Editing Eadred (section)

== Illness and death ==
Eadred suffered from ill health at the end of his life which gradually got worse and led to his early death.{{sfn|Williams|2004b}} Dunstan's first biographer, who probably attended court as a member of his household, wrote:
:Unfortunately Dunstan's beloved King Eadred was very sickly all through his reign. At mealtimes, he would suck the juice out of his food, chew what was left of it for a little and then spit it out: a practice that often turned the stomachs of the thegns dining with him. He dragged on an invalid existence as best he could, despite the protests of his body (?), for quite a long time. Finally, his worsening illness came over him more and more often with a thousandfold weight, and brought him unhappily to his deathbed.{{sfnm|1a1=Williams |1y=2004b|2a1=Winterbottom|2a2=Lapidge|2y=2011|2p=65}}

The eleventh century hagiographer [[Herman the Archdeacon]] described Eadred as "''debilis pedibus''" (crippled in both feet),{{sfnm|1a1=Williams|1y=2004b|2a1=Licence|2y=2014|2pp=8–9}} and in his later years he probably delegated authority to leading magnates such as Dunstan.{{sfn|Miller|2014|p=155}} Meetings of the ''witan'' were rarer when he was ill and business was limited, with no appointments of ealdormen.{{sfn|Roach|2013|p=212}} He did not marry, perhaps due to his poor health, and he died in his early thirties on 23 November 955, at [[Frome]] in [[Somerset]].{{sfn|Williams|2004b}}

He was buried in the [[Old Minster, Winchester]],{{efn|The Old Minster was demolished in the late eleventh century and replaced with [[Winchester Cathedral]].{{sfn|Franklin|2004}} There are six mortuary chests in the cathedral labelled with the names of Anglo-Saxon monarchs, one of them Eadred. In 1642, Parliamentary [[English Civil War|Civil War]] troops emptied the chests and the bones were mixed up, so each chest contains the bones of a variety of people.{{sfn|Yorke|2021|pp=61–63}} }} although that was probably not his choice as in his will he made bequests to an unspecified location where "he wishes his body to rest", and then property to the Old Minster, implying that they were different places. Eadwig and Ælfsige, bishop of Winchester, may have decided on the burial place.{{sfnm|1a1=Keynes |1y=1994|1p=188 and n. 99|2a1=Whitelock|2y=1979|2p=555|3a1=Yorke|3y=2021|3p=71}} The historian Nicole Marafioti suggests that Eadred may have wished to be buried at Glastonbury and Eadwig insisted on Winchester in order to prevent Eadred's supporters from using the grave as "ideological leverage" against the new regime.{{sfn|Marafioti|2014|p=79}}