King of England (955–959), a teenage king whose quarrel with Dunstan and the loss of Mercia and Northumbria to his brother Edgar marked a short and troubled reign.
Eadwig, called "All-Fair" for his good looks, was king of England from 955 to 959. The elder son of Edmund I, he came to the throne as a boy of about fifteen and swiftly fell out with the most powerful churchman of the age, Dunstan, whom he drove into exile — a quarrel that shaped his hostile reputation in the monastic sources.
His brief reign was marked by division. In 957 the Mercians and Northumbrians transferred their allegiance to his younger brother Edgar, splitting the kingdom in two, and Eadwig was left ruling only Wessex south of the Thames. He died in 959, still a teenager, and the whole realm passed to Edgar.
Eadwig was born about 940, the elder of the two sons of Edmund I. Because he and his brother Edgar had been infants when their father was murdered in 946, the throne had passed to their uncle Eadred; on Eadred's death in 955, Eadwig, now about fifteen, at last succeeded.
His accession is famous chiefly for the scandalous story, told by his monastic enemies, of the day of his coronation feast, from which the young king slipped away to the company of a noblewoman and her daughter and had to be fetched back by Dunstan.
Eadwig is one of the hardest Anglo-Saxon kings to judge fairly, because almost everything recorded of him was written by the monastic reformers he antagonised, above all the partisans of Dunstan. In their telling he is a wilful, pleasure-loving youth, ruled by a grasping faction of his wife's kin, who despoiled the Church and drove out its saints.
A cooler reading allows for the ordinary difficulties of a boy-king surrounded by rival adult factions. His grants of land suggest a ruler energetically buying support, and his marriage to Ælfgifu tied him to one noble party against another. Whether genuinely dissolute or merely the loser of a factional struggle whose winners wrote the history, he remains fixed in tradition as the "All-Fair" young king who quarrelled with a saint.
Eadwig's reign quickly ran into trouble. His clash with Dunstan, whom he exiled and whose Glastonbury he stripped of treasure, alienated the powerful reforming party in the Church. His marriage to Ælfgifu was condemned by churchmen as being within the forbidden degrees of kinship and later annulled.
In 957 the decisive blow fell: the Mercians and Northumbrians repudiated Eadwig and took his younger brother Edgar as their king, dividing the realm along the Thames. Eadwig kept Wessex, but the united monarchy of his uncles had, for the moment, come apart.
Eadwig died on 1 October 959, at about nineteen, and was buried in the New Minster at Winchester. With no surviving children, he was succeeded across the whole reunited kingdom by his brother Edgar.
Eadwig is remembered mainly as a cautionary figure in the story of the tenth-century Church — the young king whose feud with Dunstan and brief division of the kingdom form the dark prelude to the golden reign of his brother Edgar. His reign shows how quickly the new united monarchy could fracture along its old fault lines, and how completely the monastic reformers would shape the memory of a king who crossed them.