King Edgar
historical figure · 2 works · 4 mentions · 5 anchored passages
Edgar
in the texts
An Essay on the Trial by Jury
Anglo-Saxon king whose commanded law was not uniformly obeyed, illustrating limits on royal legislative power.
And yet, in defiance of this positive injunction, the laws of Edgar were not accepted in Mercia until the reign of Canute the Dane.
“It was the especial province of the earldomen or earl to attend the shyre-meeting, (the county court,) twice a year, and there officiate as the county judge in expounding the secular laws, as appears by the fifth of Edgar’s laws.
Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John
West-Saxon king associated with a home-rule style policy toward outlying provinces.
Lively sympathy is excited by consideration of the difficulties that beset the path of King Edgar or King Ethelred, endeavouring to rule from Winchester the distant and alien races of North–umbria, Mercia, and East Anglia.
Not later than the days of Edgar, it became the practice for the officiating archbishop to exact an oath of good government from the new sovereign before his final coronation.
The traditional view makes Magna Carta the direct descendant of Henry Beauclerk’s Coronation Charter, which is, in turn, regarded as merely an amplification of the old coronation oath sworn by the Conqueror and his sons, in terms borrowed from a long line of Anglo–Saxon kings, stretching back from Edward Confessor to Edgar, Alfred and Egbert, until its origin is lost in the mists of antiquity.