Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune
Produced by Martin Robb
Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune:
A Tale of the Days of Saint Dunstan,
by the Rev. A. D. Crake.
PREFACE.
It has been the aim of the Author, in a series of original tales told tothe senior boys of a large school, to illustrate interesting ordifficult passages of Church History by the aid of fiction. Two of thesetales--"Aemilius," a tale of the Decian and Valerian persecutions; and"Evanus," a tale of the days of Constantine--he has already published,and desires gratefully to acknowledge the kindness with which they havebeen received.
He is thus encouraged to submit another attempt to the public, havingits scene of action in our own land, although in times very dissimilarto our own; and for its object, the illustration of the struggle betweenthe regal and ecclesiastical powers in the days of the ill-fated andill-advised King Edwy.
Scarcely can one find a schoolboy who has not read the touching legendof Edwy and Elgiva--for it is little more than a legend in most of itsdetails; and which of these youthful readers has not execrated thecruelty of the Churchmen who separated those unhappy lovers? While thetragical story of the fate of the hapless Elgiva has been the theme ofmany a poet and even historian, who has accepted the tale as if it wereof as undoubted authenticity as the Reform Bill.
The writer can well remember the impression the tale made upon hisyouthful imagination, and the dislike, to use a mild word, with which heever viewed the character of the great statesman and ecclesiastic of thetenth century, Dunstan, until a wider knowledge of history and a moreaccurate judgment came with maturer years; and testimonies to theability and genius of that monk, who had been the moving spirit of hisage, began to force themselves upon him.
Lord Macaulay has well summed up the relative positions of Church andState in that age in the following words: "It is true that the Churchhad been deeply corrupted by superstition, yet she retained enough ofthe sublime theology and benevolent morality of her early days toelevate many intellects, and to purify many hearts. That the sacerdotalorder should encroach on the functions of the chief magistrate, would inour time be a great evil. But that which in an age of good government isan evil, may in an age of grossly bad government be a blessing. It isbetter that men should be governed by priest craft than by bruteviolence; by such a prelate as Dunstan, than by such a warrior as Penda."
The Church was indeed the salt of the earth, even if the salt hadsomewhat lost its savour; it was the only power which could step inbetween the tyrant and his victim, which could teach the irresponsiblegreat--irresponsible to man--their responsibility to the great andawful Being whose creatures they were. And again, it was then the onlyhome of civilisation and learning. It has been well said that for thelearning of this age to vilify the monks and monasteries of the medievalperiod, is for the oak to revile the acorn from which it sprang.
The overwhelming realisation of these facts, the determination to set upthe dominion of truth and justice which they held to be identical withthat of the Church, as that was identical with the kingdom of God,supplies the key to the lives and characters of such men as Ambrose,Cyril, Dunstan, and Becket. They each came in collision with the civilpower; but Ambrose against Justina or even Theodosius, Cyril againstOrestes, Dunstan against Edwy, Becket against Henry Plantagenet--eachrepresented, in a greater or less degree, the cause of religion, nay ofhumanity, against its worst foes, tyranny or moral corruption.
Yet not one of these great men was without his faults; this is only tosay he was human; but more may be admitted--personal motives would mixthemselves with nobler emotions. Self would assert her fatal claims, andgreat mistakes were sometimes made by those who would have forfeitedtheir lives rather than have committed them, had they known what theywere doing. Yet, on the whole, their cause was that of God and man, andthey fought nobly. Shall we asperse their memories because they "hadthis treasure in earthen vessels"?
The tale itself is intended to depict what the writer believes to be thetrue relative positions of Edwy and the great ecclesiastic; therefore hewill not attempt to deal with the subject here. It will be noticedhowever, that he has shorn the narrative of the dread catastrophe withwhich it terminated in all the histories of our childhood. Scarcely anywriter has made such wise research into the history of this period asMr. E. A. Freeman, and the author has adopted his conclusions upon thispoint. With him he has therefore admitted the marriage of Edwy withElgiva, although it was an uncanonical marriage beyond all doubt, andhas given her the title of queen, which she bore in a document preservedby Lappenburg. But, in agreement with the same authority, the writerfeels most happy to be able to reject the story of Elgiva's supposedtragical death. All sorts of stories are told by later writers, utterlycontradictory and confused, of a woman killed by the Mercians in theirrevolt. This could not be Elgiva, for she was not divorced till therebellion was over; and even the sad tale that she was seized by theofficers of Odo, and branded to disfigure her beauty, rests on no goodauthority. In spite of the reluctance with which men relinquish atouching tragedy, the calumny should be banished from the pages ofhistorians; and it is painful to see it repeated, as if of undoubtedauthenticity, in a recent popular history for children by one of thegreatest of modern novelists.
Edwy's character has cost the writer much thought. He has endeavoured topaint him faithfully--not so bad as all the monastic writers of thesucceeding period (the only writers with few exceptions) describe him;but still such a youth as the circumstances under which he became placedwould probably have made him--capable of sincere attachment, brave,and devoted to his friends, yet careless of all religious obligations;bitterly hostile to the Church, that is to Christianity, for the termswere then synonymous; and reckless of obligations, or of the sanctity oftruth and justice.
His measures against St. Dunstan, as they are related in the tale, havethe authority of history; although it is needless to say that the agentsare in part fictitious characters. The writer's object has been tosubordinate fiction to history, and never to contradict historic fact;if he has failed in this intention, it has been his misfortune ratherthan his fault; for he has had recourse to all such authorities as layin his reach.[i] Especially, he is glad to find that thecharacter he had conceived as Edwy's perfectly coincides with thedescription given by Palgrave in his valuable History of the Anglo-Saxons:
"Edwy was a youth of singular beauty, but vain, rash, petulant,profligate, and surrounded by a host of young courtiers, all bent onencouraging and emulating the vices of their master."
Another object of the tale has been to depict the trials andtemptations, the fall and the recovery, of a lad fresh from a home fullof religious influences, when thrown amidst the snares which aboundedthen as now. The motto, "Facilis descensus Averno," etc, epitomises thewhole story.
In relating a tale of the days of St. Dunstan, the author has felt boundto give the religious colouring which actually prevailed in that day. Hehas found much authority and information in Johnson's Anglo-SaxonCanons, especially those of Elfric, probably contemporaneous with thetale. He has written in no controversial spirit, but with an honestdesire to set forth the truth.
It may be objected that he has made all his characters speak in verymodern English, and has not affected the archaisms commonly found intales of the time. To this he would reply, that if the genuine languagewere preserved, it would be utterly unintelligible to modern Englishmen,and therefore he has thought it preferable to translate into thevernacular of today. The English which men spoke then was no morestilted or formal to them than ours is to us.
Although he has followed Mr. Freeman in the u
se of the terms English andWelsh, as far less likely to mislead than the terms Saxons and Britons,and far truer to history, yet he has not thought proper to follow theobsolete spelling of proper names; he has not, e. g., spelt Edwy, Eadwigor Elgiva, Aelfgifu. Custom has Latinised the appellations, and as hehas rejected obsolete terms in conversation, he has felt it moreconsistent to reject these more correct, but less familiar, orthographies.
The title, "First Chronicle of Aescendune," has been adopted, becausethe tale here given is but the first of a series of tales which havebeen told, but not yet written, attaching themselves to the same familyand locality at intervals of generations. Thus, the second illustratesthe struggle between Edmund Ironside and Canute; the third, the NormanConquest; etc. Their appearance in print must depend upon the indulgenceextended to the present volume.
In conclusion, the writer dedicates this book with great respect to Mrs.Trevelyan, authoress of "Lectures upon the