His death put the whole realm into the hands of Eadgar, or rather of Eadgar's friends of the Church party, for the new king was still very young. He recalled Dunstan from exile to make him his chief councillor; and when Archbishop Oda died, he gave the see of Canterbury to him. For the seventeen years of Eadgar's rule Dunstan was his prime minister, and much of the character of the earlier years of the king's reign must be attributed to the prelate. Dunstan's policy had two sides: he used his secular powers to enforce his religious views, and everywhere he and his friends began reforming the monasteries by forcing them to adopt the Benedictine rule. They expelled the secular canons, many of whom were married men, from the cathedrals, and replaced them with monks. They also dealt severely with the custom of lay persons receiving church preferment, one of the commonest abuses of the time. [Sidenote: =Complete conciliation of the Danes.--Power of Eadgar.=] But Dunstan was not only an ecclesiastical reformer. His activity had another and a more practical side. To him, in conjunction with Eadgar, is to be attributed the complete unification of the Anglo-Danes and the English. Instead of being treated as subjects of doubtful loyalty, the men of the Danelagh were now made the equals of the men of Wessex, by being promoted to ealdormanries and bishoprics, and admitted as members of the Witan. Eadgar kept so many of them about his person that he even provoked the thegns of Wessex to murmuring. But the policy of trust and conciliation had the best effects, and for the future the Anglo-Danes may be regarded as an integral part of the English nation. When he came to years of maturity, Eadgar proved to be a capable prince. His power was so universally acknowledged in Britain that his neighbours never dared attack him, and he became known as the _rex pacificus_ in whose time were known no wars. All the kings of the island served him with exact obedience; the story is well known how he made his six chief vassals--the kings of Scotland, Cumbria, Man, and three Welsh chiefs--row him across the Dee, and then exclaimed that those who followed might now in truth call themselves kings of Britain. [Sidenote: =Legislation.--The Ordinance of the Hundred.=] Eadgar was a firm ruler, and the author of a very considerable body of laws. To him is attributable the first organization of local police in England, by the issue of the "Ordinance of the Hundred," which divided the shires into smaller districts after the Frankish model, and made the inhabitants of each hundred responsible for the putting down of theft, robbery, and violence in their own district. He allowed the Danish half of England to keep a code of laws of its own, but assimilated it, as much as he was able, to that which prevailed in the rest of the land, making Dane and Englishman as equal in all things as he could contrive.