The old English democracy had thus all but passed into an oligarchy of the narrowest kind.  The feudal movement which in other lands was breaking up every nation into a mass of loosely-knit states with nobles at their head who owned little save a nominal allegiance to their king threatened to break up England itself.  What hindered its triumph was the power of the Crown, and it is the story of this struggle between the monarchy and these tendencies to feudal isolation which fills the period between the death of Eadred and the conquest of the Norman.  It was a struggle which England shared with the rest of the western world, but its issue here was a peculiar one.  In other countries feudalism won an easy victory over the central government.  In England alone the monarchy was strong enough to hold feudalism at bay.  Powerful as he might be, the English ealdorman never succeeded in becoming really hereditary or independent of the Crown.  Kings as weak as AEthelred could drive ealdormen into exile and could replace them by fresh nominees.  If the Witenagemot enabled the great nobles to bring their power to bear directly on the Crown, it preserved at any rate a feeling of national unity and was forced to back the Crown against individual revolt.  The Church too never became feudalized.  The bishop clung to the Crown, and the bishop remained a great social and political power.  As local in area as the ealdorman, for the province was his diocese and he sat by his side in the local Witenagemot, he furnished a standing check on the independence of the great nobles.  But if feudalism proved too weak to conquer the monarchy, it was strong enough to paralyze its action.  Neither of the two forces could master the other, but each could weaken the other, and throughout the whole period of their conflict England lay a prey to disorder within and to insult from without.

The first sign of these troubles was seen when the death of Eadred in 955 handed over the realm to a child king, his nephew Eadwig.  Eadwig was swayed by a woman of high lineage, AEthelgifu; 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 his seat.  But the feast was no sooner ended than a sentence of outlawry drove the abbot over sea, while the triumph of AEthelgifu was crowned in 957 by the marriage of her daughter to the king and the spoliation of the monasteries which Dunstan had befriended.  As the new queen was Eadwig’s kinswoman the religious opinion of the day regarded his marriage as incestuous, and it was followed by a revolution.  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.  The death of Eadwig a few months later restored the unity of the realm; but his