successor Eadgar was only a boy of sixteen and at the outset of his reign the direction of affairs must have lain in the hands of Dunstan, whose elevation to the see of Canterbury set him at the head of the Church as of the State.  The noblest tribute to his rule lies in the silence of our chroniclers.  His work indeed was a work of settlement, and such a work was best done by the simple enforcement of peace.  During the years of rest in which King and Primate enforced justice and order northman and Englishman drew together into a single people.  Their union was the result of no direct policy of fusion; on the contrary Dunstan’s policy preserved to the conquered Danelaw its local rights and local usages.  But he recognized the men of the Danelaw as Englishmen, he employed northmen in the royal service, and promoted them to high posts in Church and State.  For the rest he trusted to time, and time justified his trust.  The fusion was marked by a memorable change in the name of the land.  Slowly as the conquering tribes had learned to know themselves, by the one national name of Englishmen, they learned yet more slowly to stamp their name on the land they had won.  It was not till Eadgar’s day that the name of Britain passed into the name of Engla-land, the land of Englishmen, England.  The same vigorous rule which secured rest for the country during these years of national union told on the growth of material prosperity.  Commerce sprang into a wider life.  Its extension is seen in the complaint that men learned fierceness from the Saxon of Germany, effeminacy from the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane.  The laws of AEthelred which provide for the protection and regulation of foreign trade only recognize a state of things which grew up under Eadgar.  “Men of the Empire,” traders of Lower Lorraine and the Rhine-land, “Men of Rouen,” traders from the new Norman duchy of the Seine, were seen in the streets of London.  It was in Eadgar’s day indeed that London rose to the commercial greatness it has held ever since.

[Sidenote:  Eadward the Martyr]

Though Eadgar reigned for sixteen years, he was still in the prime of manhood when he died in 975.  His death gave a fresh opening to the great nobles.  He had bequeathed the crown to his elder son Eadward; but the ealdorman of East-Anglia, AEthelwine, rose at once to set a younger child, AEthelred, on the throne.  But the two primates of Canterbury and York who had joined in setting the crown on the head of Eadgar now joined in setting it on the head of Eadward, and Dunstan remained as before master of the realm.  The boy’s reign however was troubled by strife between the monastic party and their opponents till in 979 the quarrel was cut short by his murder at Corfe, and with the accession of AEthelred, the power of Dunstan made way for that of ealdorman AEthelwine and the queen-mother.  Some years of tranquillity followed this victory; but though AEthelwine preserved order at home he showed little sense of the danger