his passionate love of music, and his custom of carrying his harp in hand on journey or visit. The wandering scholars of Ireland left their books in the monastery of Glastonbury, as they left them along the Rhine and the Danube; and Dunstan plunged into the study of sacred and profane letters till his brain broke down in delirium. His knowledge became famous in the neighborhood and reached the court of Ethelstan, but his appearance there was the signal for a burst of ill-will among the courtiers, though many of them were kinsmen of his own, and he was forced to withdraw. Even when Eadmund recalled him to the court, his rivals drove him from the king's train, threw him from his horse as he passed through the marshes, and with the wild passion of their age trampled him underfoot in the mire. The outrage ended in fever, and in the bitterness of his disappointment and shame Dunstan rose from his sick bed a monk. But in England at this time the monastic profession seems to have been little more than a vow of celibacy, and his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature was sunny, versatile, artistic, full of strong affections and capable of inspiring others with affections as strong. Quick-witted, of tenacious memory, a ready and fluent speaker, gay and genial in address, an artist, a musician, he was at the same time an indefatigable worker, busy at books, at building, at handicraft. Throughout his life he won the love of women; he now became the spiritual guide of a woman of high rank, who lived only for charity and the entertainment of pilgrims. "He ever clave to her, and loved her in wondrous fashion." His sphere of activity widened as the wealth of his devotee was placed unreservedly at his command; we see him followed by a train of pupils, busy with literature, writing, harping, painting, designing. One morning a lady summons him to her house to design a robe which she is embroidering. As he bends with her maidens over their toil, his harp hung upon the wall sounds without mortal touch tones which the startled ears around frame into a joyous antiphon. The tie which bound him to this scholar-life was broken by the death of his patroness; and towards the close of Eadmund's reign Dunstan was again called to the court. But the old jealousies revived, and counting the game lost he prepared again to withdraw. The king had spent the day in the chase; the red deer which he was pursuing dashed over Cheddar cliffs, and his horse only checked

itself on the brink of the ravine while Eadmund in the bitterness of death was repenting of his injustice to Dunstan. He was at once summoned on the king's return. "Saddle your horse," said Eadmund, " and ride with me!" The royal train swept over the marshes to Dunstan's home; and greeting him with the kiss of peace, the king seated him in the priestly chair as Abbot of Glastonbury.

From that moment Dunstan may have exercised influence on public affairs; but it was not till the accession of Eadred, Eadmund's brother, that his influence became supreme as leading counsellor of the crown. We may trace his hand in the solemn proclamation of the king's crowning. Eadred's election was the first national election where Briton, Dane, and Englishman were alike represented; his coronation was the first national coronation, the first union of the primate of the north and the primate of the south in setting the crown on the head of one who was to rule from the Forth to the Channel. A revolt of the north two years later was subdued; at the outbreak of a fresh rising the Archbishop of York, Wulfstan, was thrown into prison; and with the submission of the Danelaw in 954 the long work of Ælfred's house was done. Dogged as his fight had been, the Dane at last owned himself beaten. From the moment of Eadred's final triumph all resistance came to an end. The north was finally brought into the general organization of the English realm, and the Northumbrian under-kingdom sank into an earldom under Oswulf. The new might of the royal power was expressed in the lofty titles assumed by Eadred; he was not only " King of the Anglo-Saxons," but " Cæsar of the whole of Britain."

The death of Eadred however was a signal for the outbreak of political strife. The boy-king Eadwig was swayed by a woman of high lineage, Æthelgifu; and the quarrel between her and the older counsellors of Eadred broke into open strife at the coronation feast. On the young king's insolent withdrawal to her chamber Dunstan, at the bidding of the Witan, drew him roughly back to the hall. But before the year was over the wrath of the boy-king drove the abbot over sea, and his whole system went with him. The triumph of Æthelgifu was crowned in 957 by the marriage of her daughter to the king. The marriage was uncanonical, and at the opening of 958 Archbishop Odo parted the king from his wife by solemn

sentence; while the Mercians and Northumbrians rose in revolt, proclaimed Eadwig's brother Eadgar their king, and recalled Dunstan, who received successively the sees of Worcester and of London. The death of Eadwig restored the unity of the realm. Wessex submitted to the king who had been already accepted by the north, and Dunstan, now raised to the see of Canterbury, wielded for sixteen years as the minister of Eadgar the secular and ecclesiastical powers of the realm. Never had England seemed so strong or so peaceful. Without, a fleet cruising round the coast swept the sea of pirates; the Danes of Ireland had turned from foes to friends; eight vassal kings rowed Eadgar (so ran the legend) in his boat on the Dee. The settlement of the north indicated the large and statesmanlike course which Dunstan was to pursue in the general administration of the realm. He seems to have adopted from the beginning a national rather than a West-Saxon policy. The later charge against his rule, that he gave too much power to the Dane and too much love to strangers, is the best proof of the unprovincial temper of his administration. He employed Danes in the royal service and promoted them to high posts in Church and State. In the code which he promulgated he expressly reserved to the north its old Danish rights," with as good laws as they best might choose." His stern hand restored justice and order, while his care for commerce was shown in the laws which regulated the coinage and the enactments of common weights and measures for the realm. Thanet was ravaged when the wreckers of its coast plundered a trading ship from York. Commerce sprang into a wider life. "Men of the Empire," traders of Lower Lorraine and the Rhine-land," men of Rouen," were seen in the streets of London, and it was by the foreign trade which sprang up in Dunstan's time that London rose to the commercial greatness it has held ever since. But the aims of the primate-minister reached beyond this outer revival of prosperity and good government. The Danish wars had dealt rudely with Ælfred's hopes; his educational movement had ceased with his death, the clergy had sunk back into worldliness and ignorance, not a single book or translation had been added to those which the king had left. Dunstan resumed the task, if not in the larger spirit of Ælfred, at least in the spirit of a great administrator. The reform of monasticism which had begun in the abbey of

Cluny was stirring the zeal of English churchmen, and Eadgar showed himself zealous in the cause of introducing it into England. With his support, Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, carried the new Benedictinism into his diocese, and a few years. later Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, brought monks into his own cathedral city. Tradition ascribed to Eadgar the formation of forty monasteries, and it was to his time that English monasticism looked back in later days as the beginning of its continuous life. But after all his efforts, monasteries were in fact only firmly planted in Wessex and East Anglia, and the system took no hold in Northumbria or in the bulk of Mercia. Dunstan himself took little part in it, though his influence was strongly felt in the literary revival which accompanied the revival of religious activity. He himself while abbot was famous as a teacher. His great assistant Ethelwold raised Abingdon into a school second only to Glastonbury. His other great helper, Oswald, laid the first foundations of the historic school of Worcester. Abbo, the most notable scholar in Gaul, came from Fleury at the primate's invitation.

After times looked back fondly to " Eadgar's Law," as it was called, in other words to the English Constitution as it shaped itself in the hands of Eadgar's minister. A number of influences had greatly modified the older order which had followed on the English conquest. Slavery was gradually disappearing before the efforts of the Church. Theodore had denied Christian burial to the kidnapper, and prohibited the sale of children by their parents, after the age of seven. Ecgberht of York punished any sale of child or kinsfolk with excommunication. The murder of a slave by lord or mistress, though no crime in the eye of the State, became a sin for which penance was due to the Church. The slave was exempted from toil on Sundays and holy days; here and there he became attached to the soil and could only be sold with it; sometimes he acquired a plot of ground, and was suffered to purchase his own release. Æthelstan gave the slave-class a new rank in the realm by extending to it the same principles of mutual responsibility for crime which were the basis of order among the free. The Church was far from contenting herself with this gradual elevation; Wilfrid led the way in the work of emancipation by freeing two hundred and fifty serfs whom he found attached to his estate at Selsey. Manumission became frequent in wills,

as the clergy taught that such a gift was a boon to the soul of the dead. At the Synod of Chelsea the bishops bound themselves to free at their decease all serfs on their estates who had been reduced to serfdom by want or crime. Usually the slave was set free before the altar or in the church-porch, and the Gospel-book bore written on its margins the record of his emancipation. Sometimes his lord placed him at the spot where four roads met, and bade him go whither he would. In the more solemn form of the law his master took him by the hand in full shire-meeting, showed him open road and door, and gave him the lance and sword of the freeman. The slavetrade from English ports was prohibited by law, but the prohibition long remained ineffective. A hundred years later than Dunstan the wealth of English nobles was said sometimes to spring from breeding slaves for the market. It was not till the reign of the first Norman king that the preaching of Wulfstan and the influence of Lanfranc suppressed the trade in its last stronghold, the port of Bristol.

But the decrease of slavery went on side by side with an increasing degradation of the bulk of the people. Political and social changes had long been modifying the whole structure of society; and the very foundations of the old order were broken up in the degradation of the freeman, and the upgrowth of the lord with his dependent villeins. The political changes which were annihilating the older English liberty were in great measure due to a change in the character of English kingship. As the lesser English kingdoms had drawn together, the wider dominion of the king had removed him further and further from his people, and clothed him with a mysterious dignity. Every reign raised him higher in the social scale. The bishop, once ranked his equal in value of life, sank to the level of the ealdorman. The ealdorman himself, once the hereditary ruler of a smaller state, became a mere delegate of the king, with an authority curtailed in every shire by that of the royal reevesofficers despatched to levy the royal revenues and administer the royal justice. Religion deepened the sense of awe. The king, if he was no longer sacred as the son of Woden, was yet more sacred as "the Lord's Anointed;" and treason against him became the worst of crimes. The older nobility of blood died out before the new nobility of the court. From the oldest times of Germanic history each chief or king had his war-band,