility of Wessex, who were the principal characters round the throne during the reigns of Ethelstan and Eadmund." 3 The Saxon biographer says that most of Eadmund's nobles "lapsed from the path of rectitude," that is, opposed Dunstan and his fellow-rulers. 4 The second charter of Eadwig is a grant to Ælfhere as his "kinsman," descended "a carissimis predecessoribus." Cod. Dip. 437. This was the Mercian ealdorman of later days. The assertion of the twelfth-century biographers of Dunstan that Eadwig banished his kinsmen from court "is contradicted by every grant and charter of his reign." Robertson, "Hist. Essays," p. 193. 5 She says herself, "Eadred died, and Eadgifu was bereft of all her property." Cod. Dip. 499. 6 Osbern (sec. 25) accuses Eadwig of from the first changing CHAP. VII. Ealdormen. 955 988. their ground at court for a while, in spite of the efforts of Æthelgifu, a woman of high lineage, whose The Great influence over Eadwig had played no slight part in the change of counsellors. Darker tales floated about of Ethelgifu's purpose to wed the boy-king to her daughter, a marriage which from their kinship in blood the religious opinion of the day regarded as incestuous; and when the Witan gathered to crown Eadwig, the jealousy of the two parties, as well as the irritation which her influence caused, was seen in a strife at the coronation feast.2 parties. To realize the import of this strife we must recall The strife of the sacred associations that hung round the crowning of a king. It was in itself a solemn office of the Church. It was the primate of the whole English people who called on the people for their "yea" or "nay." The king's vow to govern rightly was given before the altar. He was anointed with holy oil. The crown was set on his head by priestly hands. The prayers of the multitude went up for him to heaven as he was "hallowed to king." With the new sacredness about him, still crowned with the royal his counsellors "despectis majoribus natu, puerorum consilia sectabatur," of pillaging rich people and churches-and of plundering and outraging the Queen-mother, Eadgifu. Osbern also says that Dunstan by threats and exhortations opposed all this and the marriage, but finding his efforts vain, withdrew. 1 Dunstan signs charters till the coronation: Æthelstan still signs at the head of the ealdormen to the close of the year. 2 The coronation feast took place on the first or second Sunday after the Epiphany, 956 (Stubbs, "Memor. of Dunstan." Introd. lxxxviii.). 3 Stubbs, “Const. Hist." i. 170, gives the history of our coronations. |