Edgar of England

Edgar, known as Edgar the Peaceful (Old English: Ēadgār), was King of the English in the tenth century. He was the younger son of King Edmund I and Ælfgifu of Shaftesbury. Contemporary sources do not record an exact year or place of birth; modern historians generally place his birth in the early 940s. After Edmund was killed in 946, the throne passed to Edgar’s uncle Eadred. When Eadred died in 955, Edgar’s elder brother Eadwig became king. In 957 Mercia and Northumbria rejected Eadwig and accepted Edgar as their king. On Eadwig’s death in October 959 Edgar succeeded in Wessex as well and ruled a reunited English kingdom until 975.

His reign is remembered for relative internal peace and for the strengthening of royal government. He issued law codes, preserved the unity achieved by earlier tenth-century kings, and is associated with a coinage reform that produced a standardized high-quality silver penny across the realm. In 973, more than a decade after he had already become king, he received a solemn coronation at Bath in which Archbishop Dunstan took a leading part. The rite stressed the sacral character of English kingship and Edgar’s claimed overlordship in Britain. A later twelfth-century tradition describes a meeting at Chester in which several other rulers of Britain rowed him on the River Dee as a sign of submission.

A defining feature of the reign was royal patronage of Benedictine monastic reform. Edgar worked closely with Dunstan, whom he made Archbishop of Canterbury; Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester; and Oswald, Bishop of Worcester and later Archbishop of York. Under royal protection, secular clergy were expelled from a number of minsters and replaced by Benedictine monks, notably at Winchester, Ely, and Peterborough. The Regularis Concordia, a customary for English monasteries compiled in the early 970s, was issued with his authority in an effort to unify monastic practice. Grants of land and privilege bound the restored houses to the crown.

Edgar’s marital history is incompletely documented. He is associated with Æthelflæd, with Wulfthryth (later abbess of Wilton), and with Ælfthryth, daughter of Ordgar, ealdorman of Devon. Ælfthryth was consecrated queen, the first consort of an English king known to have been crowned. His children included Edward, who succeeded him; Edith, later venerated at Wilton; Æthelred, who became king after Edward’s murder; and Edmund, a son of Ælfthryth who died in childhood. Edgar died on 8 July 975 and was buried at Glastonbury Abbey. A disputed succession and a reaction against some monastic endowments followed. In later medieval England he was sometimes commemorated as a saint on the day of his death, without a formal papal canonization.