Essays highlighting the importance of three kings – Edmund, Eadred and Eadwig – in understanding England in the tenth century.
Much scholarly attention has been devoted to both the expanding kingdom of Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder, and Æthelstan, and to the larger and integrated realm of their more distant successors, Edgar and Æthelred II. However, the English kingdom in the 940s and 950s, and its three kings, Edmund (939-946), Eadred (946-955), and Eadwig (955-959), the men who inherited and held together the kingdom created by their immediate predecessors, have been somewhat neglected, with little research being dedicated to these men as kings, or the era in which they ruled.
This volume offers a variety of approaches to the period. Its contributors bring to light royal legal innovations to ecclesiastical law, oaths, heriot, complex factional politics, including the crucial role of queens, differing perspectives on the final era of an independent northern kingdom of York, and developments in literary culture outside the domineering trend of the later monastic reformers.
Table of Content
Introduction – Mary Elizabeth Blanchard and Christopher Riedel
1. Forgetting Kings: The First 100 Years of Historiography of Eadred’s and Eadwig’s Reigns – Alison Hudson
2. King and Church in the Laws of King Edmund – Nicole Marafioti
3. Edmund’s Oath of Loyalty in Perspective: Innovation, Emulation, and a French Prince – Isabelle Beaudoin
4. ‘Both to Bind and to Loosen’: Royal Power and the Heriots of Ealdormen and Bishops – Stuart Pracy
5. The Many Kings of Archbishop Wulfstan I – Andrew Rabin
6. Going North: Revisiting the End of Northern Independence – Neil Mc Guigan
7. Eadgifu at Eadred’s Court: the Expansion of and Limits on the Role of Mater Regis – Mary Elizabeth Blanchard
8. Eadwig Has a Threesome: Sex and the Breaking of Authority in the Tenth Century – Katherine Weikert
9. London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. XV: A Priest’s Book from before the Benedictine Reform? – Gerald Dyson
About the author
KATHERINE WEIKERT is Senior Lecturer in Early Medieval History at the University of Winchester.
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