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King of the English (975-978)

Edward the Martyr (c. 962-978) was King of the English from 8 July 975 until he was murdered on 18 March 978. Edward was the eldest son of King Edgar. On Edgar’s death, the leadership of England was contested, with some supporting Edward’s claim to be king and others supporting his younger half-brother Æthelred, recognised as a legitimate son of Edgar. Edward was chosen as king and was crowned by his main clerical supporters, the archbishops Dunstan of Canterbury and Oswald of York.

The great nobles of the kingdom, ealdormen Ælfhere and Æthelwine, quarrelled, and civil war almost broke out. In the so-called anti-monastic reaction, the nobles took advantage of Edward’s weakness to dispossess the Benedictine reformed monasteries of lands and other properties that King Edgar had granted to them.

Edward’s short reign was brought to an end by his murder at Corfe in 978 in circumstances that are not altogether clear. He was hurriedly buried at Wareham, but was reburied with great ceremony at Shaftesbury Abbey in Dorset early in 979. In 1001 Edward’s remains were moved to a more prominent place in the abbey, probably with the blessing of his half-brother King Æthelred. Edward was already reckoned a saint by this time.

A number of lives of Edward were written in the centuries following his death in which he was portrayed as a martyr, generally seen as a victim of the Queen Dowager Ælfthryth, mother of Æthelred. He is today recognised as a saint in the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Anglican Communion.

Background[edit]

In the ninth century, Anglo-Saxon England came under increasing attack from Viking raids, culminating in invasion by the Viking Great Heathen Army in 865. By 878, the Vikings had overrun the kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia, and Mercia, and nearly conquered Wessex, but in that year the West Saxons achieved a decisive victory at the Battle of Edington under King Alfred the Great. Over the next fifty years, the West Saxons and Mercians gradually conquered the Viking-ruled areas, and in 927 Alfred’s grandson Æthelstan became the first king of all England when he conquered Northumbria He died in 939 and was succeeded by his half-brother and Edward’s grandfather, Edmund, who almost immediately lost control of the north to the Vikings, but recovered full control of England by 944. He died in 946, and as his sons Eadwig and Edgar were infants, their uncle Eadred became king. Like Edmund, Eadred inherited the kingship of the whole of England and soon lost it when York (southern Northumbria) accepted a Viking king, but he recovered it when the York magnates expelled King Erik Bloodaxe in 954.

Eadred’s key advisers included Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury and future Archbishop of Canterbury. Eadred, who suffered from ill health, was in his early thirties when he died on 23 November 955, and Eadwig succeeded at the age of around fifteen. He was the first king since the early ninth century not to face the threat of imminent foreign invasion, and England remained free from Viking attacks until 980, after Edward’s death. Eadwig showed himself from the start determined to establish his independence from his uncle’s advisers. He clashed with Dunstan and exiled him to Flanders. In 957, the kingdom was divided between Eadwig, who kept Wessex, and Edward’s father Edgar, who became king of Mercia and other lands north of the Thames. Historians disagree whether this had been planned since the beginning of his reign or was the result of a successful revolt brought about by Eadwig’s incompetence.

Eadwig died in 959, and Edgar succeeded to the rule of the whole kingdom. Eadwig had appointed Ælfhere to be ealdorman^[a] of Mercia, and he became the premier layman, a status he retained until his death in 983. His rise was at the expense of the family of Æthelstan Half-King, Ealdorman of East Anglia, leading to a strong rivalry between the families which disrupted the country in Edward’s reign. The Benedictine reform movement reached its peak in Edgar’s reign under the leadership of Dunstan, Oswald, Archbishop of York, and Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester. It became dominant as a result of the strong support of Edgar, earning him high praise by contemporary and later monastic chroniclers. He was a strong, indeed overbearing ruler, and he enriched Benedictine monasteries by forcing the aristocracy and secular (non-monastic) religious institutions to surrender land to them. Secular clergy, many of whom were members of the nobility, were expelled in order to convert their institutions into monasteries. Æthelwold was the most active and ruthless of the Benedictine leaders in securing land to support his monasteries, in some cases driving secular clergy out of their establishments in favour of monks. When Edgar died at the age of only thirty-two in 975, many nobles set out to recover their lost estates by legal actions, and sometimes by force,…