The eighty years that passed between the death of Ethelwold and of Dunstan and the Norman Conquest were years of continuous stress and insecurity in England, broken only by the interval, less than twenty years lotig, of strong and peaceful government under Cnut. In the last decade of the tenth century began the series of Danish expeditions and invasions which disturbed and ravaged the country, culminating in the fierce warfare which gave control of England to Sweyn and obtained the crown for his son, Cnut. Then after an interval of peace came the disturbed reigns of Cnut's sons, Harold and Harthacnut, followed by the longer reign of Edward the Confessor during which so many conflicting forces were at work.

During all this period the organization of the Church in England, which for two centuries at least had been extremely loose, and which had attained under Dunstan a unity and cohesion which depended upon the personality of the archbishop rather than upon the strength of the system itself, tended steadily to become less and less defined. From the earliest times, but especially since the days of Alfred and Edgar, there had been a merging and intermingling of national and ecclesiastical government hardly paralleled abroad; the state of things which resulted was in many ways paradoxical, for while the bishops never acted as an independent body, held few synods whether national or diocesan, and came to have less and less directly spiritual authority within their large and often ill-defined dioceses, they, and the abbots with them, were among the most powerful men in the land, both as owners of property and as counsellors of the king.