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Updated: June 14, 2025
How effective these were was seen when the last act of the conquest was reached. All hope of Danish aid was now gone, but Englishmen still looked for help to Scotland where Eadgar the Ætheling had again found refuge and where his sister Margaret had become wife of King Malcolm.
One strange turning-about of things indeed there was. The man whom Englishmen had once chosen as their King, the heir of Alfred, Cerdic, and Woden, fought at Tinchebray in the following of Duke Robert. Eadgar and Robert had been comrades in the Crusade, and the two men were not unlike in character. Neither could ever act for himself; both could sometimes act for others.
Eadgar himself was at the head of the deputation who came to offer the crown to the Norman Duke. "They bowed to him," says the English annalist pathetically, "for need." They bowed to the Norman as they had bowed to the Dane, and William accepted the crown in the spirit of Cnut.
It is, however, doubtful if Eadgar compassed his death at all, but two years after it he married his widow, whose beauty was her chief recommendation, for though it has nothing to do with Romsey, it may be mentioned in passing that it was she by whose order Eadgar's eldest son by his first wife, Eadward the Martyr, was murdered at Corfegate, where the well-known castle afterwards rose and where its ruins remain until this day.
Eadgar the Ætheling with a band of exiles who had found refuge in Scotland took the head of the Northumbrian revolt; in the south-west the men of Devon, Somerset, and Dorset gathered to the sieges of Exeter and Montacute; while a new Norman castle at Shrewsbury alone bridled a rising in the West. So ably had the revolt been planned that even William was taken by surprise.
Whether it was continued or not when she died no record remains to tell, but, as we have seen, it was refounded by Eadgar the Peaceable in 967, and on Christmas day of the year 974 St. Meriwenna was put in charge of the completed Abbey, which was constituted according to the Benedictine Rule. Some traces of this church still remain, though only discovered in 1900.
The death of Eadwig a few months later restored the unity of the realm; but his successor Eadgar was only a boy of sixteen and at the outset of his reign the direction of affairs must have lain in the hands of Dunstan, whose elevation to the see of Canterbury set him at the head of the Church as of the State. The noblest tribute to his rule lies in the silence of our chroniclers.
The two streams of English and Norman history were joined together in the year when the two sovereigns met for the only time in their reigns. Those streams again diverged. England shook off the Norman influence to all outward appearance, and became once more the England of Æthelstan and Eadgar. But the effects of Eadgar's Norman tendencies were by no means wholly wiped away.
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