V. GEOFFREY PLANTAGENET AND STEPHEN OF BLOIS…

V. GEOFFREY PLANTAGENET AND STEPHEN OF BLOIS

1128–1139.

All the mental and bodily gifts wherewith nature had endowed the most favoured members of the Angevin house seemed to have been showered upon the eldest son of Fulk V. and Aremburg of Maine. The surname by which he is most generally known, and which an inveterate usage has attached to his descendants as well as to himself, is in its origin and meaning curiously unlike most historical surnames; it seems to have been derived simply from his boyish habit of adorning his cap with a sprig of “planta-genista,” the broom which in early summer makes the open country of Anjou and Maine a blaze of living gold. With a fair and ruddy countenance, lit up by the lightning-glance of a pair of brilliant eyes; a tall, slender, sinewy frame, made for grace no less than for strength and activity:--[628] in the unanimous opinion of his contemporaries, he was emphatically “Geoffrey the Handsome.” To this prepossessing appearance were added the charms of a gracious manner and a ready, pleasant speech;[629] and beneath this winning exterior there lay a considerable share of the quick wits of his race, sharpened and developed by such a careful education as was given to very few princes of the time. The intellectual soil was worthy of the pains bestowed upon it, and brought forth a harvest of, perhaps, somewhat too precocious scholarship and sagacity. Geoffrey’s fondness for the study of the past seems to have been an inheritance from Fulk Rechin; the historian-count might have been proud of a grandson who carried in his memory all the battles fought, all the great deeds done, not only by his own people but also in foreign lands.[630] Even Fulk the Good might have approved a descendant who when still a mere boy could shine in serious conversation with such a “lettered king” as Henry I.;[631] and Fulk the Black might not have been ashamed of one who in early youth felt the “demon-blood” within him too hot to rest content in luxury and idleness, avoided the corrupting influences of mere revelry, gave himself up to the active exercises of military life,[632] and, while so devoted to letters that he would not even go to war without a learned teacher by his side,[633] turned his book-learning to account in ways at which ruder warriors and more unworldly scholars were evidently somewhat astonished.[634] Like his ancestor the Black Count, Geoffrey was one of those men about whom their intimate associates have a fund of anecdotes to tell. The “History” of his life put together from their information, a few years after his death, is chiefly made up of these stories; and through the mass of trite moralizing and pedantic verbiage in which the compiler has imbedded them there still peeps out unmistakeably the peculiar temper of his hero. Geoffrey’s readiness to forgive those who threw themselves upon his mercy is a favourite theme of his biographer’s praise; but the instances given of this clemency indicate more of the vanity and display of chivalry in its narrower sense than of real tenderness of heart or generosity of soul. Such is the story of a discontented knight whose ill-will against his sovereign took the grotesque form of a wish that he had the neck of “that red-head Geoffrey” fast between the two hot iron plates used for making a wafer-cake called oublie. It chanced that the man whose making of oublies--then, as now, a separate trade--had suggested the wish of this knight at St.-Aignan shortly afterwards made some for the eating and in the presence of Count Geoffrey himself, to whom he related what he had heard. The knight and his comrades were presently caught harrying the count’s lands; and the biographer is lost in admiration at Geoffrey’s generosity in forgiving not only their depredations, but the more heinous crime of having, in a fit of ill-temper after dinner, expressed a desire to make a wafer of him.[635] On another occasion we find the count’s wrath averted by the charms of music and verse, enhanced no doubt by the further charm of a little flattery. Four Poitevin knights who had been taken captive in one of the skirmishes so common on the Aquitanian border won their release by the truly southern expedient of singing in Geoffrey’s hearing a rime which they had composed in his praise.[636] A touch of truer poetry comes out in another story. Geoffrey, with a great train of attendants and noble guests, was once keeping Christmas at Le Mans. From his private chapel, where he had been attending the nocturnal services of the vigil, he set out at daybreak at the head of a procession to celebrate in the cathedral church the holy mysteries of the festival. At the cathedral door he met a poorly-dressed young clerk, whom he flippantly saluted: “Any news, sir clerkling?”--“Ay, my lord, the best of good news!”--“What?” cried Geoffrey, all his curiosity aroused--“tell me quick!”--“‘Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given!’” Abashed, Geoffrey asked the youth his name, bade him join the other clergy in the choir, and as soon as mass was over went straight to the bishop: “For the love of Him Who was born this day, give me a prebend in your church.” It was no sooner granted than taking his new acquaintance by the hand, he begged leave to make him his substitute, and added the further gift of a stall in his own chapel, as a token of gratitude to the poor clerk whose answer to his thoughtless question had brought home to him, perhaps more deeply than he had ever felt them before, the glad tidings of Christmas morning.[637] From another of these anecdotes Geoffrey seems, as far as we can make out, to have been the original hero of an adventure which has since, in slightly varying forms, been attributed to several other princes, from Charles the Great down to James the Fifth of Scotland, and which indeed may easily have happened more than once. Led away by his ardour in pursuit of the chase--next to literature, his favourite recreation--the count one day outstripped all his followers, and lost his way alone in the forest of Loches. At last he fell in with a charcoal-burner, who undertook to conduct him back to the castle. Geoffrey mounted his guide behind him; and as they rode along, the peasant, ignorant of his companion’s rank, and taking him for a simple knight, let himself be drawn into conversation on sundry matters, including a free criticism on the government of the reigning count, and the oppressions suffered by the people at the hands of his household officers. When they reached the gates of Loches, the burst of joy which greeted the wanderer’s return revealed to the poor man that he had been talking to the count himself. Overwhelmed with dismay, he tried to slip off the horse’s back; but Geoffrey held him fast, gave him the place of honour at the evening banquet, sent him home next day with a grant of freedom and a liberal gift of money, and profited by the information acquired from him to institute a thorough reform in the administration of his own household.[638]

[628] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 233.

[629] Ib. pp. 232, 233.

[630] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 232.

[631] Ib. p. 235.

[632] Ib. p. 233.

[633] Ib. p. 276.

[634] See the story of the siege of Montreuil-Bellay, Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 286.

[635] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 257–260.

[636] Ib. pp. 253–256.

[637] Ib. pp. 274–276.

[638] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 240–250.

Such stories as these, while they help us to form some picture of the manner of man that Geoffrey was, set him before us in the romantic light in which he appears to the best advantage. When one turns from them to a survey of his life as a whole, one is struck with a sense of something wanting in him. The deficiency was in truth a very serious one; it was a lack of steady principle and of genuine feeling. The imaginative and impulsive vein which ran through all the more refined characters of his race lay in him very near the surface, but it did not go very deep. His imagination was sensitive, but his heart was cold; his impulses sprang from the play of a quick fancy, not from the passion of an ardent soul. One more story may furnish a slight, but significant, illustration of his temper. For some wrong done to the see of Tours Geoffrey was once threatened by the archbishop with excommunication. Either the earlier or the later Fulk of Jerusalem would have almost certainly begun by a reckless defiance of the threat, and the later one, at least, would almost as surely have ended by hearty penance. Geoffrey began and ended with a jest: “Your threats are vain, most reverend father; you know that the archbishop of Tours has no jurisdiction over the patrimony of S. Martin, and that I am one of his canons!”[639] In all the sterling qualities of a ruler and a man, the hasty, restless, downright Fulk V. was as superior to his clever charming son as Fulk the Black was superior to Geoffrey Martel. But it is only fair to bear in mind that Geoffrey Plantagenet’s life was to a great extent spoilt by his marriage. The yoke which bound together a lad of fifteen and a woman of twenty-five--especially such a woman as the Empress Matilda--could not fail to press heavily on both parties; but the one most seriously injured by it was probably the young husband. Even in a political point of view, to him personally his marriage was more of a hindrance than an advantage; it cut him off from all chance of striking out an independent career. The man himself was in fact sacrificed to his posterity. Chained down while his character was yet undeveloped to the irksome position of a mere appendage to King Henry’s heiress;--plunged suddenly, and for life, into a sphere of interests and duties alien from his own natural temper and inclinations:--weak, selfish, unprincipled as Geoffrey too plainly shewed himself to be, still it was well not only for him but for others that he had enough of the dogged Angevin thoroughness to carry him safely and successfully, if not always gloriously, through his somewhat dreary task till he could make it over to the freer, as well as stronger, hands of his son.

[639] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 252.

The hope which inspired both the king of England and the count of Anjou when they planned their children’s marriage can only have been the hope of a grandson in whom the blood of both would be united, who would gather into his own person all conflicting claims, and in whom all feuds would have an end. On this depended all King Henry’s schemes for the future; on this were concentrated all his desires, on this were founded all his plans and arrangements during the last seven years of his reign. In the internal history of England those years are an almost complete blank; they are in fact simply seven more years of the administration of Bishop Roger of Salisbury, for Henry himself spent almost the whole of them upon the continent. His work was finished, and all that remained to do was to maintain the order of things which he had established so as to hand it on in full working to his successor. He must, however, have begun to doubt the success of his schemes when Geoffrey and Matilda separated little more than twelve months after their marriage. At first, everything had seemed to be turning in favour of Henry’s arrangements. Six weeks after the wedding, the death of William the Clito, wounded in a skirmish with a rival claimant of the county of Flanders,[640] removed the only competitor whom the king could deem likely to stand in the way of his plans for the descent of the crown. In the spring Fulk’s departure for Holy Land left the young couple sole masters at Angers. All things looked tranquil and secure when Henry returned to England in July 1129. He had, however, been there only a few days when he learned, to his great indignation, that his daughter had been sent away with scorn by her husband, and had betaken herself with a few attendants to Rouen.[641] There she remained for nearly two years, while Geoffrey was busy with a general revolt among his barons. East and west and south and north had all risen at once; the list of rebels includes the chief landowners in all parts of the Angevin dominions, from the old eastern outpost Amboise to Laval on the Breton border, and from Sablé on the confines of Anjou and Maine to Montreuil-Bellay, Thouars and Mirebeau in the Aquitanian territory of Loudun, and the yet more remote fief of Parthenay in Poitou.[642] It seems as if the disaffected barons, worsted in their struggle with Fulk, had only been waiting till he was out of the country, and now, when Geoffrey by his quarrel with his wife had deprived himself of all chance of help from his father-in-law, they closed in upon the boy-count with one consent, thinking to get him into their power and wring from him any concessions they pleased. They unintentionally did him an immense service, for by thus suddenly throwing him upon his own resources they made a man of him at once. No one knew better than Geoffrey Plantagenet that he was not the first count of Anjou who had been left to shift for himself in difficult circumstances at the age of fifteen; and he faced the danger with a promptitude and energy not unworthy of Fulk Nerra’s representative. One after another he besieged the rebel leaders in their strongholds; one after another was forced, tricked or frightened into submission. Once, while besieging Theobald of Blazon in the great fortress of Mirebeau, Geoffrey was blockaded in his turn by the count of Poitou, whom the traitors had called to their aid; even from this peril, however, his quick wit and youthful energy extricated him in triumph; and the revolt was finally crushed by a severe punishment inflicted on its most powerful leader, Lisiard of Sablé. Geoffrey ravaged the whole of Lisiard’s estates, razed his castle of Briolet, seized that of Suze and kept it in his own hands for the rest of its owner’s life; while to guard against further dangers from the same quarter, by the advice of his faithful barons he reared, for the express purpose of defence against incursions from Sablé, a fortress to which he gave the name of Châteauneuf, on the left bank of the Sarthe, just below the bridge made famous by the death of Count Robert the Brave.[643]

[640] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 886, 887.

[641] Sim. Durh. Gesta Reg. a. 1129.

[642] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 263.

[643] For the barons’ revolt, see Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 263–268. The strange and not very clear story of the double siege of Mirebeau is in pp. 265, 266. “Exercitus de Mirebello” is recorded in Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Flor. Salm. a. 1130 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 33, 191). The Chron. S. Albin. also records the building of Châteauneuf, a. 1131; the Hist. Gaufr. Ducis, p. 270, connects it with the revolt of a lord of Sablé, but apparently with the later revolt of Lisiard’s son Robert--which, however, the date in the chronicle shows to be a mistake.

King Henry had joined his daughter in Normandy in the summer of 1130; in July of the next year they returned to England together. They were soon followed by a message from Geoffrey, who was now becoming awake to his rights and duties as husband of King Henry’s heiress, and having made himself thoroughly master in his own dominions felt it time to demand the return of his wife. A great council held at Northampton on September 8 decided that his request should be granted;[644] and the assembled prelates and barons repeated their homage to Matilda as her father’s destined successor.[645] She then went back to her husband, by whom she was, if not warmly welcomed, at least received with all due courtesy and honour.[646] Fortunately for the ill-matched couple, they were both of that cold-blooded temperament to which intense personal affection is not a necessary of life. Henceforth they were content to work together as partners in political enterprise, and to find in community of worldly interests a sufficient bond of union. On Mid-Lent Sunday--March 5, 1133--the bond was made indissoluble by the birth of their son and heir. Most fittingly, the child to whom so many diverse nationalities looked as to their future sovereign[647] was born not in the actual home of either of his parents, but in that city of Le Mans which lay midway between Normandy and Anjou, which had so long been the ground of their strife, and had at last been made the scene of their union.[648] He was baptized in the cathedral church by the bishop of the diocese on Easter Eve, receiving the name of his grandfather Henry, and was then, by his mother’s special desire, solemnly placed under the protection of the local patron saint on the same altar where his father had been dedicated in like manner thirteen years before.[649]

[644] Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 41 (Arnold, p. 252).

[645] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 6 (Hardy, p. 698).

[646] Hen. Hunt. as above.

[647] “Quem multi populi dominum expectant.” Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 763.

[648] Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 36 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 322). Cf. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1133 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 33, 144, 145), Chron. S. Flor. Salm. a. 1133 (ib. p. 191, giving a wrong day), Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 277, 278, also wrongly dated.

[649] Acta Pontif. Cenoman. as above.

To King Henry the birth of his grandson was the crowning of all his hopes. The greatest difficulty which had hitherto stood in the way of his scheme for the descent of the crown--the objection which was sure to be made against Matilda on account of her sex--would lose more than half its force now that she could be regarded as regent for her infant son; and Henry at once summoned another great council at which he again made the archbishops, bishops, earls and barons of his realm swear fealty to the Empress “and also to her little son whom he appointed to be king after him.”[650] All things seemed as safe as human foresight could make them when in the beginning of August he crossed over to Normandy.[651] Signs and wonders in earth and sky, related afterwards as tokens of coming evil, accompanied his voyage;[652] but nearly two years passed away before the portents were fulfilled. In the spring Matilda joined her father at Rouen, and there, shortly before Whitsuntide, her second son was born.[653] The old king’s pleasure in his two little grandchildren was great enough to keep him lingering on in Normandy with them and their mother, leaving England to the care of Bishop Roger, till the middle of the following year,[654] when there came tidings of disturbance on the Welsh border which made him feel it was time he should return.[655] His daughter however set herself against his departure. Her policy is not very clear; but it seems impossible to acquit her of playing a double game and secretly instigating her husband to attack her father while the latter was living with her in unsuspecting intimacy and confidence. Geoffrey now suddenly put forth a claim to certain castles in Normandy which he asserted had been promised to him at his marriage.[656] Henry denied the claim; the Angevin temper burst forth at once; Geoffrey attacked and burned the castle of Beaumont, whose lord was like himself a son-in-law of Henry, and altogether behaved with such insulting violence that the king in his wrath was on the point of taking Matilda, who was with him at Rouen all the while, back with him to England. But he now found it impossible to leave Normandy. The land was full of treason; many barons who only disguised their real feelings from awe of the stern old king had been gained over in secret to the Angevin cause; among those whose fidelity was most suspected were Roger of Toëny and William Talvas the lord of Alençon, who had been restored to the forfeited estates of his family at the intercession of Geoffrey’s father in 1119. Roger’s castle of Conches was garrisoned by the king; William Talvas was summoned to Rouen more than once, but the conscious traitor dared not shew his face; at last Henry again seized his estates, and then, in September, Talvas fled across the border to be received with open arms by the count of Anjou.[657] The countess pleaded warmly with her father for the traitor’s pardon, but in vain. When she found him inexorable, she suddenly threw off the mask and shewed on which side her real sympathies lay by parting from the king in anger and going home to her husband at Angers.[658] Father and daughter never met again. In the last week of November Henry fell sick while hunting in the Forest of Lions; feeling his end near, he sent for his old friend Archbishop Hugh of Rouen to receive his confession and give him the last sacraments. His son Earl Robert of Gloucester hurried to the spot at the first tidings of his illness; his daughter made no sign of a wish for reconciliation; yet when the earl and the primate asked for his final instructions concerning the succession to the crown, he remained true to his cherished purpose and once more bequeathed all his dominions on both sides of the sea to Matilda and her heirs for ever.[659] He died on the night of December 1, 1135.[660]

[650] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 187.

[651] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 8 (Hardy, p. 700).

[652] Eng. Chron. a. 1135.

[653] Chron. S. Albin. and Rob. Torigni, a. 1134.

[654] Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 43 (Arnold, p. 253).

[655] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 900.

[656] This is the version of Orderic (as above); according to Rob. Torigni (a. 1135) the claim included a good deal more: “Erat et alia causa ipsius discordiæ major, quia rex nolebat facere fidelitatem filiæ suæ et marito ejus de omnibus firmitatibus Normanniæ et Angliæ.”

[657] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 900.

[658] Rob. Torigni, a. 1133. Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 34 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 310).

[659] So says Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 8 (Hardy, p. 701). We shall see however that there were other versions of Henry’s final testamentary dispositions.

[660] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 8 (Hardy, p. 700). Flor. Worc. Contin. a. 1135 (Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 95). Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 43 (Arnold, p. 254). Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 33 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 309). Ord. Vit. (ibid.), p. 901.

With him expired the direct male line of the Conqueror; for Duke Robert’s long captivity had ended a year before.[661] Of the nine children of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders, the youngest and the last survivor was now gone, leaving as his sole representatives his daughter the countess of Anjou and her infant boys. By a thrice-repeated oath the barons of Normandy and England stood pledged to acknowledge her as their sovereign. Suddenly there sprang forth an unexpected competitor. A rivalry which had seemed dead for nearly a hundred years revived in a new form; and the house of Anjou, on the very eve of its triumph, found itself once more face to face with the deadliest of its early foes--the house of Blois.

[661] Flor. Worc. Contin. a. 1134 (Thorpe, vol. ii. pp. 94, 95).

Since Geoffrey Martel’s victory over Theobald III. in 1044 the counts of Blois have ceased to play a prominent part in our story. Theobald himself accepted his defeat as final; he seems indeed to have been almost crushed by it, for he scarcely makes any further appearance in history, save at his brother Stephen’s death in 1047, when he requited the help which Stephen had given him against Anjou by turning his son out of Champagne and appropriating all his possessions. The injured heir took refuge in Normandy, married the Conqueror’s sister, and afterwards found in England such ample compensation for what he had lost that neither he nor his posterity ever made any attempt to regain their continental heritage. The reunion of Champagne thus helped to repair the fortunes of the elder line of Blois, so severely shattered by the blows of the Angevin Hammer; and the ill-gotten gain prospered so far that some thirty-five years later Theobald’s son and successor--the young Count Stephen-Henry who in 1069 received Fulk Rechin’s homage for Touraine--could venture on aspiring to the hand of King William’s daughter Adela.[662] In winning her he won a prize of which he was scarcely worthy. Stephen-Henry was indeed, in every way, a better man than either his father or his grandfather; but he had the nerveless, unstable temper which was the curse of his race. He went on the Crusade, and deserted before Antioch was won. He came home to bury his shame; his wife sent him out again to expiate it. Her burning words changed the coward into a martyr, and the stain was washed out in his life-blood beneath the walls of Ramah.[663] In the ordinary course of things, his successor in the counties of Blois, Chartres and Champagne would have been his eldest son William. But Stephen had left the entire control of his affairs, including the disposal of his territories, to his wife; and Adela knew that her firstborn was a youth of slow wit, quite unfit for public life. She therefore disinherited him, to his own complete satisfaction; for he had sense enough to be conscious of his incapacity for government, and gladly withdrew to the more congenial life of a simple country gentleman on the estates of his wife, the lady of Sully in Champagne, while the duties and responsibilities of the head of the family were laid on the abler shoulders of his next brother, Theobald. Of the two remaining brothers, the youngest had been from his infancy dedicated to the Church; the third, who bore his father’s name of Stephen, had been intrusted for education to his uncle the king of England.[664] Adela seems to have been Henry’s favourite sister; she was certainly, in all qualities both of heart and head, well worthy of his confidence and esteem; and she once at least did him a service which deserved his utmost gratitude, for it was she who contrived the opportunity for his reconciliation with S. Anselm. She was moreover the only one of his sisters who had children; and the relation between a man and his sister’s son was in the Middle Ages held as a specially dear and sacred tie. Its force was fully acknowledged by Henry in the case of the little Stephen. He had the child carefully brought up at his court with his own son; he knighted him with his own hand, and bestowed on him, in addition to ample estates in England, the Norman county of Mortain, which had been for several generations held by a near connexion of the ducal house, and entitled its possessor to rank as the first baron of the duchy. Finally, some few years before the second marriage of the Empress, he arranged a match between Stephen and another Matilda of scarcely less illustrious descent--the only daughter and heiress of Count Eustace of Boulogne and Mary of Scotland, sister to Henry’s own queen.[665] Stephen seems in fact to have been, next to William the Ætheling, the person for whom Henry cared most; and after the disaster of the White Ship--in which a lucky attack of illness saved him from sharing--he became virtually the king’s adoptive son, and the first layman in the kingdom. His position is illustrated by a dispute which occurred when the barons took the oath of homage and fealty to Matilda in the Christmas council of 1126. They swore in order of precedence. The first place among the lay peers belonged as an unquestioned right to the king of Scots; the second was claimed at once by Stephen and by the king’s son Earl Robert of Gloucester; the dignity of the nephew was held to outweigh the privilege of the son; and the second layman who swore on bended knee to acknowledge the Empress Matilda as her father’s successor was her cousin Count Stephen of Mortain and Boulogne.[666]

[662] The story of this wooing is curious, and linked in a curious fashion to the old days when Fulk Nerra and Odo were fighting for Touraine. Gelduin, the “devil of Saumur,” when Odo’s mistaken tactics and his own loyal service had cost him the loss of his heritage, refused all the offers of compensation made to him by his penitent count, and merely asked him for a certain “bare hill” on the south bank of the Loire, half way between Amboise and Blois, where he built the castle afterwards known as Chaumont, and there remained as a perpetual thorn in the side of the Angevin lords of Amboise, till in 1035 he gave up his possessions to his son Geoffrey and went to end his days in peace in an abbey which he had founded on an estate of his own, hard by the battle-field of Pontlevoy. Geoffrey’s delicate beauty won him the surname of “the Maiden,” but beneath his girl-like face lay a spirit as manly and as noble as that of his father. In 1066 the hot northern blood in his veins drove him to give up his estates to his niece Dionysia (who married a son of Lisoy of Amboise) and join the host of adventurers who followed Duke William over sea. But after fifteen years of prosperity in England, his heart was still true to the race whom his father had served so loyally; and it was Geoffrey’s well-earned influence with the Conqueror which brought about, in 1082, the marriage between the son of his former lord and the daughter of his present one (Gesta Amb. Domin., Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 173, 174, 184). On the marriage see also Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 573. After the Conqueror’s death Geoffrey found the state of things in England no longer to his mind, made over his estates there to his nephew Savaric, and came home once more, to be received with open arms by the couple whom he had helped to marry. He dwelt at their court as an honoured guest for the rest of his days, lived to complete his hundredth year without the loss of a single faculty save the light of his still beautiful eyes, and was buried at last by his father’s side in the abbey of our Lady of Pontlevoy (Gesta Amb. Domin., Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 185, 197, 198).

[663] On the flight from Antioch see Will. Tyr., l. v. c. 10, and all the historians of the first crusade. On Stephen’s second expedition and death see Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 789 et seq.; Will. Tyr., l. x. c. 20; and Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iv. c. 384 (Hardy, pp. 593, 594).

[664] “Nutriendum promovendumque.” Will. Newb., l. i. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 31).

[665] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 811. Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 34 (ib. p. 310). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 31). Will. Malm. _Hist. Nov._, l. iii. c. 49 (Hardy, p. 750).

[666] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 3 (Hardy, p. 692).

But for that council and its oath, the succession both to the English crown and to the Norman ducal coronet would have been at Henry’s death an open question. Had Matilda’s child been old enough to step at once into the place destined for him by his grandfather, there would most likely have been no question at all; Henry II. would have succeeded Henry I. without opposition, and England would have been spared nineteen years of anarchy. But Henry Fitz-Empress was not yet three years old. The practical choice at the moment lay between the surviving adult descendants of the Conqueror; and of these there were, besides the Empress, at least two others who might be considered quite as well qualified to represent him as she was. Independently of any special engagement, the barons would be fully entitled to choose between the daughter of William’s son and the sons of his daughter--between Matilda of Anjou, Theobald of Blois, and Stephen of Boulogne. Of the three, Matilda was on the whole the one who had least to recommend her. Her great personal advantage was that she, and she alone, was the child of a crowned king and queen, of the “good Queen Maude” in whose veins flowed the ancient royal blood of Wessex, and the king whom his English subjects revered after he was gone as “a good man,” who “made peace for men and deer.”[667] Matilda’s birth would be a valuable qualification in English eyes; but it would carry very little weight in Normandy. Old-English blood-royal went for nothing there; and King Henry’s good peace had been much less successfully enforced, and when enforced much less appreciated, in the duchy than in the kingdom. Personally, Matilda was almost a stranger in both countries. She had left her own people and her father’s house at the age of eight years, to be educated not as the daughter of the English king but as the child-wife of the Emperor. All her associations, all her interests, were in Germany; there she was known and respected, there she was at home. She had only returned to England very unwillingly for a couple of years, and then left it again to become the wife of a man known there only as the son of that “earl of Anjou” who had been King Henry’s most troublesome foe; while in Normandy the Angevin was known but too well, and hated with a mingled hate and scorn which had grown with the growth and strengthened with the strength of both county and duchy ever since the days of Geoffrey Martel. If the principle of female succession was to be admitted at all--if the Conqueror’s throne was to be filled by a stranger--one of his daughter’s sons might fill it at least as worthily as his son’s daughter and her Angevin husband. And if a sovereign was to be chosen for his personal qualifications, it would have been hard to find a better choice than Theobald the Great, count of Blois, Chartres and Champagne. He did not owe his historical epithet solely to his vast possessions; he was almost the only member of the house of Blois who shewed any trace of intellectual or moral greatness. His public life was one long series of vexations and disappointments; the misfortunes which his race were so apt to bring upon themselves by their own unsteadiness and self-will seemed to fall upon him without provocation on his part; it was as if his heritage had come to him charged with the penalties of all his forefathers’ errors. But it had not come to him charged with the heavier burthen of their fatal intellectual perversity and moral weakness. In its place he had the tact, the dignity, the stedfastness of his Norman mother; and the whole of his after-career fully justified the esteem of the Norman barons, grounded upon their acquaintance with his person and character during those wars against the king of France in which his cause had been inseparably bound up with that of his uncle Henry. In England, however, he could only be known by report, as the nephew and ally of the king, and the elder brother of Stephen. It was Stephen, not Theobald, who had been the king’s favourite and constant companion, lacking nothing of the rank of an adoptive son save the avowed prospect of the crown. Stephen had lived in England from his childhood; his territorial possessions, his personal interests, lay wholly in England and Normandy; his name and his face were almost as familiar there as those of Henry himself; he was the first baron of the duchy, the first layman of the kingdom; moreover, he was the husband of a lady who stood as near to the Old-English royal line and represented it, to say the least, as worthily as her imperial cousin and namesake. Lastly, his marriage gave him yet one more advantage, slight in itself, but of no small practical use at the moment. As count of Boulogne, he had immediate command of the shortest passage from the Continent to England.

[667] Eng. Chron. a. 1135.

The tidings of Henry’s death soon reached Angers; and before the first week of December was out, Matilda presented herself in Normandy to take possession of her inheritance. The officer in charge of the border-territories, comprising the forfeited lands of William Talvas and the county of Hiesmes, at once surrendered them to her and received her as his liege lady;[668] but before she had time to secure the duchy, the kingdom was snatched from her grasp. Stephen set out at once from Wissant and crossed the Channel amid a storm so terrific that men on shore deemed it could bode nothing less than the end of the world.[669] It only boded the arrival at Dover of a candidate for the English crown.

[668] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 903. The places specified, besides Hiesmes, are Argentan and Domfront. See also Chron. S. Albin. a. 1135 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 34), and Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 294, where Geoffrey gets the credit of winning them. Rob. Torigni, a. 1135, adds Ambrières, “Gorra” and Coulommiers.

[669] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 11 (Hardy, p. 703).

Stephen’s promptitude served him as well as the promptitude of William Rufus and Henry had served them in a like case. But this time the part which had been played in 1087 by the primate and in 1100 by “the Witan who were there nigh at hand” was to be played by the citizens of London. Repulsed from Dover and Canterbury[670]--for the men of Kent had an hereditary grudge against any one coming from Boulogne--Stephen pushed on to London, where the well-known face of King Henry’s favourite nephew was hailed with delight by the citizens, vehemently declaring that they would have no stranger to rule over them.[671] They claimed to have inherited the right to a voice in the election of the sovereign which had once, in theory at least, belonged to the whole nation, and accordingly the “aldermen and wise folk”[672] came together to consider what provision should be made for the safety of the realm, and, for that end, to choose a king. A kingless land, said they, was exposed to countless perils; the first thing needful was to make a king as speedily as possible.[673] Of Matilda and her claims not a word seems to have been said; if any of the leading burgesses, as tenants-in-chief of the crown, had sworn fealty to her, they were in no humour to regard it now; and the citizens in general would doubtless not hold themselves bound by an oath which they had not personally taken. They claimed the right of election as their special prerogative, and exercising it without more ado in favour of the only person then at hand whose birth and character fitted him to undertake the defence of the kingdom, and who seemed to have been sent to them as by a special providence in their hour of need, they by common consent acknowledged Stephen as king. He hurried to Winchester to get possession of the treasury; the bishop--his own brother--came forth with the chief citizens to meet him; and the treasurer, who had refused to give up his keys to the bishop, surrendered them at once to the king-elect.[674]

[670] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 94.

[671] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 3, 4.

[672] “Majores ... natu, consultuque quique provectiores.” Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 3.

[673] Ib. pp. 3, 4.

[674] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 4–6.

Thus far the two men who ought to have taken the lead in the national counsels--the primate and the justiciar--had stood looking passively on. Both now joined Stephen.[675] He lacked nothing to make him full king but the rite of coronation. This however depended on the primate, and when called upon to perform it William of Canterbury again drew back. He had scruples, first, about the oath which he himself, as well as Stephen and all the barons, had sworn to the Empress Matilda; and secondly, about the validity of an election so hastily made by a small part only of the nation. The second objection passed unheeded; to the first Stephen’s adherents answered that the oath had been extorted and was therefore not binding, and that several persons who were with Henry at his death had heard him openly express repentance for having forced it upon the barons.[676] Roger of Salisbury affirmed that it was annulled in another way; it had been sworn, by him at least, on condition of a promise from Henry that he would not give his daughter in marriage out of the realm without the consent of the Great Council--a promise which had been immediately broken.[677] Hugh Bigod, too, the late king’s seneschal, declared upon oath that Henry had in his presence solemnly absolved the barons from their engagement,[678] and had even formally disinherited Matilda and designated Stephen as his successor.[679] The argument which really prevailed, however, was the objection to a woman’s rule, and the urgent need of having a man to take the government, and to take it at once.[680] Henry had not yet been three weeks dead, and already England was in confusion. The first outcome of the reaction against his stern control had been a general raid upon the forests; and when men in their frantic vehemence had left themselves no more game to hunt, they turned their arms against each other and trampled all law and order under foot.[681] Such a state of things, resulting solely from the fact that England had been three weeks without a king, spoke more in Stephen’s favour than any amount of legal reasonings. The archbishop gave way; all that he demanded from Stephen was a promise to restore and maintain the liberties of the Church. Bishop Henry of Winchester offered himself as surety in his brother’s behalf, and thereby won him the crown.[682] He received it at Westminster,[683] probably either on the last Sunday in Advent or on Christmas day,[684] and he issued at the same time, by way of coronation-charter, a promise at once comprehensive and vague, to maintain the laws established by his predecessor.[685]

[675] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 11 (Hardy, pp. 703, 704). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 6.

[676] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 6, 7.

[677] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 3 (Hardy, pp. 692, 693).

[678] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 94.

[679] Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. ii. p. 217. Cf. the speeches before the battle of Lincoln in Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 15 (Arnold, p. 270), and that of Stephen’s advocates at Rome in 1151, in Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx. p. 543). Gerv. Cant. (as above) does not name Hugh, but merely says “quidam ex potentissimis Angliæ.”

[680] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 8. R. Wend. as above.

[681] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 1, 2.

[682] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 11 (Hardy, p. 704).

[683] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 94. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 95).

[684] The date is variously given, as follows: December 15, Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 902.--December 20, Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above).--December 21, Ann. Waverl. a. 1136 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 225).--December 22, Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 12 (Hardy, p. 704); Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 94; and Ann. Winton. Contin. a. 1135 (Liebermann, Ungedruckte Anglo-Norman. Geschichtsquellen, p. 79).--December 23, Ann. Cantuar. a. 1135 (Liebermann, as above, p. 5).--December 24, Ann. Margam, a. 1135 (Luard, as above, vol. i. p. 13).--December 25, Eng. Chron. a. 1135; Ric. Hexh. (Raine, Priory of Hexham, vol. i.) p. 70; Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 156; and Chron. Mort.-Mar. a. 1135 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 782).--December 26, Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 189; Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. ii. p. 217.--January 1, Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 113.--Will. Malm., the Contin. Flor. Worc., and the Ann. Margam all add that the day was a Sunday. This in 1135 would be right for William’s date, December 22; nothing can make it agree with that of Florence’s continuator, “xiii. kal. Jan.”; but the Margam annalist may very possibly have substituted ix. for xi., really meaning the same as William. The two extreme dates--Orderic’s and John of Hexham’s--seem equally impossible; unless we may take Orderic’s “xviii. kal. Jan.” to have simply an x too much, and then there would be another witness for Christmas-day.

[685] Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 119.

Thus the two great feuds which had hitherto influenced the political career of the Angevin house--the feud with Blois and the feud with Normandy--merged at last into one. The successors of Odo of Blois and those of William the Conqueror were now both represented, as against the successors of Fulk Nerra and Geoffrey Martel, by one and the same man, who yet was not, in strict law, the nearest representative of either. We shall see hereafter that some of the Normans entertained a project of making Theobald their duke; had they succeeded, the older quarrel would have revived almost in its original form, as a direct conflict between the heads of the two rival houses, only with Normandy instead of Touraine for its object and its battle-ground. Its original spirit was, however, more likely to be revived, on one side at least, by the substitution of Stephen for Theobald. Stephen had renounced all share in his father’s territories; but there was one paternal heir-loom which he could not renounce, and which descended to him, and him alone, among the sons of Stephen-Henry and Adela. This was the peculiar mental and moral constitution which the house of Blois inherited from Odo II. as surely as the Angevins inherited theirs from Fulk the Black. In the reigning Count Theobald, indeed, the type was fortunately almost lost, and in his youngest brother, Bishop Henry of Winchester, it was very greatly modified by the infusion of Norman blood derived from their mother. In Stephen, however, the Norman blood had but little influence on a nature which in its essence was that of the old counts of Blois. All the characteristic qualities and defects of the race were there, just as deeply rooted as in Odo of Champagne himself; the whole difference lay in this, that in Stephen the qualities lay uppermost and shewed themselves in their most attractive aspect, while the defects took a form so mild that till their fatal consequences were seen they appeared hardly more than amiable weaknesses. Gallant knight and courteous gentleman; warm-hearted, high-spirited, throwing himself eagerly into every enterprise; all reckless valour in the battle-field, all gentleness and mercy as soon as the fight was over; open-handed, generous, gracious to all, and apparently unstained by any personal vices:--it is easy to understand Henry’s affection for him, and the high hopes with which at the opening of his career he was regarded by all classes in the realm.[686] His good qualities were plainly visible; time and experience alone could reveal the radical defect which vitiated them all. That defect was simply the old curse of his race--lack of stedfastness; and it ruined Stephen as surely as it had ruined Odo. It was ingrained in every fibre of his nature; it acted like an incurable moral disease, mingling its subtle poison with his every thought and act, and turning his very virtues into weaknesses; it reduced his whole kingly career to a mere string of political inconsistencies and blunders; and it wrecked him at last, as it had wrecked his great-grandfather, on the rock of the Angevin thoroughness.

[686] See sketches of his character in Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 12 (Hardy, p. 704), and Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 3.

For the moment, however, Stephen had outstripped his rival. The Angevin sagacity had been for once at fault. Steeped as were both Geoffrey and his wife in continental ideas and feelings, their first thought was of Normandy, and they had failed to see that in order to secure it their true policy was to secure England first; or rather, perhaps, they had failed to see that the mere will of the late king was not sufficient to give them undisputed possession of both. Stephen’s bold stroke, whether it resulted from a closer acquaintance with the relation between the two countries, or simply from a characteristic impulse to dash straight at the highest object in view, gained him kingdom and duchy at one blow. Geoffrey had followed his wife into Normandy at the head of an armed force, and accompanied by William Talvas, whose influence secured him a welcome at Séez and in all the territories of the house of Alençon. But the rival races were no sooner in actual contact than their old hatred burst uncontrollably forth. The Angevins, though they ostensibly came only to put their countess in peaceful possession of her heritage, could not yet bring themselves to look upon the Normans in any light but that of natural enemies; they treated the districts which had submitted to them as a conquered land, and went about harrying and plundering till the people rose and attacked them with such fury that they were compelled to evacuate the country.[687] The Norman barons now held at Neubourg a meeting at which they decided to invite Count Theobald of Blois to come and take possession of the duchy. Theobald came to Rouen, and thence to Lisieux, where on December 21 he had an interview with Matilda’s half-brother Earl Robert of Gloucester. They were interrupted by a messenger from England with the tidings of Stephen’s election as king.[688] The Norman barons then felt that the decision was taken out of their hands; since Stephen and England had been too quick for them, their best course now was to accept the accomplished fact, and acknowledged the king-elect as duke of Normandy.[689] To this Robert of Gloucester assented.[690] Theobald, despite his natural vexation, at once withdrew his claim, and made in his brother’s name a truce with Geoffrey to last from Christmas till the octave of Pentecost; and having thus done his best to secure the peace of the duchy till its own duke could come to it, he quietly returned to his own dominions.[691]

[687] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 903.

[688] Rob. Torigni, a. 1135. Cf. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 902, 903.

[689] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 903.

[690] Rob. Torigni, a. 1135.

[691] Ord. Vit. as above. Cf. Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 294.

In England, meanwhile, Stephen was carrying all before him. The first public act in which he had to take part as king was the burial of his predecessor at Reading on the feast of the Epiphany;[692] the next was the defence of his realm against a danger which it had not known for more than forty years--a Scottish invasion. King David of Scotland, true to the oath which every one else seemed to have forgotten, arose as the champion of Matilda’s rights, led his troops into Northumberland, and partly conquered it in her behalf. Stephen met him near Durham, pacified him by a grant of the earldoms of Carlisle, Huntingdon and Doncaster to his son Henry,[693] and came back in peace, almost in triumph, to the Easter festival and the crowning of his queen.[694] Adherents now came flocking in; the splendour of the Easter court made up for the meagreness of the Christmas meeting.[695] Baron and knight, clerk and layman, rallied round the winning young sovereign who was ready to promise anything, to undertake anything, to please anybody. The only class who still held aloof were the “new men” of the last reign, men like Payne Fitz-John and Miles the sheriff of Gloucester, who owed everything to Henry, and who were bound alike by gratitude and by policy to uphold his daughter’s cause. But the chief of them all, Bishop Roger of Salisbury, had already joined Stephen, and the rest were soon persuaded to follow his example.[696] Shortly after Easter there came in a yet more important personage. Earl Robert of Gloucester, the eldest son of the late king, influential alike on both sides of the sea by his rank, his wealth and his character, was looked upon both in Normandy and in England as the natural leader of the baronage. The suddenness of Stephen’s accession had snatched the leadership out of his hands, and he lingered on in Normandy, watching the course of events without sharing in them, and meditating how to reconcile his own interest with his duty to his sister. Stephen, anxious to win him over, sent him repeated invitations to England; till at last he decided to let himself be won, at least in appearance, if only for the sake of gaining a footing in England which might enable him afterwards to work there in Matilda’s favour. The king’s son, however, made terms for himself more like a king than a mere earl. He came to Stephen’s court and did homage for his English estates; but he did it only on the express condition of being bound by it only so long as Stephen’s own promises to him were kept, and he himself was maintained in all his honours and dignities.[697] The first result of his submission--if submission it can be called--was seen in a great council at Oxford, where all the bishops swore fealty to the king, and the vague promise to maintain the “Laws of King Henry,” which Stephen had issued on his coronation-day, was amplified into a more detailed and definite charter.[698] Suddenly, a few weeks later, there went forth a rumour that the king was dead, and the barons at once broke into revolt. Baldwin of Redvers threw himself into Exeter; Hugh Bigod, who but a few months ago had been foremost among the supporters of Stephen, seized Norwich castle, and was only dislodged by the king in person.[699] He was apparently forgiven; another rebel, Robert of Bathenton,[700] was caught and hanged, and his castle forced to surrender. The great castle of Exeter, where Baldwin had shut himself up with his family and a picked band of young knights, all sworn never to yield, cost a long and troublesome siege; but the agonies of thirst at length drove the garrison to break their vow and ask for terms. Stephen let them all go out free; Baldwin requited his leniency by hastening to a castle which he possessed in the Isle of Wight, and there setting himself up as a sort of pirate-chief at the head of a band of men as reckless as himself. But when Stephen hurried to Southampton and began to collect a fleet, Baldwin suddenly took fright and surrendered. His lands were confiscated, and he went into exile in Anjou, where he was eagerly welcomed by the count, and added one more to the elements of strife already working in Normandy.[701] In England his defeat put an end to the revolt, and the Christmas court at Dunstable brought the first year of King Stephen to a tranquil close.[702]

[692] Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 901, 902. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 2 (Arnold, pp. 257, 258). Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 95. Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 13 (Hardy, p. 705).

[693] For the details of this Scottish expedition and treaty see Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 4 (Arnold, pp. 258, 289), Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 72, and Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 114.

[694] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 96.

[695] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 2 (Arnold, p. 259).

[696] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 14–16.

[697] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 14 (Hardy, pp. 705–707). Cf. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 9.

[698] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 15 (Hardy, pp. 707–709). Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 119–121.

[699] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 4 (Arnold, p. 259).

[700] Or Bakington. In the Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 18, the name of the place is Batthentona, which Lappenberg and Mr. Freeman render by Bathenton in Devon. (Mr. Sewell, the editor of the Gesta Steph., rendered it Bath.) But while two MSS. of Hen. Hunt. have “Bathentun,” three others have “Bachentun” or “Bakentun” (Arnold, p. 259, note 6. In the index Mr. Arnold suggests “Bagington? Bathampton?”).

[701] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 18–29. Hen. Hunt. as above. Eng. Chron. a. 1135. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. pp. 96, 97.

[702] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 5 (Arnold, p. 260).

Yet already there were signs that those who had thought to find in Henry’s nephew such another king as Henry himself[703] were doomed to disappointment. It was no good omen for the fulfilment of the pledges embodied in his charters when Stephen broke the one which appealed most strongly to popular feeling--the promise to mitigate the severe forest laws--by holding a forest assize at Brampton after his triumph over Baldwin of Redvers in 1136.[704] Neither was it satisfactory that the accession of a king specially bound by the circumstances of his election to rule as a national sovereign proved to be the signal for a great influx of foreigners--not as in Henry’s time, honest industrious settlers who fled from their own unquiet homes to share “the good peace that he made in this land” and to become an useful element in the growing prosperity of the nation; but as in the Red King’s time, a rapacious and violent race of mercenary adventurers, chiefly from Britanny and Flanders; men to whom nothing was sacred, and who flocked to Stephen as they had flocked to Rufus, attracted by the report of his prodigality and the hope, only too well founded, of growing rich upon the spoils of England.[705] However much Henry may have provoked his subjects by his preference for ministers of continental birth, he had at least never insulted them by taking for his chief counsellor and confidant a mere foreign soldier of fortune like that William of Ypres who acted as the leader of Stephen’s Flemish mercenaries and whose influence over him excited the wrath of both the English and the Norman barons.[706] The peace of the country was probably all the better kept during the year 1137 because its preservation was left wholly to Bishop Roger and his nephews, while Stephen, accompanied by his Flemish friend, was well out of the way in Normandy, where he spent the year in concerting an alliance with his brother,[707] obtaining the French king’s sanction to his tenure of the duchy, for which his eldest son did homage in his stead,[708] and vainly endeavouring to secure it from the combined dangers of internal treason and Angevin intermeddling. No disturbance occurred in England during his absence; a Scottish invasion, threatened soon after Easter, was averted by Archbishop Thurstan of York, who persuaded the Scot king to accept a truce till Advent,[709] when Stephen was expected to return. He was no sooner back than David sent to demand for his son the earldom of Northumberland,[710] which had been, it was said, half promised to him a year before;[711] on the refusal of his demand,[712] early in January he led an army into England. An unsuccessful siege of the border fortress of Carham or Wark was followed by such a harrying of the whole land from Tweed to Tyne as had not been heard of since the wild heathenish days of Malcolm Canmore’s youth.[713] David, indeed, was not personally concerned in this horrible work; he had left it to the conduct of his nephew William Fitz-Duncan, while he himself with a strong body of troops took up his quarters at Corbridge.[714] Stephen marched against him early in February, whereupon he returned to the siege of Carham; dislodged thence by the English king, he buried himself and his troops in an almost inaccessible swamp near Roxburgh, bidding the townsfolk decoy the Southrons by a false show of friendliness and thus enable him to surround and despatch them.[715] Stephen however discovered the trap--apparently through the double treachery of some of his own barons who were concerned in it;[716] he crossed the Tweed, but instead of marching upon Roxburgh he turned south-westward and ravaged David’s territories till the lack of provisions forced him to return to the south.[717]

[703] “Hi uuendon thæt he sculde ben alsuic alse the eom wæs.” Eng. Chron. a. 1137.

[704] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 4 (Arnold, p. 260).

[705] “Sub Henrico rege multi alienigenæ, qui genialis humi inquietationibus exagitabantur, Angliam adnavigabant, et sub ejus alis quietum otium agebant; sub Stephano plures ex Flandriâ et Britanniâ, rapto vivere assueti, spe magnarum prædarum Angliam involabant.” Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 34. Cf. l. i. c. 14 (Hardy, pp. 731, 706).

[706] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 105. William of Ypres was son of Philip of Flanders, second son of Count Robert the Frisian. Although he had no legal place in the house of Flanders, he was one of the claimants of the county after the death of Charles of Denmark, against William the Clito and Theodoric of Alsace. After being the torment of his own country for nearly ten years, he was compelled to fly, and took service in England under Stephen. See Walter of Térouanne, Vita B. Caroli Com., in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xiii. pp. 336, 342–347; Galbert of Bruges, Vita B. Car. (ibid.), pp. 354, 355, 359 et seq.; Geneal. Com. Flandr. (ibid.), pp. 412, 413; Joh. Ypr. Chron. Sith. (ibid.), 466, 468. The people’s hatred of William was justifiable enough; but it ill became the barons to cast stones at him. His evil-doings were not a whit greater than theirs, and the changeless devotion with which he--a mere hireling, bound to Stephen by no tie but that of a bargain which Stephen certainly cannot long have had means to fulfil--stuck to the king in adversity as firmly as in prosperity, might have put them all to shame.

[707] Theobald renounced all claims upon kingdom and duchy for two thousand marks of silver to be paid him annually by Stephen. Rob. Torigni, a. 1137.

[708] This was because William the Ætheling had done homage to Louis, and it was agreed that Stephen should hold Normandy on the same terms as his predecessor Henry. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 909. Cf. Rob. Torigni, a. 1137, and Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 5 (Arnold, p. 260). This was in May. Ord. Vit. as above.

[709] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 76, 77. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 115.

[710] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 77. Joh. Hexh. as above.

[711] Ric. Hexh. (Raine, p. 72) says that some who were present at the treaty made between Stephen and David in 1136 affirmed that Stephen had then promised that if ever he should contemplate bestowing the earldom of Northumberland upon any man, he would first cause to be fairly tried in his court the claims upon it which Henry of Scotland had inherited from his mother, the eldest daughter of the last old English earl, Waltheof.

[712] According to Orderic, Stephen had some ground for his refusal; for it seems that the form in which the lately expired truce reached him--at any rate, that in which it reached Orderic--was that of a plot made by “quidam pestiferi” to kill all the Normans in England on a certain day, and betray the realm to the Scots. Some of the plotters were said to have confessed to Bishop Nigel of Ely, who revealed the plot, and so it all came out. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 912. This plot appears also in R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 253, but is there attributed solely to one Ralf, a clerk of Bishop Nigel’s, and nothing is said about the Scots.

[713] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 77–80. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), pp. 115, 116. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 6 (Arnold, pp. 260, 261). The Scottish host was “coadunatus de Normannis, Germanis, Anglis, de Northanhymbranis et Cumbris, de Teswetadalâ, de Lodoneâ, de Pictis, qui vulgo Galleweienses dicuntur, et Scottis, nec erat qui eorum numerum sciret.” Ric. Hexh., p. 79.

[714] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 79. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 116.

[715] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 81. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 117.

[716] Joh. Hexh. as above.

[717] Ric. Hexh. and Joh. Hexh., as above. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 6 (Arnold, p. 261), and Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 102.

He had not long turned his back when David re-entered Northumberland and marched ravaging along the eastern coast till a mutiny among his soldiers compelled him to retreat to the border. Thence he sent William Fitz-Duncan to ravage the district of Craven, while he himself remained busy with the siege of Carham till he was dislodged by Count Waleran of Meulan.[718] The Empress meanwhile plied him with entreaties for support, both by her own letters and through her friends in the north, chief among whom was her father’s old minister Eustace Fitz-John,[719] lord of the mighty castles of Bamborough, Knaresborough, Malton and Alnwick. Eustace had already forfeited his best stronghold, Bamborough, through his plottings against Stephen;[720] in May 1138 he openly placed himself, his remaining castles and his men at the disposal of the Scot king. David hesitated no longer. Gathering up all the forces of his kingdom,[721] he joined Eustace in an unsuccessful attempt to regain Bamborough; thence the united host marched burning and harrying through the already thrice-wasted Patrimony of S. Cuthbert, crossed the Tees, and in the middle of August made its appearance in Yorkshire.[722]

[718] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 81–84. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 117. The record of Waleran’s exploit is in Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 112.

[719] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 35.

[720] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 117. “De magnis proceribus Angliæ, regi quondam Henrico familiarissimus, vir summæ prudentiæ et in secularibus negotiis magni consilii, qui a rege Anglorum ideo recesserat quod ab eo in curiâ contra patrium morem captus, castra quæ ei Rex Henricus commiserat reddere compulsus est.” Æthelred Riev. De Bello Standardi (Twysden, X. Scriptt.), col. 343. On Eustace Fitz-John see also Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, p. 50, note 11.

[721] The Hexham chroniclers reckon them at something over twenty thousand.

[722] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 84, 85, 89. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 118.

There was no help to be looked for from the king. All through that summer the whole south and west of England had been in a blaze of revolt which was still unsubdued, and Stephen had neither time, thought, nor troops to spare for the defence of the north. But in face of such a danger as this the men of the north needed no help from him. When their own hearths and altars were threatened by the hereditary Scottish foe, resistance was a matter not of loyalty but of patriotism. The barons and great men of the shire at once organized their plans under the guidance of Archbishop Thurstan, whose lightest word carried more weight in Yorkshire than anything that Stephen could have said or done. Inspired by him, the forces of the diocese met at York in the temper of crusaders. Three days of fasting, almsgiving and penance, concluding with a solemn absolution and benediction from their primate, prepared them for their task. Worn out as he was with years and labours--so feeble that he could neither walk nor ride--Thurstan would yet have gone forth in his litter at the head of his men to encourage the host with his presence and his eloquence; but the barons shrank from such a risk. To them he was the Moses on whose uplifted hands depended their success in the coming battle; so they sent him back to wrestle in prayer for them within his own cathedral church, while they went forth to their earthly warfare against the Scot.[723]

[723] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 86, 87. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), pp. 118, 119.

Early in the morning of Tuesday, August 22, the English forces drew up in battle array upon Cowton Moor, two miles from Northallerton. In their midst was the “Standard” from which the fight afterwards took its name:--a cart into which was fixed a pole surmounted by a silver pyx containing the Host, and hung round with the consecrated banners of the local churches, S. Peter of York, S. John of Beverley, S. Wilfrid of Ripon.[724] Thurstan’s place as chief spiritual adviser of the army was filled by Ralf, bishop of the Orkneys;[725] their chief military adviser was Walter Lespec, the pious and noble founder of Kirkham and Rievaux--the very type and model of a Christian knight of the time. Standing upon the cart, with the sacred banners waving round his head, in a voice like a trumpet he addressed his comrades.[726] He appealed to the barons to prove themselves worthy of their race; he appealed to the English shire-levies to prove themselves worthy of their country; he pictured in glowing colours the wrongs which they all had to avenge, and the worse they would have to suffer if they survived a defeat; then, grasping the hand of William of Aumale, the new-made earl of York,[727] he swore aloud to conquer or die.[728] The unanimous “Amen!” of the English host was answered by shrill cries of “Albin! Albin!” as the Scots came charging on.[729] The glory of the first onset was snatched, much against David’s will, by the men of Galloway, who claimed it as their hereditary right.[730] The second division of the Scottish host comprised the Cumbrians and the men of Teviotdale, and the followers of Eustace Fitz-John. A third body was formed by the men of Lothian and of the western islands, and a fourth by the king’s household troops, a picked band of English and Norman knights commanded by David in person.[731] The English array was simple enough; the whole host stood in one compact mass clustered around the Standard,--the barons and their followers occupying the centre, the archers intermingled with them in front, and the general mass of less well-armed troops of the shire in the rear, with a small detachment of horse posted at a little distance; the main body of both armies fought on foot in the old English fashion. The wild Celts of Galloway dashed headlong upon the English front, only to find their spears and javelins glance off from the helmets and shields of the knights as from an iron wall, while their own half-naked bodies were riddled with a shower of arrows; their leader fell, and they fled in confusion.[732] The second line under the king’s son, Henry, charged with better success; but an Englishman lifted up a gory head upon a pole crying out that it was David’s; and like the English long ago in a like case at Assandun, the Scottish centre at once fled almost without waiting to be attacked.[733] David himself fought on well-nigh alone, till the few who stood around him dragged him off the field, lifted him on horseback, and fairly compelled him to retreat.[734] His scattered troops caught sight of the dragon on his standard,[735] and discovering that he was still alive, rallied enough to enable him to retreat in good order. Henry gathered up the remnants of the royal body-guard--the only mounted division of the army--and with them made a gallant effort to retrieve the day; but the horsemen charged in vain against the English shield-wall, and falling back with shattered spears and wounded horses they were compelled to fling away their accoutrements and escape as best they could.[736] Three days elapsed before Henry himself could rejoin his father at Carlisle.[737] Eleven hundred Scots were said to have been slain in the battle or caught in their flight through the woods and marshes and there despatched.[738] Out of two hundred armed knights only nineteen carried their mail-coats home again;[739] such of the rest as escaped at all escaped only with their lives; and the field was so strewn with baggage, provisions and arms, left behind by the fugitives, that the victors gave it the nickname of Baggamore.[740] The enthusiasm which had carried the Yorkshiremen through the hour of danger carried them also through the temptation of the hour of triumph. They sullied their victory by no attempt at pursuit or retaliation, but simply returned as they had come, in solemn procession, and having restored the holy banners to their several places with joy and thanksgiving, went quietly back every man to his own home.[741] Some three months later the garrison of Carham, having salted their last horse save one, were driven to surrender; but their stubborn defence had won them the right to march out free with the honours of war, and all that David gained was the satisfaction of razing the empty fortress.[742]

[724] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 90, 91. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 119. Cf. the description of the Milanese carroccio--“quod apud nos standard dicitur” as the German writer remarks--in 1162 (Ep. Burchard. Notar. Imp. de Excidio Mediolan., in Muratori, Rer. Ital. Scriptt., vol. vi. p. 917).

[725] On Ralf see Dixon and Raine, Fasti Eborac., vol. i. p. 168.

[726] So says Æthelred of Rievaux (De Bello Standardi, Twysden, X. Scriptt., cols. 338, 339), giving a charming portrait of Walter and a vivid picture of the scene. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 7 (Arnold, p. 262), attributes the speech to Bishop Ralf.

[727] “The the king adde beteht Euorwic.” Eng. Chron. a. 1138.

[728] Æthelred Riev., De Bello Standardi (as above), cols. 339–342.

[729] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 9 (Arnold, p. 263).

[730] Æthelred Riev. De Bello Stand. (Twysden, X. Scriptt.), col. 342. His account of the quarrel for precedence and its consequences makes one think of the Macdonalds at Culloden. Ric. Hexh. (Raine, p. 92), says the “Picti” were in the van; Joh. Hexh. (ib. p. 119), calls them “Scotti”--both meaning simply what at a later time would have been called “wild Highlanders,” i.e. in this case men of Galloway. Hen. Hunt. puts the Lothian men in front, but he is clearly wrong.

[731] Æthelred Riev. (as above), cols. 342, 343.

[732] Ib. col. 345. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 9 (Arnold, pp. 263, 264), who, however, turns the Galwegians into men of Lothian; see above, note 2{730}.

[733] Æthelred Riev. as above.

[734] Æthelred Riev. De Bello Stand. (Twysden, _X. Scriptt._), col. 346. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 9 (Arnold, p. 264).

[735] “Regale vexillum, quod ad similitudinem draconis figuratum facile agnoscebatur.” Æthelred Riev. as above. Had S. Margaret’s son adopted the old royal standard of her West-Saxon forefathers?

[736] Æthelred Riev. and Hen. Hunt., as above. The two accounts do not seem to tally at first sight, but they are easily reconciled.

[737] Æthelred Riev. as above. Cf. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 112.

[738] Hen. Hunt. as above. Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 93.

[739] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

[740] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 120. Serlo (Twysden, X. Scriptt.), cols. 331, 332. According to this last, the scattered eatables consisted chiefly of bread, cheese and horseflesh, which, as well as other flesh, the Scots ate indifferently raw or cooked.--There is yet one other curious version of the Scottish rout and its cause: “Archiepiscopus cum militibus regis latenter occurrens super Cotowne more juxta Northallerton, fieri jussit in viis subterraneis quædam instrumenta sonos horribiles reddentia, quæ Anglicè dicuntur petronces; quibus resonantibus, feræ et cætera armenta quæ procedebant exercitum prædicti David regis in adjutorium, timore strepitûs perterriti, in exercitum David ferociter resiliebant.” (MS. Life of Abp. Thurstan, quoted by Mr. Raine, Priory of Hexh., vol. i. p. 92, note t). The primate’s share in the victory was so strongly felt at the time that in the Ann. Cicestr. a. 1138 (Liebermann, Geschichtsquellen, p. 95), the battle appears as “Bellum inter archiepiscopum Eboracensem et David.”

[741] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 93. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 120.

[742] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 100. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 118.

The defeat of the Scots was shared by the English baron who had brought them into the land. But Eustace Fitz-John was far from standing alone in his breach of fealty to the English king. All the elements of danger and disruption which had been threatening Stephen ever since his accession suddenly burst forth in the spring of 1138.[743] Between the king and the barons there had been from the first a total lack of confidence. It could not be otherwise; for their mutual obligations were founded on the breach of an earlier obligation contracted by both towards Matilda and her son. There could not fail to be on both sides a feeling that as they had all alike broken their faith to the Empress, so they might at any moment break their faith to each other just as lightly. But on one side the insecurity lay still deeper. Not only was the king not sure of his subjects; he was not sure of himself. How far Stephen was morally justified in accepting the crown after he had sworn fealty to another candidate for it is a question whose solution depends upon that of a variety of other questions which we are not bound to discuss here. Politically, however, he could justify himself only in one way: by proving his fitness for the office which he had undertaken. What he proved was his unfitness for it. Stephen, in short, had done the most momentous deed of his life as he did all the lesser ones, without first counting the cost; and it was no sooner done than he found the cost beyond his power to meet. A thoroughly unselfish hero, a thoroughly unscrupulous tyrant, might have met it successfully, each in his own way. But Stephen was neither hero nor tyrant; he was “a mild man, soft and good--and did no justice.”[744] His weakness shewed itself in a policy of makeshift which only betrayed his uneasiness and increased his difficulties. His first expedient to strengthen his position had been the unlucky introduction of the Flemish mercenaries; his next was the creation of new earldoms in behalf of those whom he regarded as his especial friends, whereby he hoped to raise up an aristocracy wholly devoted to himself, but only succeeded in provoking the resentment and contempt of the older nobility; while to indemnify his new earls for their lack of territorial endowment and give them some means of supporting their titular dignity, he was obliged to provide them with revenues charged upon that of the Crown.[745] But his prodigality had already made the Crown revenues insufficient for his own needs;[746] and the next steps were the debasement of the coinage[747] and the arbitrary spoliation of those whom he mistrusted for the benefit of his insatiable favourites.[748] They grew greedier in asking, and he more lavish in giving; castles, lands, anything and everything, were demanded of him without scruple; and if their demands were not granted the petitioners at once prepared for defiance.[749] He flew hither and thither, but nothing came of his restless activity;[750] he did more harm to himself than to his enemies, giving away lands and honours almost at random, patching up a hollow peace,[751] and then, when he found every man’s hand against him and his hand against every man, bitterly complaining, “Why have they made me king, only to leave me thus destitute? By our Lord’s Nativity, I will not be a king thus disgraced!”[752]

[743] “Hi igitur duo anni [i.e. 1136 and 1137] Stephani regis prosperrimi fuerunt, tertius vero ... mediocris et intercisus fuit; duo vero ultimi exitiales fuerunt et prærupti.” Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 5 (Arnold, p. 260). By this reckoning it seems that after Stephen’s capture at the battle of Lincoln Henry does not count him king at all.

[744] Eng. Chron. a. 1137.

[745] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 18 (Hardy, p. 712).

[746] “He hadde get his [Henry’s] tresor, ac he todeld it and scatered sotlice.” Eng. Chron. a. 1137.

[747] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 34 (Hardy, p. 732).

[748] See the first and fullest example in the story of the siege of Bedford, December 1138–January 1139; Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 30–32. Cf. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 6 (Arnold, p. 260). The sequel of the story is in Gesta Steph., p. 74.

[749] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 18 (Hardy, p. 711).

[750] “Modo hic, modo illic subitus aderat,” ibid. “Raptabatur enim nunc huc nunc illuc, et adeo vix aliquid perficiebat.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 105. Cf. R. Glaber’s description of Stephen’s ancestor Odo II. (above, p. 150).

[751] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 18 (Hardy, pp. 711, 712).

[752] Ib. c. 17 (p. 711).

Matters were made worse by his relations with Earl Robert of Gloucester. As son of the late king and half-brother of the Empress; as one of the greatest and wealthiest landowners in England--earl of Gloucester by his father’s grant, lord of Bristol and of Glamorgan by his marriage with the heiress of Robert Fitz-Hamon--all-powerful throughout the western shires and on the Welsh march--Robert was the one man who above all others could most influence the policy of the barons, and whom it was most important for Stephen to conciliate at any cost. Robert had followed the king back to Normandy in 1137; throughout their stay there William of Ypres strove, only too successfully, to set them at variance; a formal reconciliation took place, but it was a mere form;[753] and a few months after Stephen’s return to England he was rash enough to order the confiscation of the earl’s English and Welsh estates, and actually to raze some of his castles.[754] The consequence was that soon after Whitsuntide Robert sent to the king a formal renunciation of his allegiance, and to his vassals in England instructions to prepare for war.[755] This message proved the signal for a general rising. Geoffrey Talbot had already seized Hereford castle;[756] in the north Eustace Fitz-John, as we have seen, joined hands with the Scot king; while throughout the south and west the barons shewed at once that they had been merely waiting for Robert’s decision. Bristol under Robert’s own son;[757] Harptree under William Fitz-John;[758] Castle Cary under Ralf Lovel; Dunster under William of Mohun; Shrewsbury under William Fitz-Alan;[759] Dudley under Ralf Paganel;[760] Burne, Ellesmere, Whittington and Overton under William Peverel;[761] on the south coast, Wareham, another castle of Earl Robert’s, held by Ralf of Lincoln, and Dover, held by Walkelyn Maminot[762]:--all these fortresses, and many more, were openly made ready for defence or defiance; and Stephen’s own constable Miles, who as sheriff of Gloucester had only a few weeks before welcomed him into that city with regal honours,[763] now followed the earl’s example and formally renounced his allegiance.[764]

[753] Ib. (p. 710).

[754] Ib. c. 18 (p. 713).

[755] Ib. p. 712; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 104. The grounds of the defiance were--1, the unlawfulness of Stephen’s accession; 2, his breach of his engagements towards Robert; 3, the unlawfulness of Robert’s own oath to him as being invalidated, like Stephen’s claim to the crown, by the previous oath to Matilda. (Will. Malm. as above.)

[756] At Ascension-tide. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 7 (Arnold, p. 261). There is also an account of the seizure of Hereford by Geoffrey Talbot in Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 69, where it seems to be placed in 1140. The writer has apparently confused the seizure by Geoffrey in 1138 with that by Miles of Gloucester in December 1139, and misdated both.

[757] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 7 (Arnold, p. 261). Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 917. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 36.

[758] Ord. Vit. as above. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 43.

[759] Hen. Hunt. and Ord. Vit. as above.

[760] “Paganellus [tenuit] castellum de Ludelaue,” says Hen. Hunt. (as above). But we shortly afterwards find Stephen, according to Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 110), marching against “castellum de Duddelæge, quod Radulf Paignel contra illum munierat.” As Henry makes no mention of Dudley at all, and the continuator of Florence makes no mention of Ludlow till 1139, when he says nothing of its commander, it seems plain that there has been some mistake between the two names, which indeed might easily get confounded. Mr. Eyton (Antiquities of Shropshire, vol. v. pp. 244, 245) rules that the Continuator is right, as there is no trace of any connexion between Ralf Paganel and Ludlow, which indeed he shews to have been in other hands at this time. See below, p. 301.

[761] Ord. Vit. as above.

[762] Hen. Hunt. and Ord. Vit. as above.

[763] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 105.

[764] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 104.

The full force of the blow came upon Stephen while he was endeavouring to dislodge Geoffrey Talbot from Hereford. After a siege of nearly five weeks’ duration the town caught fire below the bridge; the alarmed rebels offered terms, and Stephen with his usual clemency allowed them to depart free.[765] After taking the neighbouring castle of Weobly, and leaving a garrison there and another at Hereford,[766] he seems to have returned to London[767] and there collected his forces for an attack upon the insurgents in their headquarters at Bristol. Geoffrey Talbot meanwhile made an attempt upon Bath, but was caught and put in ward by the bishop. The latter however was presently captured in his turn by the garrison of Bristol, who threatened to hang him unless their friend was released. The bishop saved his neck by giving up his prize; Stephen in great indignation marched upon Bath, and was, it is said, with difficulty restrained from depriving the bishop of his ring and staff--a statement which tells something of the way in which the king kept his compact towards the Church. He contented himself however with putting a garrison into Bath, and hurried on to the siege of Bristol.[768]

[765] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 106. The writer adds that on the very day of Stephen’s departure (June 15) Geoffrey set fire to everything beyond the Wye; seven or eight Welshmen perished, but no English (ib. p. 107)--an indication that the part of Hereford beyond the Wye was then a Welsh quarter.

[766] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 106.

[767] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 36.

[768] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), pp. 108, 109. In Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 37–39, 41, 42, the story is told at greater length, and the writer seems to defend the bishop and to consider his own hero rather ungrateful.

A survey of its environs soon convinced him that he had undertaken a very difficult task. Bristol with its two encircling rivers was a natural stronghold of no common order; and on the one side where nature had left it unprotected, art had supplied the deficiency. The narrow neck of land at the eastern end of the peninsula on which the town stood--the only point whence it could be reached without crossing the water--was in the Conqueror’s last days occupied by a castle which in the Red King’s reign passed into the hands of Robert Fitz-Hamon, famed alike in history and legend as the conqueror of Glamorgan; in those of his son-in-law and successor, Earl Robert of Gloucester,[769] it grew into a mighty fortress, provided with trench and wall, outworks and towers, and all other military contrivances then in use,[770] and surrounded on its exposed eastern side by a moat whose waters joined those of the Avon on the south.[771] Bristol was in fact Robert’s military capital, and under the command of his eldest son it had now become the chief muster-place of all his dispossessed partizans and followers, as well as of a swarm of mercenaries attracted thither from all parts of the country by the advantages of the place and the wealth and renown of its lord.[772] From this stronghold they sallied forth in all directions to do the king all the mischief in their power. They overran his lands and those of his adherents like a pack of hounds; wholesale cattle-lifting was among the least of their misdeeds; every wealthy man whom they could reach was hunted down or decoyed into their den, and there tortured with every refinement of ingenious cruelty till he had given up his uttermost farthing.[773] One Philip Gay, a kinsman of Earl Robert, specially distinguished himself in the contrivance of new methods of torture.[774] In his hands, and those of men like him, Bristol acquired the title of “the stepmother of all England.”[775] If Bristol could be reduced to submission, Stephen’s work would be more than half done. He held a council of war with his barons to deliberate on the best method of beginning the siege. Those who were in earnest about the matter urged the construction of a mole to dam up the narrow strait which formed the haven, whereby not only would the inhabitants be deprived of their chief hope of succour, but the waters, checked in their course and thrown back upon themselves, would swell into a mighty flood and speedily overwhelm the city. Meanwhile, added the supporters of this scheme, Stephen might build a tower on each side of the city to check all ingress and egress by means of the two bridges, while he himself should encamp with his host before the castle and storm or starve it into surrender. Another party, however, whose secret sympathies were with the besieged, argued that whatever material, wood or stone, was used for the construction of the dam would be either swallowed up in the depths of the river or swept away by its current; and they drew such a dismal picture of the hopelessness of the undertaking that Stephen gave it up, and with it all attempt at a siege of Bristol. Turning southward, he struck across the Mendip hills into the heart of Somerset, and besieged William Lovel in Castle Cary,[776] a fortress whose remains, in the shape of three grass-covered mounds, still overlook a little valley where the river Cary takes its rise at the foot of the Polden hills. According to one account, the place yielded to Stephen;[777] according to another,[778] he built over against it a tower in which he left a detachment of soldiers to annoy its garrison, and marched northward to another castle, Harptree, whose site is now buried in the middle of a lonely wood. Harptree was gained by a stratagem somewhat later on;[779] for the present Stephen left it to be harassed by the garrison of Bath, and pursued his northward march to Dudley. Here he made no attempt upon the castle, held against him by Ralf Paganel, but contented himself with burning and harrying the neighbourhood, and then led his host up the Severn to Shrewsbury.[780] The old “town in the scrub,” or bush, as its first English conquerors had called it, had grown under the care of its first Norman earl, Roger of Montgomery, into one of the chief strongholds of the Welsh border. The lands attached to the earldom, forfeited by the treason of Robert of Bellême, had been granted by Henry I. to his second queen, Adeliza; she and her second husband, William of Aubigny, had now thrown themselves into the party of her stepdaughter the Empress; and the castle built by Earl Roger on the neck of a peninsula in the Severn upon which the town of Shrewsbury stands was held in Matilda’s interest by William Fitz-Alan, who had married a niece of Robert of Gloucester.[781] William himself, with his wife and children, slipped out at the king’s approach, leaving the garrison sworn never to surrender. Stephen, however, caused the fosse to be filled with wood, set it on fire, and literally smoked them out.[782] The noblest were hanged; the rest escaped as best they could,[783] while Stephen followed up his success by taking a neighbouring castle which belonged to Fitz-Alan’s uncle Arnulf of Hesdin, and hanging Arnulf himself with ninety-three of his comrades.[784] This unwonted severity acted as a salutary warning which took effect at the opposite end of the kingdom. Queen Matilda, with a squadron of ships manned by sailors from her own county of Boulogne, was blockading Walkelyn Maminot in Dover, when the tidings of her husband’s victories in Shropshire induced Walkelyn to surrender.[785] This was in August.[786] When a truce had been patched up with Ralf Paganel,[787] the west of England might be considered fairly pacified, and Stephen was free to march into Dorsetshire against Earl Robert’s southernmost fortress, Wareham.[788] Nothing, however, seems to have come of this expedition; and Robert himself was still out of reach beyond sea. In the midland shires William Peverel, the lord of the Peak country, was still unsubdued, but he was now almost isolated, for in the north Eustace Fitz-John, as we have seen, had drawn his punishment upon himself from other hands than those of the king. Stephen’s successes in the west, his wife’s success at Dover, were quickly followed by tidings of the victory at Cowton Moor; and meanwhile a peacemaker had come upon the scene.

[769] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 3 (Hardy, p. 692).

[770] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 37.

[771] See plans and description in Seyer, Mem. of Bristol, vol. i. pp. 373 et seq.

[772] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 37.

[773] Ib. p. 40, 41. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 109. Both writers, however, seem to lay to the sole account of the Bristol garrison all the horrors which in the Eng. Chron. a. 1137, are attributed to the barons and soldiers in general throughout the civil war.

[774] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

[775] “Ad totius Angliæ novercam, Bristoam.” Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 41.

[776] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 43. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 110.

[777] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 43, 44.

[778] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

[779] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 44.

[780] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above. On Dudley see above, p. 295, note 4{760}.

[781] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 917.

[782] “Omnes infumigat et exfumigat.” Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 110.

[783] Ibid.

[784] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 917.

[785] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 7 (Arnold, p. 261).

[786] Ord. Vit. as above.

[787] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

[788] Ibid.

In the spring of 1138 a schism which had rent the Western Church asunder for seven years was ended by the death of the anti-pope Anacletus, and Pope Innocent II. profited by the occasion to send Alberic bishop of Ostia as legate into England--Archbishop William of Canterbury, who had held a legatine commission together with the primacy, having died in November 1136.[789] Alberic landed just as the revolt broke out, and Stephen had therefore no choice but to accept his credentials and let him pursue his mission, whatever it might be.[790] It proved to be wholly a mission of peace. Alberic made a visitation-tour throughout England,[791] ending with a council at Carlisle, whither the king of Scots, who had adhered to Anacletus, now came to welcome Innocent’s representative. There, on the neutral ground of young Henry’s English fief, the legate made an attempt to mediate between David and Stephen; but all that the former would grant was a truce until Martinmas, and a promise to bring to Carlisle and there set free all the captive Englishwomen who could be collected before that time, as well as to enforce more Christian-like behaviour among his soldiers for the future.[792] On the third Sunday in Advent the legate held a council at Westminster, when Theobald, abbot of Bec, was elected archbishop of Canterbury by the prior of Christ Church and certain delegates of the convent, in presence of the king and the legate.[793] Theobald’s consecration, two days after Epiphany, brought Alberic’s mission to a satisfactory close.[794]

[789] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. pp. 97, 98. On Alberic see Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 96, 97.

[790] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 106.

[791] Ibid. The details of his movements in the north are in Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 98, and Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 121.

[792] Ric. Hex. (Raine), pp. 99, 100. Joh. Hexh. as above.

[793] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 9 (Arnold, p. 265). Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 101–103. Eng. Chron. a. 1140. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 107–109, and vol. ii. p. 384. Chron. Becc., in Giles, Lanfranc, vol. i. p. 207. Vita Theobaldi (ibid.), pp. 337, 338.

[794] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 109.

In the work of mediation he had soon found that there was one who had the matter more nearly at heart, and who had a much better chance of success than himself. Queen Matilda was warmly attached to her Scottish relatives, and lost no opportunity of urging her husband to reconciliation with them. At last, on April 9, she and her cousin Henry met at Durham; David and Henry gave hostages for their pacific conduct in the future, and the English earldom of Northumberland was granted to Henry.[795] The treaty was ratified by Stephen at Nottingham;[796] the Scottish prince stayed to keep Easter with his cousins, and afterwards accompanied the king in an expedition against Ludlow. The castle of Ludlow, founded probably by Roger de Lacy in the reign of William Rufus, was destined in after-days to become a treasure-house alike for historian, antiquary and artist. Memories of every period in English history from the twelfth century to the seventeenth throng the mighty pile, in which almost every phase of English architecture may be studied amid surroundings of the most exquisite natural beauty. The site of the fortress, on a rocky promontory rising more than a hundred feet above the junction of the Corve and the Teme, was admirably adapted for defence. The northern and western walls of its outer ward rose abruptly from the steep slope of the rock itself; on the east and south it was protected by a ditch, crossed by a bridge which led to the inner ward and the keep, securely placed near the south-western angle of the enclosure.[797] The fief of Ludlow had escheated to the Crown soon after Stephen’s accession,[798] and he had apparently bestowed it upon one Joce or Joceas of Dinan,[799] who now, it seems, was holding it against him. The siege came to nothing, though it was made memorable by an incident which nearly cost the life of Henry of Scotland and furnished occasion for a characteristic display of Stephen’s personal bravery. A grappling-iron thrown from over the wall caught the Scottish prince, dragged him off his horse, and had all but lifted him into the castle, when the king rushed forward and set him free.[800] This adventure, however, seems to have cooled Stephen’s ardour for the assault, and after setting up two towers to hold the garrison in check, he again withdrew to London.[801] Early in the year he had taken Earl Robert’s castle of Leeds;[802] and altogether his prospects were beginning to brighten, when they were suddenly overclouded again by his own rashness and folly.

[795] With the exception of Newcastle and Bamborough, and on condition that the local customs established by Henry I. should be maintained inviolate. Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 105, 106. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 10 (Arnold, p. 265), has a very strange version of the way in which this treaty was brought about; see below, p. 302, note 3{802}.

[796] Ric. Hexh. (as above), p. 106.

[797] See plan and description in Clark, Mediev. Milit. Archit., vol. ii. pp. 273–290.

[798] By the death of Payne Fitz-John. See Eyton, Antiqu. Shropshire, vol. v. p. 244.

[799] This is Joceas’s surname according to the romantic History of Fulk Fitzwarine, and it is adopted by Mr. Eyton, who takes it as derived from Dinan in Britanny; see his account of Joceas, Antiqu. Shropsh., vol. v. pp. 244–247. According to this, the name of Dinham, now borne by the part of Ludlow which lies south and west of the castle, would be a corruption of Dinan, which the above-mentioned romance (a work of the reign of Henry III.) says was the name given to the whole place in Joceas’s time. Mr. Wright, however (Hist. Ludlow, pp. 13, 34), thinks that Dinham was the original name, afterwards superseded by Ludlow; in which case Joceas becomes simply “Joceas of Dinham,” with a surname derived not from a foreign birthplace, but from an English fief.

[800] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 10 (Arnold, p. 265).

[801] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 115.

[802] Hen. Hunt. as above. This is Leeds in Kent. It is probably through mistaking it for its Yorkshire namesake that Henry was misled into his odd notion that Stephen himself was fighting in the north, and compelled the Scots to a pacification. See above, p. 300, note 7{800}.

The administrative machinery of the state was still in the hands of Bishop Roger of Salisbury and the disciples whom he had trained. Roger himself retained his office of justiciar; the treasurership was held by his nephew, Nigel bishop of Ely, and the chancellorship by one whom he also called his nephew, but who was known to be really his son. This latter was commonly distinguished as “Roger the Poor”--a nickname pointed sarcastically at the enormous wealth of the elder Roger, compared with which that of the younger might pass for poverty. Outwardly, the justiciar stood as high in Stephen’s favour as he had stood in Henry’s; whatever he asked--and he was not slack in asking--was granted at once: “I shall give him the half of my kingdom some day, if he demands it!” was Stephen’s own confession.[803] But the greediness of the one and the lavishness of the other sprang alike from a secret mistrust which the mischief-makers of the court did their utmost to foster. Stephen’s personal friends assured him that the bishop of Salisbury and his nephews were in treasonable correspondence with the Empress, that they were fortifying and revictualling their castles in her behalf, and that the worldly pomp and show, the vast retinue of armed followers, with which they were wont to appear at court, was really intended for the support of her cause.[804] How far the suspicion was correct it is difficult to decide. Roger owed his whole career to King Henry; he had broken his plighted faith to Henry’s child; it is no wonder if his heart smote him for the ungrateful deed. If, on the other hand, that deed had been done from a real sense of duty to the state, a sincere belief in the advantage of Stephen’s rule for England, then it is no wonder if he felt that he had made a grievous mistake, and sought to repair it by a return to his earlier allegiance. But whatever may be thought of the bishop’s conduct, nothing can justify that of the king. At Midsummer 1139 Stephen summoned Bishop Roger to come and speak with him at Oxford. Some foreboding of evil--possibly some consciousness of double-dealing--made the old man very unwilling to go;[805] but he did go, and with him went his son the chancellor, and his two nephews, the treasurer and Alexander bishop of Lincoln,[806] each accompanied by a train of armed knights. Stephen, equally suspicious, bade his men arm themselves likewise, to be ready in case of need. While he was conversing with the bishops in Oxford castle,[807] a dispute about quarters arose between their followers and those of the count of Meulan and Alan of Richmond;[808] a fray ensued, in which Alan’s nephew was nearly killed,[809] whereupon the two Rogers and the bishop of Lincoln were at once seized by the king. Nigel of Ely, who was lodging apart from the others outside the town,[810] escaped, threw himself into his uncle’s castle of Devizes, and prepared to stand a siege.[811]

[803] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 32 (Hardy, p. 729).

[804] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 46, 47.

[805] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 107. (This writer puts the event a year too early, but afterwards corrects himself, ib. p. 116). Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 20 (Hardy, p. 717), says that he himself heard Roger’s expression of reluctance: “Per dominam meam S. Mariam (nescio quo pacto) reluctatur mens mea huic itineri! Hoc scio, quod ejus utilitatis ero in curiâ, cujus est equinus pullus in pugnâ.” This really seems to imply nothing more than that he was conscious of having lost all power to control or guide the king.

[806] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 10 (Arnold, p. 265). Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 107.

[807] “In castro Oxenfordiæ.” Ann. Oseney, a. 1139 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. iv. p. 23).

[808] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 20 (Hardy, p. 717), lays the blame on the men of Alan of Richmond (or Britanny); the Gesta Steph. (Sewell, p. 49) on Waleran of Meulan. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 108, gives no name.

[809] Will. Malm. as above. Cf. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 124.

[810] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 919.

[811] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 108. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 50.

The town of Devizes stands on a steep escarpment of greensand penetrated by two deep ravines which give it the form of a semicircle with a tongue projecting in the middle. On this tongue of rocky ground, five hundred feet above the level of the sea, the bishop of Salisbury had reared a castle unsurpassed in strength and splendour by any fortress in Europe.[812] At its gates Stephen soon appeared, bringing the two Rogers with him as captives. The elder he lodged in a cowshed, the younger he threatened to hang if the place was not surrendered at once. Its unhappy owner, in terror for his son’s life, vowed neither to eat nor drink till the castle was in the hands of Stephen;[813] but neither his uncle’s fasting nor his cousin’s danger moved Nigel to yield. The keep, however, was held by the chancellor’s mother, Matilda of Ramsbury, and the sight of a rope actually round her son’s neck overcame her resistance. She offered her own life in exchange for his, and the offer being refused, she surrendered. Nigel could only follow her example.[814] Roger’s other castles, Sherborne and Malmesbury, soon fell likewise into the king’s hands, and with them the enormous treasure collected by their owner.[815] Alexander of Lincoln was dragged to the gates of Newark and there kept starving till he induced his people to give up the place; and his other castle, Sleaford, was gained by the same means.[816]

[812] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 10 (Arnold, p. 265).

[813] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above. In Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 920, it is the king who vows to starve the bishop till the castle is won. Cf. Hen. Hunt. (as above) and Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 20 (Hardy, p. 718).

[814] Ord. Vit. as above.

[815] Hen. Hunt. and Will. Malm. Hist. Nov. as above. The Eng. Chron. tells the whole tale briefly under a wrong year (a. 1137).

[816] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 11 (Arnold, p. 266).

Such an outrage as Stephen had committed could not pass unchallenged. His victims indeed were unpopular enough; but two of them were bishops, and the whole English Church was up in arms at once. And the English Church was no longer without a fully qualified spokesman and leader. That leader, however, was not the new-made primate. The legatine commission held by William of Corbeil was not renewed to his successor in the archbishopric: it was sent instead to the man who had long been the most influential member of the English episcopate--Henry, bishop of Winchester. For nearly four months Henry kept this all-powerful weapon lying idly in the scabbard;[817] now, at the call of duty, neither fear nor love hindered him from drawing it against his own brother. Having vainly dinned into Stephen’s ears, both privately and publicly, his entreaties for the restoration of the two bishops, he fell back upon his legatine powers and cited the king to answer for his conduct before a council at Winchester on August 29.[818]

[817] Innocent’s commission bore date March 1, 1139. Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 22 (Hardy, p. 719).

[818] Ib. c. 21 (p. 719).

The council sat for three days, and the case was argued out between Stephen’s advocate Aubrey de Vere, the bishop of Salisbury and the legate. Henry formally charged his brother with sacrilege, in having laid violent hands upon bishops, and appropriated their lands and goods to his own use. Stephen met the charge with the plea which had been used by the Conqueror against Odo of Bayeux--he had arrested the culprits not as bishops, but as unfaithful ministers and disloyal subjects; and the property which he had taken from them they had acquired as private men, in defiance of the canons of the Church. Roger retorted that all these accusations were false; both parties threatened an appeal to Rome, and swords were drawn almost in the council-chamber.[819] The legate and the primate intervened as peacemakers, and a compromise was arranged. It was decreed by the council that all prelates who held fortresses other than those which belonged to their sees should place them under the king’s control, and confine themselves henceforth to their canonical duties and rights.[820] On the other hand, Stephen’s act was solemnly condemned, and he had to lay aside his royal robes and come as an humble penitent to receive the censure of the Church.[821] This humiliation saved him from the ecclesiastical penalties of his misdeed; from its political consequences nothing could save him now. He had filled up the measure of his follies. When the obedience of the barons had been forfeited--when the trust of the people had been shaken--two forces still remained by whose help he might have recovered all that he had lost: the administration and the clergy. At a single blow he had destroyed the one and thrown the other into opposition.

[819] Ib. cc. 22–28 (pp. 719–724).

[820] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 116. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 51.

[821] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 51, 52.

His rivals saw that the hour for which they were vainly waiting in Normandy had struck at last in England. All Geoffrey’s attempts on Normandy had failed. At the expiration of his truce with Theobald of Blois in 1136 the barons of Anjou were again in revolt,[822] and it was not till the end of September that Geoffrey was free to invade the duchy. Its internal confusion was such that the twin earls of Meulan and Leicester (sons of King Henry’s friend Robert), who were trying to govern it for Stephen, had been obliged again to call Count Theobald to their aid; but at sight of the hated “Guirribecs,” as the Angevins were derisively called, the Normans forgot their differences and rose as one man against the common foe. On October 1 Geoffrey was wounded in the right foot while besieging the castle of Le Sap near Lisieux; that night his wife joined him with reinforcements; but the morning had scarcely dawned when, like another Geoffrey of Anjou ninety years earlier, he fled with all his host[823]--not, however, before the military fame of the Norman duke, but before the vengeance of the Norman people. Next spring he again ventured to attack the Hiesmois.[824] Stephen, who was now in Normandy and had just won its investiture from King Louis, prepared to meet the invader; but the jealousies between his Norman and his Flemish troops compelled him to abandon the attempt and make another truce for two years.[825] In April next the Angevins broke the truce;[826] in June Robert of Gloucester openly declared for them, and under his influence Bayeux and Caen surrendered to Geoffrey. The count of Anjou retired, however, before a threatened attack from Stephen’s cousin Ralf of Vermandois, in conjunction with Waleran of Meulan and William of Ypres.[827] Early in October he made an unsuccessful attempt upon Falaise.[828] In November he marched upon Toucques, then one of the most flourishing seaport towns of Normandy. The burghers were taken captive “seated in their own arm-chairs,” and in their comfortable houses the Angevins, after feasting to their heart’s content, settled themselves carelessly for the night. But their presence was known to William Trussebut, the governor of the neighbouring castle of Bonneville; and at dead of night a band of desperate characters, purposely chosen for a desperate deed, came by his orders from Bonneville to Toucques, dispersed silently throughout the town, and fired it in forty-five places. The Angevins, wakened by the cries of the watchmen and the roaring of the flames, fled headlong, leaving their arms, horses and baggage behind them. William Trussebut had come forth at the head of his men to intercept their flight, but the smoke and the darkness were such that neither party could distinguish friends from foes. Geoffrey, bewildered as he was, managed to bring some of his men to a stand in a cemetery; there the rest of the Angevin force gradually collected, and waited, in shame and trembling, for the day. At the first gleam of morning they fled, and never stopped till they had buried themselves and their disgrace safe within the walls of Argentan.[829] This time the Normans had taught Geoffrey a lesson which he did not soon forget; he did not venture to meddle with them again for more than two years. Neither he nor his wife made any movement at all till late in the following summer, when a prospect was opened for them beyond the sea by Stephen’s arrest of the two bishops. The council of Winchester broke up on the first of September;[830] on the thirtieth the Empress was in England.

[822] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 268, 269. Cf. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 903.

[823] Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 903–908. Rob. Torigni, a. 1136.

[824] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 909, says he was “stipendiarius conjugi suæ factus.”

[825] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 910. Rob. Torigni, a. 1137, makes it three years. Stephen also promised an annual payment of two thousand marks of silver.

[826] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 916.

[827] Ord. Vit. as above.

[828] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 918. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1138 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 34, 145).

[829] Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 918, 919.

[830] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 29 (Hardy, p. 724).

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VI. ENGLAND AND THE BARONS

1139–1147.

On the last day of September 1139 Matilda sailed in company with her brother Robert and a hundred and forty knights;[831] they landed at Arundel, and were received into the castle by its owner, the ex-queen Adeliza.[832] Stephen hurried to besiege them there, but before he could reach the spot one of the travellers had left it. Earl Robert only stayed to place his sister in safety beneath her step-mother’s roof,[833] and then set off to arouse her friends in England with the tidings of her arrival. Stephen flew after him, but in vain. With an escort of only twelve knights he rode right across southern England, met Brian of Wallingford and told him the news, carried it on to Miles at Gloucester, and got safe to his journey’s end at Bristol.[834] The baffled king threw all his energies into the siege of Arundel, till his brother joined him and suggested another scheme. Bishop Henry argued that it was useless to besiege the Empress at one end of England while her brother was stirring up the other, and that it would be far wiser to get all the enemies collected in one spot by letting her follow him to Bristol.[835] That Stephen, having once made up his mind to this course, should not only give his rival a safe-conduct but should commission the count of Meulan and the bishop of Winchester himself to escort her till she reached her brother’s care,[836] was only what might have been expected from his chivalrous character. Of the wisdom of the proceeding it is difficult to judge. We can hardly imagine either of Stephen’s predecessors giving a safe-conduct to a competitor for his crown; but neither Rufus nor Henry had had to deal at once with a lady-rival and with her brother; and both had been, materially, politically and morally, in a much stronger position than Stephen. As matters then stood with him, what in itself looks like a piece of Quixotism may have been the best means of cutting an awkward knot; and both he and Matilda played their game so badly from beginning to end that it is hardly worth while to criticize single moves on either side.

[831] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 29 (Hardy, p. 724). The Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 56, and Rob. Torigni, a. 1139, also name Arundel as the landing-place, but give no date. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 11 (Arnold, p. 266), says merely “statim,”--i.e. immediately after the council at Winchester. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. pp. 116, 117, says first “in October,” and afterwards “before S. Peter-in-chains,”--i.e. August 1; but he is clearly wrong in this as well as in saying they landed at Portsmouth.

[832] Will. Malm. as above (p. 725).

[833] Rob. Torigni, a. 1139, says he left her there “cum uxore suâ et aliis impedimentis.”

[834] Will. Malm. as above. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 56. Rob. Torigni, a. 1139.

[835] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 56, 57.

[836] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 29 (Hardy, p. 725). Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 117. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 11 (Arnold, p. 266).

The next seven years were a time such as England never saw before or since. For want of a better name, we call them the years of civil war and count them as part of the reign of Stephen; but the struggle was not worthy of the name of war, and the authority of the Crown, whether vested in Stephen or in Matilda, was a mockery and a shadow. The whole system of government established by King Henry had fallen with his ministers; the death of Bishop Roger in December 1139[837] was typical of the extinction of all law and order throughout the kingdom, nearly half of which had already slipped from Stephen’s grasp. While he kept his Christmas feast in Roger’s episcopal city,[838] Matilda was doing the like in regal state at Gloucester, receiving homage from the western shires, and distributing lands and honours at her will.[839] Of the Easter assembly there is no notice at all,[840] and by Whitsuntide matters had reached such a pass that Stephen held his court not at Westminster as usual but in the Tower, and only one bishop, and that one a foreigner, could be got to attend it.[841] “In those days,” wrote one who lived through them, “there was no king in the land, and every man did not only, as once in Israel of old, that which was right in his own eyes, but that which he knew and felt to be wrong.”[842] For the first and last time in English history, the feudal principle had full play, uncontrolled by any check either from above or from below, from regal supremacy or popular influence. England was at the mercy of the body of feudal nobles whose aim throughout the last seventy years had been to break through the checks placed upon their action by the Conqueror and his sons, and to master the power of the Crown and the control of the state for their own private interests, as the French feudataries had striven in an earlier time to master the Crown of France. This was the condition into which Normandy fell whenever its ducal coronet passed to a weak man or a child, and from which it had had to be forcibly rescued by almost every duke in succession, from Richard the Fearless to Henry the First. By their sternly repressive policy, by their careful adoption and dexterous use of all those safeguards and checks upon the power of the baronage which could be drawn from old English constitutional practice, by their political alliance with the nation against the disruptive tendencies of feudalism, and by their strict administrative routine, the Conqueror and his sons had hitherto managed to save England from such a catastrophe. The break-down of their system under Stephen revealed its radical defect: it rested, in the last resort, on a purely personal foundation--on the strong hand of the king himself. The “nineteen winters” that England “suffered for her sins” under the nominal reign of Stephen were a time of discipline which taught the people, the sovereign, and at last even the barons themselves, to seek a wider and more lasting basis for the organization and administration of the state. The discipline was a very bitter one. The English chronicler’s picture of it has been copied times out of number, yet whoever would paint that terrible scene can but copy it once again. “Every rich man made his castles and held them against the king, and filled the land with castles. They greatly oppressed the wretched men of the land with castle-work; and when the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. They took the men who they weened had any goods, both by night and by day, men and women, and put them in prison for gold and silver, and tortured them with unspeakable torture; never were martyrs so tortured as they were.... When the wretched men had no more to give, they reaved and burned all the townships; and well thou mightest fare all a day’s journey and shouldst never find a man sitting in a township, or land tilled. Corn and cheese and butter were dear, for there was none in the land. Wretched men starved of hunger; some went about asking alms who once were rich men; some fled out of the land. Never was more wretchedness in a land, and never did heathen men worse than these did, for they forbore neither for church nor churchyard, but took all the goods that were therein and then burned church and all.... If two or three men came riding to a township, all fled from them, thinking they were reavers. The bishops and clerks were ever cursing them; but that was nought to them; for they were all accursed, and forsworn, and lost. Even if it was tilled, the earth bare no corn, for it was all undone with their deeds; and they said openly that Christ slept, and His holy ones. Such things, and more than we can say, did we thole nineteen winters for our sins.”[843]

[837] Will. Malm. (as above), c. 32 (Hardy, p. 727). Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 113, under a wrong year.

[838] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 122.

[839] Ib. p. 118. Will. Malm. (as above), cc. 29, 31 (pp. 725, 726).

[840] The only allusion to it is in Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 12 (Arnold, p. 267); “Ubi autem ad Natale vel ad Pascha fuerit [sc. rex], dicere non attinet.” As to Christmas, however, see above, p. 310.

[841] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 37 (Hardy, p. 734). The bishop was John of Séez.

[842] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 22 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 69).

[843] Eng. Chron. a. 1137.

The military history of the struggle is scarcely worth following out in detail; for the most part it is but a dreary tale of raid and counter-raid, of useless marches and unfinished sieges, of towns and castles taken and retaken, plundered and burned, without any settled plan of campaign on either side.[844] By the close of the year 1140 the geographical position of the two parties may be roughly marked off by a line drawn from the Peak of Derbyshire to Wareham on the Dorset coast. Owing to the influence of Robert of Gloucester, Matilda was generally acknowledged throughout the western shires; but she was almost imprisoned in them, for the great highway of central England, the valley of the Thames, from Oxford to the sea, was still in Stephen’s hands; London was loyal to him, and so was Kent, although the archbishop as yet stood aloof from both parties, as did also the legate-bishop of Winchester and the bishops and clergy in general. North of Thames, the midland shires served as a wide battle-field where each of the combatants in turn gained and lost ground, without any decisive advantage on either side. In East-Anglia, Hugh Bigod was for the moment again professing obedience to Stephen, but he was simply watching the political tide to take it at the flood and use it for his own interest; and so were the chief men of central and northern England, the earls of Northampton, Derby and York, the lords of the Peak, of Holderness and of Richmond. In the north-west, between the Welsh march and the southern border of Cumberland, lay a district ruled by an almost independent chieftain whose action brought about the first crisis in the war.

[844] The details of the first year’s fighting are in Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 58–69; Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. pp. 118–128; and Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. cc. 30, 31, 34–37 (Hardy, pp. 726, 730–735).

Of all the great nobles, the one whom both parties were most anxious to win to their own interest was the earl of Chester. His earldom was no empty title, no mushroom creation of the last few years, but a great palatine jurisdiction inherited in regular succession from Hugh of Avranches, on whom it had been conferred by the Conqueror, and comprising the sole government and ownership of the whole of Cheshire. Within its limits the earl ruled supreme; every acre of land, save what belonged to the Church, was held under him; every man owed him suit and service; the king himself had no direct authority within the little realm of Chester, and could claim from its sovereign nothing but the homage due from vassal to overlord. The earl, in fact, as has been often said, “held Chester by the sword as freely as the king held England by the crown;” and as things now stood the earl’s tenure was by far the more secure of the two. The present ruler of this miniature kingdom, Ralf by name, had been married almost in his boyhood to a daughter of Robert of Gloucester.[845] All his father-in-law’s persuasions, however, had as yet failed to draw him to Matilda’s side. Stephen on the other hand was equally alive to the importance of securing Ralf’s adherence, and lavished upon him all the honours he could desire,[846] with one exception. That one was the earldom of Carlisle, which his father had held for a few years and then surrendered in exchange for that of his cousin Richard of Chester, who perished in the White Ship.[847] Ralf accordingly quarrelled for the possession of Carlisle with Henry of Scotland, of whose Cumbrian earldom it now formed a part. Henry appealed to Stephen, who could not but take his side,[848] yet for his own sake was anxious to satisfy Ralf. The mother of Ralf and of his elder half-brother William of Roumare was a great Lincolnshire heiress, daughter of Ivo Taillebois by his marriage with a lady of Old-English race whose family held considerable estates in that county, of which one of them had been sheriff under the Conqueror.[849] In consequence, no doubt, of this old connexion, Stephen at the close of the year 1140 contrived a meeting with the two brothers somewhere in Lincolnshire, and there bestowed great honour upon them both,[850] including, as it seems, a grant of the earldom of Lincoln to William of Roumare.[851] A mere empty title, however, satisfied neither of the brother-earls. Rather, as the English chronicler says of them and of all the rest, “the more he gave them the worse they were to him.”[852] His back was no sooner turned than they planned a trick, which their wives helped them to execute, for gaining possession of Lincoln castle.[853] There Ralf set himself up as lord and master of the city and the neighbourhood;[854] and we can want no more speaking witness to the character of such feudal tyranny as was represented in his person than the fact that not only the citizens, but Stephen’s late victim Bishop Alexander himself, sent the king an urgent appeal to come and deliver them from the intruder.[855]

[845] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 38 (Hardy, p. 739).

[846] “Noht forthi thæt he ne iaf him al thæt he cuthe axan him, alse he dide alle othre.” Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

[847] On the earldoms of Carlisle and Chester, see Mr. Hodgson Hinde’s Introd. to Pipe Rolls of Cumberland, and his paper on the “Early History of Cumberland,” in Archæological Journal, vol. xvi. pp. 229, 230.

[848] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 131, 132.

[849] On the person, pedigree and connexions of Ralf’s mother, Countess Lucy, see Appendix P.P. to Mr. Freeman’s Norm. Conq., vol. iii. pp. 778, 779; and Mr. J. G. Nichols’s paper on the “Earldom of Lincoln,” in Proceedings of Archæological Institute, Lincoln, 1849, pp. 254–257.

[850] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 38 (Hardy, p. 739).

[851] See Nichols, “Earldom of Lincoln” (Proc. Archæol. Inst., Lincoln, 1849), p. 260.

[852] Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

[853] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 921.

[854] “Cumque civibus et affinibus dira injungeret.” Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 70.

[855] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 38 (Hardy, p. 739). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 70. Ord. Vit. as above. The last alone mentions the bishop.

The news reached Stephen as he was keeping Christmas in London, and the peaceful gathering of the court changed into the muster of an armed host which set off at once for Lincoln, and, actively supported by the citizens and the bishop, sat down to besiege the castle.[856] The present polygonal keep of Lincoln castle appears to have been built by Ralf of Chester in the last years of Stephen’s reign. That which he now occupied stood on the same spot, on the south side of the enclosure, and was the original round shell built by the Conqueror upon a mound of still earlier date. Its base was surrounded by ditches, the outer fortifications on that side being on a lower level, and probably still consisting of nothing more than the old English rampart-mound and palisade; the other three sides of the enclosure, where there was no such steep natural incline, were protected by a curtain-wall raised upon the old mounds, and encircled by ditches wide and deep, but dry, for there was no means of contriving a moat on the top of that limestone crag. The brother-earls were not prepared for Stephen’s prompt and vigorous attack: their force was small, and they had their wives and children to protect. Ralf slipped out alone,[857] made his way to Chester to raise his followers there, and sent a message to his father-in-law offering his allegiance to the Empress if Robert would help the besieged at Lincoln out of their strait.[858] Even had his own daughter not been among them, Earl Robert was not the man to miss such a chance. At the head of the entire force of his party he answered Ralf’s appeal; but so keenly did he feel the importance of the crisis that he kept the real object of his expedition a secret from all but his own nearest friends; and the bulk of his host followed him all the way from Gloucester without any idea whither he was leading them, till they found themselves actually in sight of the foe.[859]

[856] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 13 (Arnold, p. 268). Ord. Vit. as above. According to Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 38, 39 (Hardy, pp. 739, 740), the castle was closely invested all round, and a chief base of operations seems to have been the minster.

[857] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 38 (Hardy, p. 740). Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 921.

[858] Ord. Vit. as above.

[859] Will. Malm. (as above), c. 39 (p. 741).

The two earls probably met at Claybrook in Leicestershire. At that point Ralf, coming down from Chester by the Watling Street, and Robert, marching up by a branch road from Gloucester, would both strike into the Foss-Way, and thence would follow its north-eastward course along the eastern side of the Trent valley. Between the road, the river and the promontory of Lincoln stretched a tract of low-lying marshy ground across which the Foss-Dyke ran from the Trent at Torksey into the Witham just above the bridge of Lincoln, thus connecting the two rivers and forming an outlet for the superfluous waters of the Trent, which in rainy seasons was only too apt, as it is even now, to overflow its banks and flood all the surrounding country. Against the storms of the winter of 1140 all precautions had failed; the surging stream had risen far above the level of the dyke, and the greater part of the ground between it and the south-western slope of the Lincoln hill was drowned in one vast sheet of water. The Foss-Way entered the city by a bridge over the Witham; the two earls, however, could not venture to take this route, and made instead for an ancient ford which crossed the river a little farther westward, nearer to its junction with the Foss-Dyke. Stephen was evidently expecting them and had anticipated their course, for he had posted a detachment of troops to guard the site of this ford.[860] All trace of the ford itself, however, was lost in the flood. “Even so would I have it,” cried the earl of Gloucester to his son-in-law, as in the dawn of Candlemas-day they reached the southern margin of the water; “once across, retreat will be impossible; we must conquer or die.” The two leaders plunged in, swam boldly across the fordless stream, and their whole host followed their example.[861] Stephen’s outpost fled or was overcome, and the earls apparently wound their way round the foot of the hill till they reached a tract of comparatively high and dry ground on its south-western side. On the eastern border of this tract, close under shelter of the ridge, a dark moving shadow might tell them that swift and secret as their march had been, Stephen was aware of it and had drawn out all his forces to meet them;[862] while on the height above there loomed out dimly, through the chill grey mist of the February morning, the outlines of the fortress which they had come to deliver.

[860] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 71. See note at end of chapter.

[861] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 40 (Hardy, p. 741). Cf. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 15 (Arnold, p. 268).

[862] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 71. See note at end of chapter.

As they drew up in battle array on the marshy meadows there arose a momentary dispute for precedence. The fiery young earl of Chester pleaded that as the quarrel was his, so the foremost place of danger and of honour should be his likewise. But the quarrel was no longer Ralf’s alone. The flower of the army which had come to aid him consisted of the “Disinherited,” the men whom Stephen had deprived of their lands and honours to bestow them on his own favourites--the men whom Henry had raised up and whom Stephen had cast down[863]--and for them Earl Robert claimed the right of striking the first blow to avenge at once their own wrongs and those of King Henry’s heiress. While his eloquence was winding up their feelings to the highest pitch of excitement,[864] all was astir in the royal camp. There, too, crown and kingdom were felt to be at stake, and many of Stephen’s friends besought him not to risk everything in a pitched battle till he should have gathered a larger force--above all, not on that holy day, for it was Sexagesima Sunday as well as the feast of the Purification.[865] Sinister omens at the early mass--the breaking of the lighted taper in the king’s hand, the falling of the pyx upon the altar[866]--lent additional force to their entreaties; but Stephen was impatient for the crisis and would hear of no delay.[867] He drew up his host in three divisions; two on horseback, commanded respectively by Alan of Richmond and William of Ypres;[868] the third on foot around the royal standard, with the king himself in their midst.[869] In the opposing army the van was taken by the “Disinherited”; the men of Chester, who had first occupied it, now stood in the second line, under the command of their own earl, and on foot.[870] The third line was headed by Robert of Gloucester, and on the wings of the host was a crowd of half-savage Welshmen, drawn from the Welsh dependencies of the earldoms of Gloucester and Chester, and “better furnished with daring than with arms.”[871]

[863] “Quos magnus rex Henricus erexit, iste dejecit--ille instruxit, iste destruxit.” Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 15 (Arnold, p. 270).

[864] See Robert’s speech in Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 15 (Arnold, pp. 268–271); and cf. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 922. What does Orderic mean by “Bassiani”?

[865] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 921.

[866] Ib. p. 922. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 16 (Arnold, p. 271). There is another version of the story about the taper in Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 70, 71.

[867] Ord. Vit. as above.

[868] “Tres nimirum cohortes sibi Rex constituit.... In primâ fronte regalis exercitûs Flandritæ et Britones erant.” Ibid. Compared with the account of the actual battle in Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, pp. 273, 274), the meaning seems to be as given above.

[869] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 16 (Arnold, p. 271).

[870] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 922. Cf. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 13 (Arnold, p. 268), and c. 18 (p. 273).

[871] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 13 (Arnold, p. 268). Cf. Ord. Vit. as above.

In the midst of a spirited harangue addressed to the royal troops by Baldwin of Clare--for among all Stephen’s popular gifts, that of eloquence was lacking[872]--Earl Robert sounded his trumpets for the attack. The Disinherited charged the first line of the royal cavalry under the earls of Richmond, Meulan, Norfolk, Northampton and Surrey, with such vigour that it was scattered almost in a moment. The second line of Stephen’s cavalry--the Flemings under William of Ypres and the count of Aumale--were attacked in flank by the Welsh, whom they put to flight, but a charge of the men of Chester dispersed them in their turn, and the whole body of horsemen on the king’s side turned tail at once.[873] Even William of Ypres for once forsook his royal friend; and the hasty flight of the other leaders, with Alan of Richmond at their head, shewed how half-hearted was their attachment to the king.[874] Stephen and his foot-soldiers were left alone in the midst of the foe, who closed round them on all sides and set to work to assault them as if besieging a fortress. Again and again the horsemen dashed upon that living wall, each time leaving a ghastly breach, but each time driven back from the central point[875] where the king stood like a lion at bay,[876] cutting down every one who came within reach of his sword. The sword broke; but a citizen of Lincoln who stood at his side replaced it by a yet more terrible weapon--one of those two-handed Danish battle-axes which it seems had not yet gone quite out of use in the Danelaw.[877] Almost all his followers were taken or slain, yet still he fought on, with the rage of a wild beast[878] and the courage of a hero, alone against an army. At last Chester charged with all his forces straight at the king. Down upon his helmet came the axe, and Ralf, on his knees in the mire, learned that he was even yet no match for his deserted and outraged sovereign.[879] Most likely it was that blow, dealt at the traitor with all Stephen’s remaining strength, which broke the axe in his hands.[880] Then a stone, hurled no one knew whence, struck him on the head and he fell.[881] A knight, William of Kahaines, seized him by the helmet, shouting “Hither, hither! I have the king!”[882] Yet even then Stephen shook him off, and it was only to Robert of Gloucester in person that he deigned to surrender at last.[883] Baldwin of Clare and three other faithful ones were captured with him; all the rest of the gallant little band were already taken or slain.[884] The triumphant host marched into Lincoln and sacked the town under the royal captive’s eyes.[885] He was then conveyed to Gloucester and there presented, as a great prize, by Earl Robert to his sister, who straightway sent him to prison in Bristol castle.[886]

[872] “Tunc quia rex Stephanus festivâ carebat voce.” Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 16 (Arnold, p. 271).

[873] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, pp. 273, 274).

[874] “His men him suyken and flugæn.” Eng. Chron. a. 1140. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 134, says Alan deserted before the battle began, but Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, p. 273), and Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 922, both name him as receiving the first charge. Orderic (as above) is loud in his denunciations of the traitors. He says that some of them had adopted a practice not unknown in the civil war of the seventeenth century, and still more largely followed in the Jacobite risings of the eighteenth--that of joining the king with a part of their men, and sending the remainder to his enemies.

[875] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, p. 274).

[876] “Stetit autem rex in acie quasi leo.” Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 135.

[877] Ibid. Hen. Hunt. (as above) says the axe was the first weapon, and the sword replaced it when broken, but John’s is far the more likely version. See also Ord. Vit. (as above) and Rob. Torigni, a. 1141.

[878] “Rugiens ut leo ... stridens dentibus, spumans ore, apri more.” Rob. Torigni, a. 1141.

[879] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 135.

[880] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, p. 274), says that both sword and axe broke.

[881] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 40 (Hardy, p. 742).

[882] Hen. Hunt. as above.

[883] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.) p. 922. Joh. Hexh. as above. For other accounts see Will. Malm. as above; Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 71; and Will. Newb., l. i. c. 8 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 39, 40). All agree in praise of Stephen’s valour.

[884] Ord. Vit. as above. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, pp. 274, 275).

[885] Will. Malm., Hen. Hunt. and Will. Newb. as above.

[886] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 41 (Hardy, p. 742). Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 19 (Arnold, p. 275). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 8 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 40). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 72. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 129, giving the date, February 9 [1141].

Matilda’s day had come now. Within three weeks after the battle of Lincoln one of her adherents, Miles Beauchamp, regained Bedford castle from its titular earl Hugh the Poor;[887] William Peverel was forced to surrender Nottingham;[888] Hervey of Lions, Stephen’s son-in-law, was driven out of Devizes;[889] and Alan of Richmond, repenting of his treason and vainly striving to atone for it, was caught in a trap which he himself had laid for Ralf of Chester, flung into a dungeon, and compelled to make submission to the earl and the Empress both at once;[890] while voluntary offers of service and homage came flowing in to Gloucester from all quarters.[891] Still the clergy held aloof. The outrage of Midsummer 1139 had made it impossible for them to support the king; but he was still the Lord’s anointed, to whom their faith was pledged; and their leader, Henry of Winchester, was his own brother. Matilda, anxious above all things to gain Henry’s adhesion, bluntly sent him word that if he would join her, she would honour him as the chief among her counsellors; if not, she would lead “all the armies of England” against him at once. The legate, thus driven into a corner--for, at the moment, her words were by no means an empty threat--felt that even for his brother’s interest, let alone the interest of the Church, which was really dearer to him than all beside, his best course was to make terms with the victorious party.[892] The terms were arranged between him and his imperial cousin in person, on a rainy March morning in the plain before Winchester. Next day the old West-Saxon capital opened its gates to the Empress, and the legate himself, with a long train of bishops and abbots, clergy and people, led her in triumphal procession to the “Old Minster” where so many of her forefathers had been crowned and buried.[893]

[887] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 74. Cf. ib. p. 32.

[888] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 136.

[889] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 74. Cf. ib. p. 69. Hervey, it must be noticed, was actually expelled not by Matilda’s partizans, but by the poor country folk whom his oppressions had exasperated. But it was Matilda who got the benefit of his expulsion.

[890] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 136.

[891] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 74.

[892] Ib. p. 75.

[893] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 42 (Hardy, pp. 743, 744). In Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 130, this entry into Winchester on March 3 is confused with Matilda’s formal election there in April. So it is also in Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 75.

In a few days the archbishop of Canterbury followed the legate’s example and swore fealty to the Empress at Wilton.[894] She next advanced to her father’s burial-place, Reading, and thence summoned Robert of Oilly, who had been her father’s constable, to surrender Oxford castle; the summons was obeyed,[895] and she held her Easter court at Oxford.[896] The key of the upper valley of the Thames being thus in her hands, she set herself to win its lower valley by advancing to S. Alban’s and thence opening negotiations with London.[897] A deputation of its citizens were at the same time invited by the legate-bishop to a great council at Winchester on the second Monday after Easter. The first day of the council was spent in a succession of private conferences; on the second Henry spoke out publicly. He set forth how, as vicar of the Apostolic see, he had summoned this assembly to consider of the best means of restoring order in the land; he contrasted its present wretched state with the good peace which it had enjoyed under King Henry; he recited how the crown had been promised to Matilda;--how, in consequence of her absence at her father’s death, it had seemed wiser to secure a king at once in the person of Stephen;--how he, the speaker, had stood surety for the maintenance of the new king’s promises to the Church and the nation:--and how shamefully those promises had been broken. He had tried to bring his brother to reason, but in vain; and now the matter had been decided by a higher Power. The judgment of the God of battles had delivered Stephen into the hand of his rival, and cast him down from his throne; the speaker’s duty was to see that throne filled at once. He had spent the previous day in consultation with the bishops and clergy to whom the right of election chiefly belonged; their choice had fallen upon the candidate to whom their faith had been plighted long ago; he called upon them now publicly to confirm their choice, and swear fealty to King Henry’s heiress as Lady of England and Normandy.

[894] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 42 (Hardy, p. 744). Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 130.

[895] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

[896] Will. Malm. as above. The Contin. Flor. Worc. says she spent Easter at Wilton, and places the visits to Reading and Oxford between Easter and Rogation-tide; but his chronology is very confused, while that of Will. Malm. is especially careful just here. William’s account of all these matters is by far the best. The Gesta Steph. cuts them very short.

[897] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 131.

Not a dissentient voice was raised save that of a clerk of the queen’s household, who ventured to read out a letter from his mistress to the legate, passionately entreating for her husband’s restoration. The deputation from London, who seem to have been the only laymen in the assembly, did not exactly oppose the decision of the majority; they merely pleaded for Stephen’s release, and carried back a report of the proceedings to their fellow-citizens, with a view to gaining their assent. It was not till just before midsummer that the Londoners were finally persuaded to forsake their own chosen king;[898] then, indeed, they opened their gates with the utmost humility;[899] and thus the Lady entered her capital and took up her abode at Westminster in triumph.[900]

[898] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 43–48 (Hardy, pp. 744–749).

[899] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 76, 77.

[900] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 131.

The triumph did not last long. Matilda fell, just as her rival had fallen, by her own fault; only the faults of the two cousins were of a directly opposite nature. The Lady’s habitual temper was that of her grandfather the Conqueror--“very stern to all who withstood her will”; and her will was not, like his, kept under the control of sound policy and reason. Where Stephen had erred through his fatal readiness to listen to the most worthless counsellors, Matilda erred through her obstinate refusal to listen to any counsellors at all. She was no sooner in London than she began confiscating lands and honours and disposing of Church property more ruthlessly than ever Stephen had done; and neither the brother to whom she owed her victory, nor the legate to whom she owed her throne, nor the old king of Scots who came to share his niece’s triumph and give her the benefit of his mature wisdom, could succeed in bringing her to reason. Not a word of conciliation would she hear from any one. The queen appealed to her in behalf of her captive husband; some of the great nobles did the like; but she was deaf to their prayers. The bishop of Winchester besought her at least to secure to Stephen’s children the possessions which he had held before he became king; but she would not hear him either. The citizens of London besought her to give them back “the Laws of King Eadward”;[901] and that, too, she refused. She did worse; she summoned the richest burghers to her presence, demanded from them instant payment of a large sum of money, and when they respectfully remonstrated, drove them away with a torrent of abuse, utterly refusing all abatement or delay.[902] She was soon punished. All through the spring Matilda of Boulogne had been busy in Kent with the help of William of Ypres, rallying her husband’s scattered partizans, and gathering an army which she now led up, wasting, plundering, slaughtering all before them, almost to the gates of London. Her vigorous action determined that of the citizens. One day, as the Empress was quietly sitting down to dinner, the bells began to ring, the people came swarming out of their houses “like bees out of a hive”; the whole city flew to arms; and she and her friends were driven to flee, some one way, some another, as fast as their horses could carry them.[903] Earl Robert accompanied his sister as far as Oxford;[904] thence she hurried on to Gloucester to consult with her favourite Miles, the only person who seems to have had any real influence over her, and brought him back with her to Oxford to help in rallying her scattered forces.[905] Her cousin the queen meanwhile was in London at the head of an enthusiastic city, eager for the restoration of Stephen; from one end of England to the other the heroic wife was leaving no stone unturned in her husband’s interest, and her zeal was speedily rewarded by the re-conversion of the legate. Utterly disgusted at the result of his second attempt at king-making for the good of the Church, after one last warning to the Empress he met his sister-in-law at Guildford, reversed all the excommunications issued against Stephen’s party by the council of Winchester, and pledged himself to do henceforth all that in him lay for the restoration of the captive king.[906] Robert of Gloucester vainly sought to win him back;[907] then the Lady resolved to try her own powers of persuasion, and without a word of notice even to her brother, at the head of a strong body of troops she set off for Winchester.[908]

[901] “Ut leges eis Regis Edwardi observari liceret, quia optimæ erant, non patris sui Henrici, quia graves erant.” Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 132.

[902] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 77.

[903] Ib. pp. 78, 79. Cf. Flor. Worc. Contin. as above, and Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 48 (Hardy, p. 749).

[904] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 79.

[905] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

[906] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 49 (Hardy, p. 750).

[907] Ib. c. 50 (p. 751).

[908] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov. as above. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 80. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 133) says this was just before August 1.

Of the two royal dwelling-places founded at Winchester by the Conqueror, only one now remained. He and his sons apparently found the castle at the western end of the city a more agreeable residence than the palace whose inconvenient proximity drove the monks of the New Minster to remove to Hyde. This palace was almost as great a nuisance to the Old Minster as to the New, and three years after King Henry’s death his nephew and namesake the bishop determined to get rid of it. Amid the gathering storms of the year 1138 Bishop Henry, in his turn, grew dissatisfied with his episcopal abode hard by the cathedral church, and resolved that he too would have a castle of his own. With an audacity characteristic alike of the man and of the time, he carried the stones of his grandfather’s deserted palace down to a clear space within the “soke” or “liberty” of the church, just within the eastern boundary of the city, and there set them up again in the shape of a mighty fortress[909] afterwards known as Wolvesey-house, some fragments of whose walls still stand, broken and overhung with ivy, in a green enclosure between the river-bank and the long, dark pile of the cathedral. As the Lady rode into Winchester by one gate the bishop rode out by another, to shut himself up in Wolvesey.[910] Matilda established herself without opposition in the castle,[911] and thence sent him a civil message requesting him to come and speak with her. He answered, “I will make me ready”;[912] and he did so, by despatching an urgent summons to all the partizans of the king.[913] The Empress, too, called up her friends; they hurried to her support, quartered themselves in the city with the goodwill of the inhabitants, and beset both the bishop’s palace and his fortress with all the troops they could muster.[914] But his summons was no less effectual than hers. It brought up all the barons who still held with Stephen; it brought up a troop of mercenaries;[915] best of all, it brought up, not only William of Ypres with his terrible Flemings,[916] but a thousand valiant citizens of London with Stephen’s own Matilda at their head.[917] The besiegers of Wolvesey found themselves beset in their turn by “the king’s queen with all her strength”;[918] the bishop himself ordered the town to be fired, and the wind, which saved the cathedral, carried the flames northward as far as Hyde abbey.[919] While he thus made a desert for the besiegers within the city, the queen was doing the like without. Under her directions the London contingent were guarding every approach from the west, whence alone the Lady’s troops could look for supplies: the convoys were intercepted, their escorts slain; and while eastward the roads were lined all the way to London with parties bringing provision for the bishop and his little garrison, his besiegers already saw famine staring them in the face.[920] At last they sent out a body of knights, three hundred strong, to Wherwell, intending there to build a castle as a cover for their convoys.[921] They had no sooner reached the spot than William of Ypres pounced upon them and captured the whole party.[922]

[909] “Hoc anno fecit Henricus episcopus ædificare domum quasi palatium cum turri fortissimâ in Wintoniâ.” Ann. Winton. a. 1138 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 51). The story of the pulling down of the royal palace is in Girald. Cambr., Vita S. Remigii, c. 27 (Opera, ed. Dimock, vol. vii. p. 46).

[910] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 80. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 133.

[911] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 133. Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 50 (Hardy, p. 751).

[912] “Ego parabo me.” Will. Malm. as above.

[913] Ibid.

[914] “Castellumque episcopi, quod venustissimo constructum schemate in civitatis medio locârat, sed et domum illius quam ad instar castelli fortiter et inexpugnabiliter firmârat, validissimâ obsidione claudere præcepit” [sc. comitissa]. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 80. The first-named “castellum” is clearly the old palace of the bishops; the “domus” is Wolvesey, where Henry now was. The list of Matilda’s followers is given in Gesta Steph., p. 81, and in Will. Malm. as above.

[915] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 82.

[916] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 19 (Arnold, p. 275).

[917] Gesta Steph. as above.

[918] “Tha com the kings cuen mid all hire strengthe and besæt heom.” Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

[919] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 50 (Hardy, p. 752). Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 133. The latter gives the date--August 2.

[920] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 50 (Hardy, pp. 751, 752). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 83.

[921] Gesta Steph. as above. Joh. Hexh. (Raine, p. 138) says two hundred knights, commanded by John the Marshal and Robert, son of King Henry and Eda (i.e. Edith who married Robert of Oilly).

[922] Gesta Steph. and Joh. Hexh. as above.

Then Robert of Gloucester felt that the case was hopeless, and that, cost what it might, he must get his sister out. Suddenly, as he was marshalling his host to cut their way through at all risks,[923] on the evening of September 13, the city gates were opened, and peace was proclaimed in the bishop’s name.[924] Robert hereupon decided to march quietly out next morning. He took, however, the precaution of sending his sister out first of all, while he brought up the rear with a small band of men as dauntless as himself.[925] He did wisely. Matilda had but just ridden through the west gate when the bishop, doubtless from his tower at Wolvesey, gave the signal for attack. The whole host of the queen’s partizans rushed upon those of the Lady and routed them completely. Earl Robert succeeded in covering his sister’s retreat, and cut his own way out in another direction, but was overtaken at Stockbridge by William of Ypres and his Flemings, who surrounded and took him prisoner.[926] Miles of Gloucester (whom the Empress had made earl of Hereford), surrounded in like manner, threw down his arms and fled for his life, reaching Gloucester in disgrace, weary, alone, and almost naked.[927] King David, it is said, was thrice made prisoner, but each time bribed his captors to let him go,[928] and was hidden in safety at last by a certain David Holcfard, who happened to be his godson.[929] The archbishop of Canterbury and several other bishops who had accompanied the Empress were despoiled of their horses and even of their clothes. The Lady herself had escaped in company with the Breton lord of Wallingford, Brian Fitz-Count, who had long been her devoted friend and who never forsook her.[930] Their first halt was at Luggershall; urged by her friends, still in terror of pursuit, she mounted another horse and spurred on to Devizes; there, half dead with fatigue, she laid herself on a bier, and bound to it with ropes as if she had been a corpse, she was carried at last safe into Gloucester.

[923] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 51 (Hardy, p. 753). Cf. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 84.

[924] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 134.

[925] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 51 (Hardy, p. 753).

[926] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 135. Cf. Gesta Steph., Will. Malm., and Joh. Hexh. (as above). The Geneal. Com. Flandr. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xiii. p. 413) declares that this was the service for which Stephen rewarded William with the earldom of Kent.

[927] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 135.

[928] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 85.

[929] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 138.

[930] Gesta Steph. as above. Brian was a son of Alan Fergant, duke of Britanny (Eng. Chron. a. 1127). Together with Robert of Gloucester, he escorted Matilda over sea when she went to be married to Geoffrey, and he is said to have been one of the three persons with whom alone Henry consulted about the marriage. Eng. Chron. a. 1127; Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 3 (Hardy, p. 693). He was, all his life, a most loyal and useful member of the Angevin party. His father’s first wife was the Conqueror’s daughter Constance; the second was Fulk Rechin’s daughter Hermengard; Brian, however, had no kindred with the house which he served so well.

Earl Robert was brought back to Winchester to the feet of the queen, who sent him, under his captor’s charge, into honourable confinement in Rochester castle.[931] The next six weeks were spent in negotiations for his release and that of Stephen; for the party of the Empress found themselves helpless without Robert, and the chief aim of Matilda of Boulogne was to get her husband free. She proposed to Countess Mabel of Gloucester--for the Empress held sullenly aloof--that the two illustrious captives should simply be exchanged, and to this Mabel eagerly assented. Robert, however, protested that an earl was no equivalent for a king, and insisted that all those who had been captured with him should be thrown in to balance the crown. To this their various captors naturally demurred, and the project failed.[932] It was next proposed to settle the whole dispute by restoring Stephen to his throne and making Robert governor of England in his name;[933] but the earl would agree to nothing without his sister’s consent, and the Empress refused to modify her claims in any way.[934] The queen threatened that if Robert did not yield, she would send him over to Boulogne and keep him there in chains for the rest of his life; but he knew that if a hair of his head was touched his countess, whom he had left in command at Bristol, would at once ship off her royal captive to Ireland, and the threat produced no effect. Meanwhile the party of the Empress was falling to pieces so rapidly that her few genuine adherents grew alarmed for her personal safety, and besought Robert to accept freedom on any terms, as the sole chance of averting her ruin. The original proposition of a simple exchange was therefore revived, and accepted in the first days of November.[935]

[931] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 134.

[932] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 58 (Hardy, pp. 759, 760).

[933] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 136. Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 59 (Hardy, p. 760).

[934] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above. At this point we lose him.

[935] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 51, 60–64 (Hardy, pp. 754, 760–762). Cf. Eng. Chron. a. 1140; Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 19 (Arnold, p. 275); and Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 85, 86.

The earl rejoined his sister at Oxford;[936] the king re-entered his capital amid general rejoicings.[937] His misfortunes, the heroism of his queen, the overbearing conduct of the Empress, all helped to turn the tide of popular feeling in his favour once more. Early in December the legate, with such daring indifference to the awkwardness of his own position as can surely have been due to nothing but conscious integrity of purpose, called a council at Westminster and formally undid the work which he had done at Winchester in the spring. After a solemn complaint had been lodged by Stephen against the vassals who had betrayed and captured him--the counterpart of the charge once made in a similar assembly against Stephen himself, of having been false to his duty as king--Henry rose and made his apology. He had acquiesced in the rule of the Empress, believing it a necessary evil; the evil had proved intolerable, and he was thankful to be delivered from its necessity. In the name of Heaven and its Roman representative he therefore once more proclaimed his brother as the lawfully-elected and apostolically-anointed sovereign to whom obedience was due, and denounced as excommunicate all who upheld the claims of the Angevin countess. The clergy sat in puzzled silence; but their very silence gave consent.[938]

[936] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 51 (Hardy, p. 754).

[937] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 85. Hen. Hunt. as above.

[938] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 52–53 (Hardy, pp. 755, 756). The council met on December 7.

Throughout the winter both parties remained quiet, Stephen in London, Matilda in Oxford; both, in the present exhausted state of their forces, had enough to do in simply standing their ground, without risking any attack upon each other. In the spring Matilda removed to Devizes; there, at Mid-Lent, she held with her partizans a secret council which resulted in an embassy to Anjou, calling upon Geoffrey to come and help in regaining the English heritage of his wife and son. At Pentecost the answer came. Geoffrey, before he would accede to the summons, required to be certified of its reasonableness, and he would accept no assurance save that of the earl of Gloucester in person. Robert, knowing how closely his sister’s interest and even her personal safety was bound up with his presence at her side, was very unwilling to undertake the mission. A scheme was however contrived to satisfy him. Matilda returned to her old quarters at Oxford; the chief men of her party bound themselves by oath to keep within a certain distance of the city, and to guard her against all danger until her brother’s return. On this understanding he sailed from Wareham shortly before Midsummer. He was but just gone when Stephen, who since Easter had been lying sick at Northampton, swooped down upon Wareham so suddenly that the garrison, taken by surprise, yielded to him at once.[939] The king marched up to Cirencester, surprised and destroyed a castle lately built there by the Empress,[940] and thence turned westward to try conclusions with Matilda herself by attacking her headquarters at Oxford.

[939] Ib. cc. 66–71 (pp. 763–766).

[940] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 87, 88.

Oxford was, from its geographical situation, one of the most important strategical posts in England. It stood at the very centre and crowning-point of the valley of the Thames, the great high-way which led from the eastern sea and the capital into the western shires, through the very heart of the land. So long as it remained loyal to Stephen, he was master of the whole Thames valley, and the Angevins, however complete might be their triumph in the west, were cut off from all direct communication with eastern England and even with the capital itself. The surrender of Oxford castle to Matilda in the summer of 1141 had reversed this position of affairs. It probably helped to determine--it was at any rate soon followed by--the surrender of London; and even when London was again lost to the Empress, her possession of Oxford still gave her command over the upper part of the river-valley and thus secured her main line of communication with her brother’s territories in the west, while Stephen in his turn was almost prisoned in the eastern half of his realm. For nearly eleven months he had seen her defying him from her father’s palace of Beaumont or from the impregnable stronghold of the castle, where the first Robert of Oilly, not content with raising a shell-keep on the old English mound, had built another tall square tower which still stands, on the western side of the enclosure, directly above the river.[941] Not until her brother had left her did the king venture to take up the challenge which her very presence there implied; then indeed he felt that the hour had come. Matilda, as if in expectation of his attack, had been employing her followers on the construction of a chain of forts intended to protect and keep open her communications with the west.[942] One by one Stephen broke the links of the chain--Cirencester, Bampton, Ratcot[943]--and from this last place, a little village in the midst of a marsh, half-way between Bampton and Farringdon, he led his host across the Isis and round by the meadows on its southern shore to the ford below S. Frideswide’s from which the city took its name. Matilda’s partizans no sooner discovered his approach--three days before Michaelmas[944]--than they streamed down to the bank of the river, across which they greeted him first with a torrent of abuse and then with a flight of arrows. The vanguard of the royal host, with Stephen himself at their head, sprang into the water, swam rather than waded across the well-known and time-honoured ford,[945] and by the fury of their onset drove their insulting enemies back to the city gates. The rest of the army quickly followed; Matilda’s adherents fled through the open gate, their pursuers rushed in after them, entered the town without difficulty, set it on fire, captured and slew all on whom they could lay their hands, and drove the rest to take shelter in the castle with their Lady.[946]

[941] See above, p. 42, note 2{113}.

[942] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 87, 88.

[943] Ib. p. 88. “Apud viculum Ratrotam fluctibus inaccesse et paludibus obseptum.” Ib. p. 87. Ratcot is Anthony Wood’s rendering.

[944] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 71 (Hardy, p. 766).

[945] “Præmonstrato antiquo sed eximiæ profunditatis vado.” Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 89.

[946] Ibid.

Stephen had doubtless not braved S. Frideswide’s wrath by entering Oxford, so to say, under her very eyes. His troops had won the city; his task was to win the castle, and that task he vowed never to abandon till both fortress and Empress should be in his hands. For nearly three months he blockaded the place, till its inhabitants were on the verge of starvation. The barons who had sworn to protect Matilda, bitterly ashamed of their failure, gathered at Wallingford ready to meet Stephen if he should chance to offer them battle; but he had no such intention, and they dared not attack him where he was.[947] At last a gleam of hope came with Earl Robert’s return, quickened, it seems, by tidings of his sister’s danger. Landing at Wareham with a force of some three or four hundred Normans, he regained the port and the village without difficulty, and as his force was too small to effect Matilda’s relief directly, he laid siege to the castle, hoping by this means to make a diversion in her favour.[948] The garrison of Wareham did in fact send a message to Stephen beseeching him to come and relieve them before a certain day, as if he did not, they must give up the place.[949] But the king was not to be drawn from his prey; he left Wareham to its fate, and after a three weeks’ siege it surrendered. Robert went on to Portland and Lulworth, took them both, and then summoned all the friends of the Empress to meet him at Cirencester, thence to set out with their united forces for the rescue of Matilda herself.[950] In Oxford castle the provisions were all but exhausted; the Lady despaired of succour.[951] Her faithful friend the lord of the castle, Robert of Oilly, had died a fortnight before the siege began.[952] Christmas was close at hand; the snow lay thick on the ground; the river was frozen fast. From the top of D’Oilly’s tall tower nothing was to be seen but one vast sheet of cold, dead white, broken only by the dark masses of Stephen’s host encamped round about upon the frozen meadows:--a dreary outlook, but the prospect within was drearier still. Matilda had gone through too many adventures to shrink from the risk of one more. One night four white-robed figures[953] dropped down by a rope[954] over the castle-wall upon the frozen river at its foot; they crossed dry-shod over the stream whose waters, a little lower down, had been almost over the heads of their enemies three months before; their footsteps fell noiseless upon the fresh snow, their white garments reflected its gleams and deceived the eyes of Stephen’s sentinels; in the stillness of the night, broken only by the bugle-call and the watchman’s cry, they stole through the besieging lines and across the very sleeping-quarters of the king--never caught, never discovered save by one man in all the host; and he, whether taking them for ghosts, or in chivalrous sympathy for their desperate venture, let them pass unchallenged and kept his story till the morrow.[955] Five miles they fled on foot “over snow and ice, over ditch and dale”; at Abingdon they took horse, and before the morning broke the Empress Matilda and her faithful comrades were safe under the protection of Brian Fitz-Count in his great fortress of Wallingford.[956]

[947] Will. Malm. as above.

[948] Ib. cc. 72, 73 (Hardy, pp. 767, 768). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 91. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 124.

[949] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 73 (Hardy, p. 768).

[950] Ib. c. 74 (p. 768). Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 124, 125.

[951] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 90.

[952] Ann. Osen. a. 1142 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. iv. p. 24).

[953] Gesta Steph. as above. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 124, makes them six.

[954] Eng. Chron. a. 1140. Gerv. Cant. (as above) says “per posticium.”

[955] Gesta Steph. as above.

[956] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 90. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 124, 125. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 20 (Arnold, p. 276). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 43).

At Wallingford her brother came to meet her, accompanied not by her husband but by her son, a child nine years old whom Geoffrey, now absorbed in the conquest of Normandy, had sent to England in his stead.[957] The escape from Oxford was Matilda’s last exploit. The castle surrendered to Stephen as soon as she had left it;[958] she returned to her old quarters at Bristol or Gloucester; and thenceforth she ceased to figure prominently in the war which dragged languidly on for five more years. A battle between Stephen and Earl Robert near Wilton, on July 1st, 1143, in which the king was utterly routed and only escaped being made prisoner a second time by taking to headlong flight,[959] was the last real success of the Angevin party. The year closed with a severe blow to the Empress, in the death of her trusted friend Miles of Hereford, who was slain on Christmas Eve, not in fight, but by a chance shot in hunting.[960] Early in the next year Ralf of Chester again seized Lincoln castle;[961] but Ralf fought for his own hand rather than for the Empress; and so, too, did Hugh Bigod, Turgis of Avranches and Geoffrey of Mandeville, who kept all eastern England in ceaseless commotion.[962] Stephen’s energies were absorbed in a vain endeavour to reduce them to order, while Robert struggled almost as vainly against the anarchy of the western shires; in the north Ralf of Chester now ruled supreme from the Witham to the Dee; and the upper valley of the Thames was at the mercy of William of Dover, who had built a castle at Cricklade, from which he ravaged the whole country between Oxford and Malmesbury.[963]

[957] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 70 (Hardy, p. 765). Rob. Torigni, a. 1142. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 125.

[958] Will. Malm. as above, c. 74 (p. 769. At this point he ends). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 91. Hen. Hunt. as above.

[959] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 92. Gerv. Cant. (as above), pp. 125, 126. Will. Newb. as above (p. 42).

[960] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 101. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 146.

[961] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 22 (Arnold, p. 277).

[962] On Hugh Bigod and Turgis see Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 109–111; on Geoffrey of Mandeville, ib. pp. 101–104; Will. Newb., l. i. c. 11 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 44–46); and Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 21 (Arnold, pp. 276, 277).

[963] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 106, 107, 111.

Suddenly, after capturing the commandant of Malmesbury and sending him as a great prize to the Empress, the lord of Cricklade threw aside his evil work and went off to die for a nobler cause in Palestine.[964] Geoffrey de Mandeville, the worst of all the troublers of the land, who had accepted titles and honours from both the rival sovereigns and had never for one moment been true to either, met his death in the same summer of 1144 in a skirmish with the king’s troops; his fellow-sinner Robert of Marmion was soon afterwards slain by the earl of Chester’s men at the gates of the abbey of Bath which he had desecrated.[965] For a moment it seemed as if the cry which had long been going up from all the desolated sanctuaries of England--“Up, Lord, why sleepest Thou?”--had been heard and answered at last.[966] Philip of Gloucester, Earl Robert’s son, who had taken William of Dover’s place at Cricklade, was so hard pressed by the garrison of Oxford[967] that he called his father to his aid; Robert built a great castle at Farringdon, but the king besieged it with such vigour that its defenders were compelled to surrender.[968] From that moment the Angevin party fell rapidly to pieces. Young Philip of Gloucester himself went over to Stephen and turned his arms against his own father.[969] The earl of Chester came to meet the king at Stamford,[970] humbly apologized for his rebellion, and sought to prove the sincerity of his repentance by regaining Bedford for Stephen, by constantly accompanying him with a band of three hundred picked knights, and by helping him to build a fortress at Crowmarsh to keep the garrison of Wallingford in check.[971] As, however, he still refused to give up the castles which he had seized and to pay his dues to the royal treasury, he was naturally regarded with suspicion by the other barons and by the king himself.[972] In the summer of 1146 their mutual distrust came to a crisis at Northampton. Ralf besought Stephen’s help against the Welsh; the barons persuaded Stephen to let them answer in his name that he would not give it unless Ralf surrendered his castles and gave hostages for his fidelity; he refused indignantly; they accused him of plotting treason, laid hands upon him with one accord, and gave him in charge to the royal guards, by whom he was flung into prison.[973] As in the case of the seizure of the bishops, it is difficult to say how far Stephen was responsible, and how much justification he had, for this arrest. We can hardly get nearer to the truth than the English chronicler: “The king took him in Hamton through wicked rede, and did him in prison; and soon after he let him out again through worse rede, with the precaution that he swore on the halidom and found hostages that he should give up all his castles; some he gave up and some gave he not, and did then worse than before.”[974] But among the castles which Ralf did give up for the sake of regaining his freedom was that which Stephen valued most--Lincoln.[975] Then at last the king felt that his enemies were at his feet; and he resolved that the city which had beheld his worst overthrow should also behold his highest triumph. In defiance of an old superstition which forbade any English king to appear in regal state within the walls of Lincoln, he kept his midwinter feast there with a splendour which had been unknown for years, and wore his crown at high mass in the minster on Christmas-day.[976]

[964] Ib. p. 111.

[965] Will. Newb., l. i. cc. 11, 12 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 46–48). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 104. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 22 (Arnold, p. 277).

[966] “Dicebaturque a laborantibus piis ‘Exsurge, quare obdormis, Domine?’ At postquam ... ‘excitatus est,’ ut ait propheta, ‘tanquam dormiens Dominus, et percussit inimicos Suos in posteriora.’” Will. Newb., l. i. c. 11 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 45). “Quia igitur improbi dixerunt Deum dormire, excitatus est Deus.” Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 22 (Arnold, p. 227)--two different interpretations of the Chronicler’s phrase, “men said openly that Christ slept, and His hallows.”

[967] Under William of Chamai, “civitatis Oxenefordiæ præses, regalisque militiæ dux et assignator.” Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 112. This seems to mean that he was the king’s constable--an office which had apparently gone with the command of Oxford castle ever since the Norman conquest.

[968] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 112–114. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 23 (Arnold, p. 278). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 13 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 48).

[969] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 116.

[970] Eng. Chron. a. 1140. The real date must be 1146, as given by Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 24 (Arnold, p. 279).

[971] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 115. Hen. Hunt. as above. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 129, 130.

[972] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 115, 116.

[973] Ib. pp. 121–123. Cf. Hen. Hunt. as above.

[974] Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

[975] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 123, 124. Hen. Hunt. as above. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 13 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 49).

[976] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 25 (Arnold, p. 279). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 18 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 57). Compare the different tone of the two writers.

The hour of Stephen’s exultation over Matilda in England was the hour of her husband’s complete triumph on the other side of the Channel. In the seven years which had gone by since they parted, the count of Anjou had really achieved far more than his wife. As soon as he heard of Stephen’s capture, early in 1141, Geoffrey again summoned the Norman barons to give up their castles and submit to his authority in peace. They held a meeting at Mortagne in the middle of Lent to consider their answer; despairing of Stephen, yet still unwilling to accept Geoffrey, they fell back upon their original scheme and once more besought Theobald of Blois to come and take possession of both duchy and kingdom. Theobald refused the impossible task; but, thinking like every one else that all was over with Stephen, he undertook to arrange terms with Geoffrey for the pacification of both countries. Stephen’s claims, as king and duke, were to be given up to the Angevins on condition that they should set him at liberty and secure to him and his heirs the honours which he had held during his uncle’s lifetime; while to Theobald, as the price of his services in negotiating this settlement, Geoffrey was to restore the county of Tours.[977] The treaty however remained a dead letter; for one of the contracting parties had reckoned without his brother and the other without his wife, both of whom refused their consent. But it served Geoffrey’s purpose nevertheless. The twin earls of Meulan and Leicester, hitherto Stephen’s most active partizans, and the former of whom was after Robert of Gloucester the most influential man in Normandy, at once accepted the proposed terms as final and made their peace with Anjou.[978] Nearly a third part of the duchy followed their example. Mortagne had submitted already; Verneuil and Nonancourt soon did the like; in the last week of Lent Lisieux was surrendered by its bishop;[979] Falaise yielded shortly after;[980] and in a few weeks more the whole Roumois--that is, the district between the Seine and the Rille--except the capital itself, acknowledged Geoffrey as its master.[981]

[977] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 923.

[978] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 923. Cf. Rob. Torigni, a. 1141.

[979] Ord. Vit. as above. At this point we lose him.

[980] Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1141 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 34, 145).

[981] Rob. Torigni, a. 1141.

All this happened while the Empress was in full career of success in England. There, however, as we have seen, summer and autumn undid the work of spring; the news of Matilda’s triumph were quickly followed by those of her fall, of her brother’s capture, of his release in exchange for Stephen, and finally, at Whitsuntide 1142, by the visit of Earl Robert himself to entreat that Geoffrey would come and help his wife to reconquer her father’s kingdom. Geoffrey’s views of statecraft were perhaps neither very wide nor very lofty; but his political instinct was quicker and more practical than that of either his wife or her brother. He saw that they had lost their hold upon England; he knew that he had at last secured a hold upon Normandy; and he resolved that no temptation from over sea should induce him to let it go. Instead of helping Robert to conquer the kingdom, he determined to make Robert help him to conquer the duchy. He represented that it was impossible for him to leave matters there in their present unsatisfactory condition; if the earl really wanted him in England, he must first help him in bringing Normandy to order. Thereupon Robert, finding that he could get no other answer, agreed to join his brother-in-law in a campaign which occupied them both until the end of the year.[982] The central part of Normandy, from Nonancourt and Lisieux on the east to a line marked by the course of the Orne on the west, and from the Cenomannian border up to Caen, was already in Geoffrey’s power; he had in fact inserted a big wedge into the middle of the duchy. To gain its western side was the object of the present expedition. The brothers-in-law seem to have started from Robert’s native Caen, and their first success was probably the taking of Bastebourg--Bastebourg above the ford of Varaville, whose name recalls an earlier time and another Geoffrey of Anjou. Then the expedition moved south-westward from Caen through the diocese of Bayeux and up the left bank of the Orne to Villers, Aunay, Plessis and Vire, till it reached and won the already historic site of Tinchebray, on the north-eastern frontier of Stephen’s old county of Mortain.[983] The town and castle of Mortain, and the whole county, with the fortresses of Le Teilleul and St.-Hilaire, were speedily won.[984] Geoffrey marched on to Pontorson, the south-western outpost of the Norman duchy, close upon the Breton frontier, at the bottom of a sandy bay guarded by the Mont-St.-Michel; warned by the general experience, the whole population, men and women, townsfolk and garrison, streamed out to welcome the conqueror as soon as he made his appearance. Thence he turned northward again, to Cérences in the Avranchin; and this place, too, surrendered without striking a blow.[985]

[982] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 70 (Hardy, p. 765).

[983] The story of this campaign, as told by the historians of the time, is little more than a list of the places taken, put together evidently at random, just as the names happened to come into the writer’s mind. Its real order must however have been somewhat as suggested above. The fullest list is in Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 70 (Hardy, p. 765): Tinchebray, St. Hilaire, “Brichesart,” Aunay, Bastebourg, “Trivères,” Vire, “Plaiseiz,” Villers, Mortain. Bastebourg lies quite apart from all the rest, and must have been the object of a distinct expedition from Caen. The other places would follow in geographical order. “Plaiseiz” may be either Plessis-Grimoult or Placy; “Brichesart” and “Trivères” are still to be accounted for. There is a Trévières about half-way between Bayeux and Isigny, but this is even farther away from all the other places than Bastebourg, and in an opposite direction. From Rob. Torigni (a. 1142) we get another list: Aunay, Mortain, Tinchebray, Cérences, Le Teilleul, all in the county of Mortain. The Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 295) names only Mortain and St. Hilaire. The Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg., a. 1142 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 35, 145), say Geoffrey won “castella plurima,” but specify only Mortain.

[984] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 295, 296. Rob. Torigni, a. 1142.

[985] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), pp. 296–298. The last-named place appears in Rob. Torigni, a. 1142, as “Cerences.” In the Hist. Gaufr. Ducis, as printed by M. Marchegay (p. 298), it is “Cerentias”; in the old editions it was “Carentias,” which the editors of Rer. Gall. Scriptt. rendered “Carentan.” “Cérences” is the rendering of M. Delisle (Rob. Torigni, vol. i. p. 226, note 2). It lies about half-way between Avranches and Coutances. There is a “Chérencé-le-Roussel” a few miles north-west of Mortain.

At this point the campaign of the count and the earl seems to have been interrupted by tidings of Stephen’s success and Matilda’s danger at Oxford. That Robert must go at once was clear; but that it would be wise for Geoffrey to accompany him was even more doubtful now than it had been six months ago. A substitute was found in the person of little Henry Fitz-Empress, who, if he could do nothing practically to help his mother’s cause and his own, at least ran no risk of damaging it by raising such a storm of ill-feeling as would probably have greeted the count of Anjou himself. While Robert and Henry sailed for England together, Geoffrey remained to finish his work in Normandy. Avranches, the next place which he threatened, made a ready submission; he took up his abode in the castle, and summoned the lords of all the fortresses in the Avranchin to come and do him homage, one after another. When they had all obeyed, he set himself to win the Cotentin. St.-Lô, which had been strongly fortified by the bishop of the diocese, surrendered after a three days’ siege. The victor advanced straight upon Coutances; the bishop was absent; no one else dared to offer resistance; Geoffrey simply marched into the city and took it. Thither, as at Avranches, he summoned the barons of the county to perform their homage, and they all obeyed except two brothers, Ralf and Richard of La Haye. Ralf was soon brought to submission; Richard flung himself with some two hundred knights into Cherbourg, a mighty fortress on a foundation of solid rock, guarded on one side by a belt of woodland full of wild beasts, and on the other by a bay whose advantages as a naval station have only been put to their full use in much later times. A siege of Cherbourg was likely to be a lengthy, troublesome and costly undertaking. But such a siege was of all military operations that in which Geoffrey most excelled and most delighted. He had little sympathy with the downright hand-to-hand fighting by which Fulk Nerra had won his spurs at Conquereux, or Fulk V. had repulsed Theobald and Stephen before Alençon, or Stephen had put his very captors to shame beneath the walls of Lincoln. Engineering was Geoffrey’s favourite science; in its developement he spared neither labour nor expense; and he now brought up against Cherbourg such a formidable array of machines that Richard thought it prudent to slip away by sea, intending to go to England and ask help of King Stephen. He was however overtaken by pirates and carried away “among strange peoples”; and a rumour of his fate reaching the garrison whom he had left behind, they lost heart and made submission to the Angevin.[986] The whole duchy south and west of the Seine was now his,[987] except the one town of Vaudreuil; before the close of the year this, too, was won, and the Angevin power even advanced beyond the river, for “Walter Giffard and all the people of the Pays de Caux made agreement with Count Geoffrey.”[988] The Norman capital now stood out alone against the Angevin conqueror of Normandy, as Tours had once stood out alone against the conqueror of Touraine. In January 1144 Geoffrey crossed the Seine at Vernon and pitched his camp at La Trinité-du-Mont, close to the walls of Rouen.[989] Next day the citizens opened their gates, and conducted him in solemn procession to the cathedral church.[990] The castle was still held against him by some followers of the earl of Warren;[991] the barons, headed by Waleran of Meulan, came to help him in besieging it, but neither their valour nor his machines were of any avail, and it was not till a three months’ blockade had reduced the garrison to the last straits of hunger that the citadel of Rouen was given up on S. George’s day.[992]

[986] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 298–301. The year, 1143, is given by Rob. Torigni.

[987] Chronn. S. Serg. and S. Albin. a. 1143 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 35, 146). The Chron. S. Flor. Salm. (ib. p. 191) ventures to say in 1142: “Goffredus Comes totam Normanniam adquirit hoc anno, iii. octabarum Paschæ, x. kalendas maii.” This is the true date for the Wednesday in Easter week, 1142, but the fact is placed two years too early.

[988] Rob. Torigni, a. 1143.

[989] Ib. a. 1144.

[990] Chron. Rotom. a. 1144 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 785); Rob. Torigni, a. 1144. The former makes the day January 19; the latter, January 20.

[991] Rob. Torigni, as above.

[992] Chron. Rotom. a. 1144 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 785); Rob. Torigni, a. 1144.

Allies offered themselves readily now to help in the little that remained to be done; foremost among them was the overlord of Normandy, the young King Louis VII. of France. All was changed since the days when his father, Louis VI., had granted the investiture of Normandy to Stephen’s little son. The inveterate enmity between the house of Blois and the French Crown had broken out afresh, in a new and most disastrous form, between Count Theobald and the young king; Louis fell back upon the traditional policy of his forefathers and gladly embraced the Angevin alliance against all the branches of the house of Blois on both sides of the sea. Thus when Geoffrey, after composing matters as well as he could at Rouen, mustered his forces to subdue the few still outstanding castles, he was joined at once by his own brother-in-law Theodoric of Flanders and by the king of France. Driencourt was the first place won by their united hosts; then Lions-la-Forêt--the old hunting-seat where King Henry had died--was given up by Hugh of Gournay;[993] the rest of the castles beyond Seine were quickly won, and then Geoffrey was master of the whole Norman duchy,[994] save one fortress, Arques, which a Fleming called William the Monk held so pertinaciously for Stephen that the Angevin was obliged to leave a body of troops before the place and go home without waiting to finish the siege in person.[995] Next summer the “monk” was shot dead by a chance arrow, and the surrender of Arques completed Geoffrey’s conquest of Normandy.[996] He made no pretence of holding it in the name of either his wife or his son; it was his own by right of conquest, and that right was formally acknowledged by the king of France. Before they parted in 1144 Louis granted to Geoffrey the investiture of the whole Norman duchy, save one spot which he claimed as the price of his favour:--the old bone of contention, Gisors.[997]

[993] Rob. Torigni, a. 1144. Driencourt is now known as Neufchâtel-en-Bray.

[994] Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1144 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 35, 146); Chronn. S. Michael. and S. Steph. Cadom. a. 1144 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. pp. 773, 780).

[995] Rob. Torigni, a. 1144. “Willermus Monachus Flandrensis”--can he have been really a monk?

[996] Rob. Torigni, a. 1145.

[997] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 282.

The Angevin conqueror had been called home by a revolt among his own barons.[998] The leader was, as before, Robert of Sablé;[999] but there was worse to come. Geoffrey’s brother Elias was persuaded by the rebels to put forth a claim to the county of Maine and uphold his pretension by force of arms. Geoffrey defeated him, took him prisoner, and put him in ward at Tours,[1000] where he remained five years, and whence he was released only to die of the effects of his imprisonment.[1001] The revolt failed as all previous revolts against Geoffrey had failed; the count swooped down upon Robert and his accomplices with such irresistible energy that they were utterly confounded and made submission at once.[1002] Undisputed master from the Poitevin border to the English Channel, Geoffrey once more cast his eyes across the sea, not with any thought of joining his wife in her desperate venture, but with an uneasy longing to get his heir safe out of the entanglement of a losing cause and bring him home to share in his own triumph. He therefore sent envoys to Earl Robert, begging that Henry might be allowed to come and see him, if only for a short time. The request was at once granted, and by Ascension-tide 1147 the boy was again at his father’s side.[1003] His uncle the earl of Gloucester had escorted him as far as Wareham;[1004] there they parted, as it turned out, for the last time. Robert caught a fever and died at Bristol early in the following November.[1005] Then at last the Empress herself felt that all was lost. Her last faint chance had expired with the wise and valiant brother whose patient devotion she had never fully appreciated until it was too late. In the early spring of 1148 she gave up the struggle and followed her son back to Normandy, to live thenceforth in peace by her husband’s side;[1006] while the knot which the sword had failed to cut was left to be slowly disentangled by more skilful hands which had long been preparing for their task.

[998] Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1145 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 35, 146).

[999] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), p. 269.

[1000] Ibid. Gesta Cons. (ibid.), p. 155.

[1001] Gesta Cons. as above. The Chron. Vindoc. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 173), gives the date, 1150. Cf. Chron. Tur. Magn. a. 1110 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 131).

[1002] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 270–272. It is here that the writer places the building of Châteauneuf-sur-Sarthe (see above, p. 267). In connexion with this affair he gives an amusing reason for the warlike habits of the Angevins: “Antiquitus nempe Andegavenses præliandi consuetudinem habebant, forsan, ut puto, a Deo sibi permissum, ne per otium pejoribus inimicis expugnarentur, moribus scilicet vitiosis.” Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), pp. 270, 271.

[1003] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 131. Rob. Torigni, a. 1147.

[1004] Gerv. Cant. as above.

[1005] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 131. Gervase is not clear about the year, which we learn from Ann. Tewkesb. a. 1147 (Luard, Ann. Monast. vol. i. p. 47), and from Ann. Cantuar. a. 1147 (Liebermann, Geschichtsquellen, p. 6). The place is given in Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 132.

[1006] Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 133--dated a year too early.

NOTE.

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLE OF LINCOLN.

The topography of the battle of Lincoln is a very puzzling matter. We have two sources of information, and it seems impossible to make them agree. The questions to be solved are two: 1. Which way did Robert and Ralf approach the city? 2. Where was the battle actually fought?

1. The first question lies between William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon. William (Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 39, 40; Hardy, p. 741) says distinctly that the main army started from Gloucester; that Ralf and his troops joined them somewhere on the road; that Stephen, hearing of their approach, left off besieging the castle and went forth to meet them; and that on Candlemas day they arrived “ad flumen quod inter duos exercitus præterfluebat, Trenta nomine, quod et ortu suo et pluviarum profluvio tam magnum fuerat ut nullatenus vado transitum præberet.” He then gives the story of the crossing. Henry of Huntingdon (l. viii. c. 13; Arnold, p. 268) describes the crossing much in the same way, except that the “consul audacissimus” to whom he attributes the first plunge seems to be Ralf, whereas in William’s version Robert is the hero. But Henry makes no mention of the Trent; in his story the plunge is into “paludem pœne intransibilem.”

For both these versions there is something to be said. The authority of the two witnesses is very evenly balanced. Chronologically, both are equally near to their subject. Geographically, the archdeacon of Huntingdon is nearer than the librarian of Malmesbury; but he is not a whit more likely to have been personally present; and if Henry may have got his information from Bishop Alexander, William may just as probably have got his from Earl Robert himself. The question therefore becomes one of the intrinsic probability of the two stories. Here again there is something to be said for William; for although the most direct and obvious road from Gloucester to Lincoln would undoubtedly be the Foss-Way, along the eastern side of the Trent valley, yet it is possible that the earls might have chosen a more unusual route along its western side, just because it would seem less likely to their enemies. Yet we can hardly accept William’s version; for the fording of the Trent, especially in winter, and when its waters were--as he himself tells us--swollen with heavy rains, would be little short of a physical impossibility. At the origin of his mistake (or of Earl Robert’s, for it must surely have been Robert who told him the story) we may perhaps be able to guess. The writer of the Gesta Stephani (Sewell, p. 71) says nothing of either river or marsh; the only thing which he mentions is a ford, of whose whereabouts he gives no indication whatever. “Cumque fortissimam ... [Stephanus] præmississet cohortem in exitu cujusdam vadi eis ad obsistendum, illi ... cum violentiâ in ipsos irruentes vadum occupaverunt.” Now, if the earls had followed the Foss-Way quite up to Lincoln, it would have brought them not to any ford, but to the bridge over the Witham, leading directly into the city by the south gate. But the city was bitterly hostile to them; had they attempted to pass through it to reach the castle, they must have cut their way through a crowd of enemies. There was however another and a much more practicable route open to them. Some little distance to westward of the bridge, the Witham at its junction with the Foss-Dyke expands into a broad sheet of water known by the name of Brayford. The kindness of the Rev. Precentor Venables has enabled me to ascertain that half way between the bridge and Brayford Head (i.e. the eastern end of this sheet of water) there still exists in the bed of the river a well-paved ford road, probably of Roman origin. By this ford the army could cross the river and advance towards the castle without entering the town at all; and I feel little doubt that this was the ford at which Stephen posted the guard mentioned by his biographer, and across which the two earls swam with their followers. In that case William of Malmesbury’s mistake as to the name of the river is not surprising. The Foss-Dyke unites the Witham and the Trent; a medieval geographer could hardly be expected to know accurately where the one ended and the other began. Out of the three names so closely connected, he not unnaturally chose the one most generally known, and concluded the whole water-way under the comprehensive name of Trent; while on the other hand, the overflowing of dyke and river may quite sufficiently account for Henry of Huntingdon having described them and the flooded ground on each side of them all together as an “almost impassable marsh.”

2. Local tradition persists in asserting that the battle was fought to the north of the city, somewhere beyond the New Port. If this was so, Stephen must have led his troops out of the city by the old Roman way--the Ermine Street--through the New Port, and drawn them up on the plateau formed by the top of the range of hills whose southern extremity is occupied by the city itself; and his enemies, after crossing the water, must have marched all round the south-western foot of the hill, below the castle, and then climbed the western slope to meet Stephen on the top. Such a manœuvre is doubtless possible; but it hardly seems to agree with the indications--provokingly few and slight though they are--given us by the historians. None of them indeed tells us which way Stephen went forth; the nearest approach to a clear statement is that of his own biographer, who says “extra civitatem obvius eis audacter occurrit” (Gesta Steph. as above). Now marching up northward can hardly be called “going forth boldly to meet” an enemy who was coming from the south-west. The tradition in fact is in itself very improbable, and has no evidence to support it. In 1881 I made two attempts at a personal examination of the topography, with the help of indications kindly furnished me by Precentor Venables. The result was as follows: The western wall of the castle-enclosure does not stretch to the extreme edge of the hill; beyond it lies a part of the plateau, now occupied by the County Asylum, and marked by Stukeley as the site of Stephen’s encampment. Stukeley was probably misled by the circumstance that an adjoining bit of ground was called “Battle-piece”--a name which is now known to have been derived not from any battle fought there, but from the place having been set apart for trials by battle. But farther to the west there lies at the foot of the ridge a tract of comparatively level ground, rising slightly on the one side to join the slope of the hill, and on the other gradually sinking into the lower land which spreads to the bank of the Trent. This tract--part of it is now a race-course--seems to be really the only place in which it is possible for the two armies to have met. The ground immediately south of the castle, between its outer wall and the northern bank of the Foss-Dyke, is too steep to allow of anything like a pitched battle between two formally-arrayed armies. The earls after crossing the ford could hardly do anything but lead their troops round the foot of the hill, to draw them up at last on the western side of the level tract above described. Stephen, on the other hand, could hardly have chosen a better post for defence than its eastern side, with the ridge of the hill at his back.

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