Edgar's chief counsellor was the famous archbishop Dunstan, to whom no small part of the glory of his reign has been ascribed. This great prelate was an ecclesiastical reformer--a leader in a movement for the general purification of morals, and especially for the repressing of simony and evil-living among the clergy--a great builder of churches, and a stringent enforcer of the rules of the monastic life. But he was also a busy statesman; he probably had a share in the considerable body of legislation which was enacted in Edgar's reign, and is said to have encouraged him in his policy of treating Dane and Englishman with exact equality, and of investing the one no less than the other with the highest offices in church and state. Edgar's life was too short for the welfare of his people--he was only in his thirty-third year when he died in 975, and his sons were young boys. The hand of a strong man was still needed to keep the peace in the newly-constituted realm of all England, and the evils of a minority were not long in showing themselves. One section of the magnates had possession of the thirteen-year-old king Edward, and used his name to cover their ambitions. The other was led by his step-mother Ælfthryth, who was set on pushing the claims of her son, the child Æthelred. After much factious strife, and many stormy meetings of the Witan, Edward was murdered at Corfe in 978 by some thegns of the party of the queen-dowager. The crime provoked universal indignation, but since there was no other prince of the house of Alfred available, the magnates were forced to place Æthelred on the throne: he was only in his eleventh year, and was at least personally innocent of complicity in his brother's death. Æthelred the Unready. Danish invasions.