The Reigns of Edmund Eadred and Eadwig 939-959

<b>Essays highlighting the importance of three kings - Edmund Eadred and Eadwig - in understanding England in the tenth century.</b><br><br>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.<br><br>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.