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Updated: June 5, 2025
For above all things Eadmund loved the craft of the warrior, and Eadward all that belonged to peace. My mother lived but a few months after that flight of ours; but at least she knew before she died that Bertha was safe. What the old nurse had foreseen had come to pass.
Such was the man who, seemingly in the fourth year of Eadward, in the twenty-fourth of his own age, was invested with the rule of one of the great divisions of England, who, seven years later, became the virtual ruler of the kingdom; who, at last, twenty-one years from his first elevation, received, alone among English kings, the crown of England as the free gift of her people, and, alone among English kings, died axe in hand on her soil in the defence of England against foreign invaders.
He had bequeathed the crown to his elder son Eadward; but the ealdorman of East-Anglia, Æthelwine, rose at once to set a younger child, Æthelred, on the throne. But the two primates of Canterbury and York who had joined in setting the crown on the head of Eadgar now joined in setting it on the head of Eadward, and Dunstan remained as before master of the realm.
The accession of Eadward at once brings us among the events that led immediately to that conquest, or rather we may look on the accession of this Saxon king as the first stage of the conquest itself. Swend and Cnut, the Danes, had shown that it was possible for a foreign power to overcome England by force of arms.
The Laws, which form the base of our constitutional knowledge of this period, fall, as has been well pointed out by Mr. Freeman, into two classes. Those of Eadward, Æthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadgar, are like the earlier laws of Æthelberht and Ine, "mainly of the nature of amendments of custom."
The first definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English Chronicle which recalls its seizure by Eadward the Elder, but the form of this entry shows that the town was already a considerable one, and in the last wrestle of England with the Dane its position on the borders of Mercia and Wessex combined with its command of the upper valley of the Thames to give it military and political importance.
The queen moved away to the seat where Eadward had been sitting and took his place, staring out of the window with unseeing eyes. And I was glad that she was no longer beside us. Presently the king raised his head and turned it a little towards me. "Redwald," he said, "you were our companion in Normandy, and you are a trusted friend of ours.
Those of Ælfred, Æthelred, Cnut, with those which bear the name of Eadward the Confessor, "aspire to the character of Codes." They are printed in Mr. Thorpe's "Ancient Laws and Institutes of England," but the extracts given by Professor Stubbs in his "Select Charters" contain all that directly bears on our constitutional growth.
Instead of freedom, the subjects of William or Henry called for the "good laws of Eadward the Confessor." But it was as a mere shadow of the past that the exile really returned to the throne of Ælfred; there was something shadow-like in his thin form, his delicate complexion, his transparent womanly hands; and it is almost as a shadow that he glides over the political stage.
Fines from the greater landowners atoned for a resistance which now counted as rebellion; but with this exception every measure of the new sovereign showed his desire of ruling as a successor of Eadward or Ælfred. As yet indeed the greater part of England remained quietly aloof from him, and he can hardly be said to have been recognized as king by Northumberland or the greater part of Mercia.
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