Dunstan did this because the young King's fair wife was his own
cousin, and the monks objected to people marrying their own
cousins; but I believe he did it, because he was an imperious,
audacious, ill-conditioned priest, who, having loved a young lady
himself before he became a sour monk, hated all love now, and
everything belonging to it.

The young King was quite old enough to feel this insult. Dunstan
had been Treasurer in the last reign, and he soon charged Dunstan
with having taken some of the last king's money. The Glastonbury
Abbot fled to Belgium (very narrowly escaping some pursuers who
were sent to put out his eyes, as you will wish they had, when you
read what follows), and his abbey was given to priests who were
married; whom he always, both before and afterwards, opposed. But
he quickly conspired with his friend, Odo the Dane, to set up the
King's young brother, EDGAR, as his rival for the throne; and, not
content with this revenge, he caused the beautiful queen Elgiva,
though a lovely girl of only seventeen or eighteen, to be stolen
from one of the Royal Palaces, branded in the cheek with a red-hot
iron, and sold into slavery in Ireland. But the Irish people
pitied and befriended her; and they said, 'Let us restore the girl-
queen to the boy-king, and make the young lovers happy!' and they
cured her of her cruel wound, and sent her home as beautiful as
before. But the villain Dunstan, and that other villain, Odo,
caused her to be waylaid at Gloucester as she was joyfully hurrying
to join her husband, and to be hacked and hewn with swords, and to
be barbarously maimed and lamed, and left to die. When Edwy the
Fair (his people called him so, because he was so young and
handsome) heard of her dreadful fate, he died of a broken heart;
and so the pitiful story of the poor young wife and husband ends!