In speaking of the reigns of Ethelbard, Ethelbert, and Ethelred the First, the monkish historians have left us but little real information respecting the affairs of the Church, their pages being filled with lamentations over the massacre and plunderings of the monasteries and convents by the Danes, who appear to have exercised the greatest barbarities.
Assassination of Edward the Martyr. (See p. 47.)
The councils held on ecclesiastical affairs were composed of laymen as well as priests: properly speaking, they were scarcely to be called councils, being spoken of in the Saxon chronicles by the name of Wittena-Gemot, or Micel Synod, both signifying the great council.
It was at an assembly of this kind, at Winchester, that Ethelwulph is said to have granted the famous charter which secured to the clergy the tithes; but the most important regulations for the Church were made at the Synod of Greatly, where numerous laws or canons were enacted.
In the reign of Edgar were published a body of canons, of which the following are chiefly remarkable:—
By the fifth, if a priest received any injury, the complaint was to be preferred to the synod, who were to treat the case as if the injury had actually been done to the whole of the clergy, and take care that satisfaction be made at the discretion of the bishop of the diocese.
The eleventh enjoins the priests to learn some employment, in order to get their livelihood in case of misfortune.
The seventeenth orders parents to teach their children the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles' Creed, without which they were neither to be admitted to the Eucharist nor buried in consecrated ground.
