In the frontispiece to his grant of privileges for the New Minster, Winchester, drawn up in 966, King Edgar is shown prostrate before Christ (see frontis. to this book);¹ and in an eleventh-century manuscript of the Regularis Concordia, perhaps reproducing an earlier image, he is shown flanked by two bishops, presumed to be Dunstan and Æthelwold, lending their combined authority to the text.² Both images depict Edgar in close association with the monastic reform movement, and symbolize the particular aspect of his reign which has come to dominate all others.

As always, it is instructive to see how the received...

The standard catalogue of Anglo-Saxon charters, compiled by Peter Sawyer and first published in 1968,¹ now available in a revised, updated and expanded form,² registers the existence of about 160 charters in the name of King Edgar, including four ‘new’ charters (dated 958, 962, 963 and 974) which have come to light in more recent years.³ The corpus comprises about ten charters which purport to have been issued during Edgar’s reign as king of the Mercians (957–9), and about 150 charters from Edgar’s reign as king of the English (959–75). To these should be added a number of...

The difficulty with Edgar’s regime is not just that so little is known about it, but that the monastic memory of him sought to plug a gaping hole by imposing its own image. In some ways Edgar was similar to Edward the Confessor–an iconic figure representing a golden age and ‘the good law’.¹ The aim of this chapter is to shed light on comparatively neglected aspects of Edgar’s rule – on the principals at court and the relations between the nobility and the king.

A great deal of the politics of Edgar’s reign has its roots in the years immediately...

Edgar’s diploma of 958 for the minster church of St Werburgh in Chester is one of few charters of the mid-tenth century for an unreformed house of secular clerks. It opens a small window on the obscure affairs of Mercia during the period 957–9 when the English kingdom was divided, Edgar ruling north of the Thames and his brother Eadwig in Wessex. More obviously it provides evidence for the early history of the community at Chester.

Yet the charter has been relatively little studied, despite the existence of a good edition by Tait and consensus on its authenticity.¹ And...

One of the more puzzling questions associated with Edgar’s reign concerns his path to the throne between 23 November 955 when his uncle, King Eadred, died and 1 October 959 when his elder brother, King Eadwig, passed away, leaving Edgar in control of all of England then held by the West Saxons. The problem arises because there is strong evidence that Edgar first assumed power, as ASC BC report,¹ in Mercia in 957: how are we to interpret this stepped ascent to rule especially in light of the laconic and often contradictory contemporary written sources as well as the even...

This story from William of Malmesbury neatly encapsulates some of the features and problems of studying King Edgar’s relationships with women. There are many things that we do not know about the reign of Edgar, but we are relatively well-informed about some of the women who were significant to him. With a shortage of other narrative material, his relations with women were a means through which historians of the Middle Ages sought to elucidate aspects of his reign and find something of his elusive personality. The concentration in more recent years has been on the women themselves. The study of...

Albion, that ancient term of British geography, used from the time of Pliny onwards to designate the island of Britain, came of age in the seventeenth century. When James VI of Scotland acceded to the English throne in 1603 and created an island polity, Albion found its political meaning. Indeed, to judge from the output of British presses, it exploded into life. Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, published in 1612, carried on its title page the personification of Albion, ‘th’Oceans Island’. In the following year James Maxwell celebrated in print the genealogy of ‘the infanta of Albion’, James I’s daughter, while his Carolanna...

In 1976, in a provocative and influential article, Niels Lund asserted that in the competitive political environment of the late 950s Edgar was made king of the Mercians and Northumbrians by important northern laymen, who in 957 withdrew their allegiance from his brother, King Eadwig.¹ These magnates, he argued, saw an opportunity to use Edgar’s need for their support to further their own, separatist, purposes in those parts of England later called the Danelaw. In particular, Lund claimed that the magnates of these regions were motivated by the desire to resist the penetration of royal interference into their domain. In...

It is universally accepted by numismatists that a reform of the coinage was put in hand at a national level at some date not very far from the end of Edgar’s reign, whether in 973, as was strongly urged by the late Professor Michael Dolley,¹ or just a little later. The result was a coinage of Reform Small Cross type, in which all the coins struck throughout Edgar’s kingdom were of a uniform design carrying the king’s name and bust on the obverse, and a small cross in the centre of the reverse surrounded by an inscription which provided the...

The process which saw the foundation of the great medieval English Benedictine monasteries in the tenth century was, if not necessarily the most important development within the English church of the time, certainly the best recorded.¹ Many aspects of the process – including the use of the term ‘reform’ – have been undergoing re-evaluation recently.² However, mapping out the chronology of the Benedictine movement overall has not been attempted since David Farmer sketched it out in the early 1970s, summarising the account in David Knowles’ Monastic Order, so it is high time to re-attempt it.³ Chronology matters because establishing the sequence of...

The New Minster Charter (BL, Cotton Vespasian A.viii) was produced in Winchester in 966 to commemorate the refoundation of the New Minster two years earlier by King Edgar with the assistance of his new bishop, Æthelwold. The famous frontispiece (frontis. to this book) has been understood largely as a political statement: a visualization of the ideals of the monastic reform, of Edgar’s exalted vision of kingship (or Æthelwold’s exalted vision of Edgar’s kingship), and of the united concerns of king and bishop, specifically as they are conveyed in the text of the charter the miniature prefaces.¹ The iconography of the...

Of the two main divisions within Anglo-Saxon society, ecclesiastical and lay, the latter made up the vast majority of the population. However, because of the purpose and bias of the surviving written sources relating to the tenth-century monastic reform, lay people were only very selectively mentioned in them, mainly as either benefactors or despoilers of the endowment. We should not think from this that the rest of the lay population were unaware of, or impervious to, the events and consequences of the reform and there are clear indications that some individuals, families, and groups were greatly affected in one way...

While rhetorically and stylistically less brilliant than The Battle of Brunanburh, two other poems from the ASC, known as The Coronation of Edgar (in the entry for 973) and The Death of Edgar (975), deserve attention because of what they reveal about the politics and culture of Edgar’s period.¹ These poems have much in common with The Battle of Brunanburh and another of the Chronicle’s panegyrics, The Capture of the Five Boroughs and, taken together, they celebrate three tenth-century kings, Æthelstan, Edmund and Edgar, distinguishing them from the monarchs that are only mentioned in non-poetic entries. Thus they eulogize the...