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Edgar the Peaceful

Born: 7 August 943 AD, Kingdom of England

Died: 8 July 975 AD, Winchester

Full name: Edgar I

Nickname: the Peaceable

Spouse: Wulthryth

Children: Edward the Martyr, Æthelred the Unready, Edith of Wilton, Edmund Ætheling

Parents: Edmund I, Ælfgifu of Shaftesbury

In the brilliant and peaceful reign of Edgar all this long building had reached its culmination. The re-conquest of England was accompanied step by step by a conscious administrative reconstruction which has governed the development of English institution from that day to this. The shires were reorganised, each with its sheriff or reeve, a royal officer directly responsible to the Crown. The hundreds, subdivisions of the shire, were created, and the towns prepared for defence. An elaborate system of shire, hundred, and borough courts maintained law and order and pursued criminal.

Taxation was reassessed. Finally, with this military and political revival marched a great re-birth of monastic life and learning and the continuation of native English literature. The movement was slow and English in origin, but advanced with great strides from the middle of the century as it came in contact with the religious revival on the Continent.

The work of Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his younger contemporaries, Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, and Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, was to revive the strict observance of religion within the monasteries, and thereby indirectly to reform the Episcopate as more and more monks were elected to bishoprics. Another and happy, if incidental, result was to promote learning and the production of splendid illuminated manuscripts, which were much in demand in contemporary Europe. Many of these, designed for the religious instruction of the laity, were written in English.

The Catholic Homilies of Elfric, Abbot of Eynsham, mark, we are told, the first achievement of English as a literary language – the earliest vernacular to reach this eminence in the whole of Europe. From whatever point of view we regard it, the tenth century is a decisive step forward in the destinies of England.

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