Bamborough family. The king himself died in 955, and was succeeded by
his nephew Eadwig. But Northumbria and Mercia revolted once more, and
chose Eadwig's brother, Eadgar, instead of their own Danish princes.
Eadwig died in 958, and Eadgar then became king of all three provinces;
thus finally uniting the whole of Teutonic England into one kingdom.

Eadgar's reign forms the climax of the West Saxon power. It was, in
fact, the only period when England can be said to have enjoyed any
national unity under the Anglo-Saxon dynasties. The strong hand of a
priest gave peace for some years to the ill-organised mass. Dunstan was
probably the first Englishman who seriously deserves the name of
statesman. He was born in the half-Celtic region of Somerset, beside the
great abbey of Glastonbury, which held the bones of Arthur, and a good
deal of the imaginative Celtic temper ran probably with the blood in his
veins.[2] But he was above all the representative of the Roman
civilisation in the barbarised, half-Danish England of the tenth
century. He was a musician, a painter, a reader, and a scholar, in a
world of fierce warriors and ignorant nobles. Eadmund made him abbot of
Glastonbury. Eadgar appointed him first bishop of London, and then, on
Eadwig's death, Archbishop of Canterbury. It was Dunstan who really
ruled England throughout the remainder of his life. Essentially an
organiser and administrator, he was able to weld the unwieldy empire
into a rough unity, which lasted as long as its author lived, and no
longer. He appeased the discontent of Northumbria and the Five Burgs by
permitting them a certain amount of local independence, with the
enjoyment of their own laws and their own lawmen. He kept a fleet of
boats cruising in the Irish Sea to check the Danish hosts at Dublin and
Waterford. He put forward a code, known as the laws of Eadgar, for the
better government of Wessex and the South. He made the over-lordship of
the West Saxons over their British vassals more real than it had ever