of learning and larger opportunities for education, and thus in a special manner must have recommended itself to Dunstan's goodwill. His comparatively small participation in the work that was being carried out so vigorously by his friends was doubtless due to his conciliatory temper, as well as to the fact that during Eadgar's reign his energies must have been fully employed in affairs of state. Although the secular clergy who were expelled from the cathedral churches and other monasteries were as a class married men, it is wholly untrue that Dunstan, or indeed any one else, persecuted the married clergy as such. It was uncanonical for a priest to have a wife, and if he was married before he became a priest he was bound to put away his wife. Dunstan, however, made no effort to compel the clergy to celibacy. The canons for which he is responsible merely direct that ‘a priest should not desert his church, but hold her as his lawful wife’ (canon 8), and the only penalty that he decided should follow clerical marriage was that the married priest should lose his privilege, he ceased to be of thegn-right worthy, and had no higher legal status than that which belonged to a layman of equal birth. A clause in the Penitential that is called Dunstan's directs that any mass priest, monk, or deacon who, after having put away his wife before he was ordained, again returned to her, should ‘fast as for murder;’ but this, as Dr. Stubbs has pointed out, is ‘an extract from Penitentials of much earlier date,’ and moreover it cannot be proved that the compilation in which it stands belongs to the pontificate of Dunstan (Introduction to Memorials, cvii).
In other respects also, besides the question of his policy in the struggle of seculars and regulars, the character of Dunstan's ecclesiastical administration may best be gathered from the canons of Eadgar's reign. The long wars with the Danes had thrown the people back into ignorance, and their ignorance made them superstitious, and led them to hanker after the paganism of their forefathers. It was needful, therefore, to repeat the old injunction that all heathen practices should be put away (16). Dunstan, however, went to the root of the evil; he saw that if his fellow-countrymen were to be saved from barbarism, they could only find salvation in intellectual improvement. He desired to make the church the educator of the people; her ministers were to be teachers. If, however, they were to be successful teachers, it was needful that they should work in harmony and order. No priest, therefore, was to take another's scholar without his leave (10). And it was not only intellectual instruction the people needed. The energies of the nation had too long been wasted in war. In common with his king, Eadgar ‘the Peaceful,’ Dunstan laboured for peace, and, excellent craftsman that he was, he longed to see the people learn the arts of peace. Accordingly every priest was to learn a handicraft with diligence, that he might be able to teach it to others for the increase of knowledge (11). The importance of spiritual instruction was not forgotten; a sermon was to be preached every Sunday (52). The special evil of the age was to be forsaken: all concubinage was forbidden, and lawful marriage alone was to be practised (21). In this the church under Dunstan's guidance was following in the path marked out by Oda. That priests were to be examples of continence we have already seen. As regards other matters also it was needful to bid them live a higher life than the life around them; they were not to hunt, hawk, or play dice (61), and they were to keep from drunkenness and rebuke it in others (57). In order to put a stop to the drinking bouts that largely prevailed among the English, Dunstan is said to have ordered pegs to be placed in all drinking cups, so that a man might see how much he had drunk, and so be warned against excess (Gesta Regum, c. 149). As he desired to raise the character of the priesthood, so also he would have its dignity maintained. No priest was to clear himself by oath in a matter with a thegn without the thegn's ‘fore-oath’ (63), and quarrels between priests were not to be taken before a civil judge, but before the bishop (7). With Dunstan's desire for the exaltation of the priesthood must be connected the stringent rules as to vestments and other matters that were to be observed in the eucharistic celebration (30–45). If we are to accept the penitential canons already referred to as his work, they bear witness to a mind not only eminently practical, but of wide and tender sympathies. The rich offender might redeem his penance by building and endowing or repairing churches, by making roads, bridges, and causeways, by helping the poor, the widow and the fatherless, by freeing his own slaves, or by buying slaves and setting them free. Penance was not to consist merely in bodily mortification: the great man was bidden to forgive his enemy, to comfort the sorrowful, and bury the dead (13–16). Nor did the archbishop shrink from enforcing discipline at any possible cost to himself. One of the great men of the kingdom contracted an unlawful marriage. Dunstan rebuked him often, and when he found that he continued in sin excommunicated him. The noble journeyed to Rome and obtained a papal mandate,
