He was born in the half-Celtic region of Somerset, beside the great abbey of Glastonbury, which held the bones of Arthur, and a good deal of the imaginative Celtic temper ran probably with the blood in his veins.[2] But he was above all the representative of the Roman civilisation in the barbarised, half-Danish England of the tenth century.

He was a musician, a painter, a reader, and a scholar, in a world of fierce warriors and ignorant nobles.

Eadmund made him abbot of Glastonbury.

Eadgar appointed him first bishop of London, and then, on Eadwig's death, Archbishop of Canterbury.

It was Dunstan who really ruled England throughout the remainder of his life.