CHAPTER XV.
ENGLAND FROM A.D. 954 TO THE DEATH OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR.
The task which Alfred's descendants had undertaken of creating an English nation was by no means accomplished in 954. The conquest of the Yorkshire Danes by Eadred and the final expulsion of Eric in that year completed the territorial development of the kingdom, but there still remained the harder tasks of creating a national feeling and a common law; and even a hundred years later only slight progress can be discerned in either of these important matters. For the moment however the inhabitants of England might fairly congratulate themselves on what had been achieved by the last two generations, and the prospects for the future seemed bright enough. War and the danger of war were over at least for a time; the country had become consolidated as never before, and the only trouble, which seemed at all threatening, was a certain want of robustness, which was beginning to manifest itself in the royal house. Of this weakness Eadred, despite his energy, was an unmistakeable example. By all accounts he must have been, even from boyhood, a chronic invalid, and his health grew worse as he grew older. It was but little of a surprise then to his subjects that he lived to be only thirty-one, dying at Frome in Somerset somewhat suddenly in 955 while still unmarried.
Eadred's premature death opened the succession to his nephew Eadwig, the son of Edmund, who had been passed over in 946 as too young to rule, and even now was little more than fifteen. From the very first this youth seems to have had an aversion to most of the advisers, who had surrounded his father and uncle, and to have been under the control of a party among the nobles of Wessex who resented the influence which had been exercised at court by Dunstan, the Abbot of Glastonbury, and Eadgifu the young king's grandmother. The result was that quarrels broke out even at the king's coronation, and within a year Dunstan was banished from England and driven to take refuge at Ghent in the abbey of Blandinium. The treatment meted out to Dunstan, together with an unwise marriage made by the king, led to a revolt breaking out in 957, apparently organised by the
