A .D. 975.] DEATH OF EADGAR. 265 Death of Eadgar and succession of Eadward. In the same year, the flower and grace of kings, the glory and honour of England, king Eadgar the Pacific, whose liberality and magnificence bad now filled all Europe, departed this life in the thirty-second year of his age and the sixteenth of his reign, exchanging an earthly for an eternal kingdom. His body was carried to Glastonbury, and there buried in a royal manner. On his death a great dissension arose among the nobles of the realm respecting the choice of a successor ; some favouring the king's eldest son Eadward, whilst others inclined to his brother Ethelred, by the second wife. For which cause the two archbishops, Dunstan of Canterbury and Oswald of York, assembled with the bishops, abbats, and nobles, and having elected Eadward according to the direction of his dying father, amidst the murmurs of some, consecrated and anointed him king ; for his step-mother Alfdritha sought to advance her son Ethelred, a boy scarcely eight years of age, that she might reign the more speciously in his name. And so, after the death of the Pacific king, the kingdom was troubled and full of animosities; for a number of the nobles and great men thrust forth the abbats and monks from the monasteries in which king Eadgar had placed them, and restored the clerks and their wives in their room; and one of them, named Elfery with great insolence overthrew nearly all the monasteries which the most reverend Ethelwold had built in the province of Mercia. These questions being referred to the blessed Dunstan, he assembled a synod at Winchester, and in the midst of the conflict of the disputing parties, the image of the Lord, which stood near in the church, distinctly spoke, to the con fusion and silencing of the clerks and those who favoured them. But the minds of the cruel gainsayers not being yet calmed, another synod was held at Calne, in an upper room (cœnaculum), at which were present all the senators of the king dom ; but tfie king, on account of his tender age, was absent. While the matter was being discussed with much heat on both sides, and numbers assailed Dunstan with great abuse, against which he stood firm as a church wall, on a sudden, the whole of the floor on which they were assembled gave way with the beams and the planks, and all were precipitated with