Edgar, An Early English King

A bit of early English history and an early English king from The Political History Of England..:

 Later historians more out spoken tell a story which seems to have some foundation in fact about his [Edgar's] seduction of a novice named Wulfthryth whom he is said to have carried off from the abbey of Wilton and by whom he had a daughter named Edith who took the vows of a nun and died an abbess.

The long delay of Edgar's coronation which happened as we have seen in the fourteenth year of his reign has been connected by later writers with this intrigue and with an alleged penance inflicted on the king by Dunstan who is said to have forbidden him to wear his crown for seven years. Chronological arguments however prove the untruth of this theory.

 Edgar's first wedded wife was apparently Ethel the Fair who was known also by the epithet of the Duck.   By this lady Edgar was the father of a son known in English history as Edward the Martyr.  ...in 964 Edgar married another woman celebrated for her beauty Elfthryth... .

 But however innocent may have been the story of the peaceful king's courtship of his second wife there can be no doubt that when she was once seated in the palace her influence on the lives of its inmates was disastrous.  Edgar survived his coronation but two years.  He died in the thirty third year of his age July 8, 975, and was buried in the Abbey of Glastonbury... .