Fresh assessments of Edgar's reign, reappraising key elements using documentary, coin, and pictorial evidence. King Edgar ruled England for a short but significant period in the middle of the tenth century. Two of his four children succeeded him as king and two were to become canonized. He was known to later generations as "the Pacific" or"the Peaceable" because his reign was free from external attack and without internal dissention, and he presided over a period of major social and economic change: early in his rule the growth of monastic power and wealth involved redistribution of much of the country's assets, while the end of his reign saw the creation of England's first national coinage, with firm fiscal control from the centre. He fulfilled King Alfred's dream of the West Saxon royalhouse ruling the whole of England, and, like his uncle King Æthelstan, he maintained overlordship of the whole of Britain. Despite his considerable achievements, however, Edgar has been neglected by scholars, partly becausehis reign has been thought to have passed with little incident. A time for a full reassessment of his achievement is therefore long overdue, which the essays in this volume provide. CONTRIBUTORS: SIMON KEYNES, SHASHI JAYAKUMAR, C.P. LEWIS, FREDERICK M. BIGGS, BARBARA YORKE, JULIA CRICK, LESLEY ABRAMS, HUGH PAGAN, JULIA BARROW, CATHERINE KARKOV, ALEXANDER R. RUMBLE, MERCEDES SALVADOR-BELLO

Edgar is the youngest son of King Edmund of Wessex. Although he became known as Edgar 'the Peaceable' he ruled England with an iron rod. His strict government was backed up by a naval force which deterred invasion by the Vikings. This work tells the story of a Anglo-Saxon monarch who became the first King of a united England in 959.

By tapping into the vast reservoir of undertreated early English documents and texts, the collected studies explore how individuals living in the late tenth through fifteenth centuries engaged with the authorizing culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

Focusing on the family of Ealdorman Leofwine, which retained power throughout an extraordinary period of political and dynastic upheaval, Stephen Baxter reassesses fundamental elements of late Anglo-Saxon government and society, offering a fresh interpretation of the structure of the late Anglo-Saxon polity and the origins of the Norman Conquest.

During the tenth century England began to emerge as a distinct country with an identity that was both part of yet separate from 'Christendom'. The reigns of Athelstan, Edgar and Ethelred witnessed the emergence of many key institutions: the formation of towns on modern street plans; an efficient administration; and a serviceable system of tax. Mark Atherton here shows how the stories, legends, biographies and chronicles of Anglo-Saxon England reflected both this exciting time of innovation as well as the myriad lives, loves and hates of the people who wrote them. He demonstrates, too, that this was a nation coming of age, ahead of its time in its use not of the Book-Latin used elsewhere in Europe, but of a narrative Old English prose devised for law and practical governance of the nation-state, for prayer and preaching, and above all for exploring a rich and daring new literature. This prose was unique, but until now it has been neglected for the poetry. Bringing a volatile age to vivid and muscular life, Atherton argues that it was the vernacular of Alfred the Great, as much as Viking war, that truly forged the nation.

An important study of the emergence of the kingdom of England in the first half of the 10th century. This book is concerned with aspects of the revival of English military, ecclesiastical, and intellectual strength in the period from King Alfred's defeat of the Great Danish Army at Edington in 878 to that of the triumph of Benedictinism in the of Edgar, king of England959-975. Studying intellectual developments of the first half of the10th century, Dr Dumville argues that those decades were a period of continuation of the Alfredian renascence and he looks back into that king's troubled but productive reign to discover new aspects of his thinking and to offer some new interpretations of his actions.These were also the years in which the kingdom of England was formed: attention is therefore given to King Æthelstan, its creator. This series of new studies draws on fresh manuscript-evidence as well as reinterpreting texts long known to historians. By bringing together the testimonies of a wide variety of sources, it seeks to provide the basis on which a new history of the period may be written. DAVID N. DUMVILLE is Reader in the Early Mediaeval History and Culture of the British Isles at the University of Cambridge.

The first-ever biography of the most powerful woman of tenth-century England.