King Stephen and The Anarchy

Civil War and Military Tactics in Twelfth-Century Britain

Chris Peers

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781473863675
• eBook ISBN: 9781473863699
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

"[The] epic story of the struggle for the throne and the woman who was almost the first queen of England . . . historically accurate . . . entertaining." — Tudor History
The Anarchy, the protracted struggle between Stephen of Blois and the Empress Matilda for the English crown between 1135 and 1154, is often seen as a disastrous breakdown in one of the best-governed kingdoms of medieval Europe. But perhaps the impact of the conflict has been overstated, and its effect on the common people across the country is hard to judge. That is why Chris Peers's fresh study of this fascinating and controversial era is of such value. He describes each phase of this civil war, in particular the castles and sieges that dominated strategic thinking, and he sets the fighting in the context of the changing tactics and military systems of the twelfth century. His fresh account of this pivotal episode in the medieval history of England will be absorbing reading for anyone who is keen to gain an insight into this period of English history and has a special interest in the practice of medieval warfare.
"Brings alive a fascinating period when chivalry and the church reduced battlefield fighting to a necessary minimum . . . a good story, well told." — Clash of Steel

Chapter 1

Stephen and the English Succession

When William the Conqueror died in 1087 he was succeeded on the throne of England, not by his eldest son Robert ‘Curthose’, but by his second son, William II ‘Rufus’. The laws of succession were less rigid at that time than they were to become in later centuries, and it was acceptable for a monarch to choose as his heir any member of his family who showed the necessary ability. William I had quarrelled with Robert, and hoped that he would be satisfied with the consolation prize of the Duchy of Normandy. In the event Robert unsuccessfully challenged Rufus for the throne, and was to do so again in the reign of Rufus’ successor, Henry I. When Rufus died in 1100, in what was alleged to be a hunting accident in the New Forest, the Conqueror’s third son Henry happened to be nearby, and seized his opportunity with decisive speed. He rode at once to Winchester, where he seized the treasury, and then on to Westminster, where he had himself crowned before Robert could mobilize his supporters. Henry also attempted to legitimize his rule in the eyes of the English themselves, as well as his Scottish neighbours, by marrying Edith, the daughter of King Malcolm and Queen Margaret of Scotland, who through her mother was a descendant of Anglo-Saxon royalty – a move which obviously improved relations between the two kingdoms, but was to give rise to unexpected problems after Henry’s death. It appears that Edith – who once she arrived in England took the throne name of Queen Matilda – had once lived with her aunt in an English nunnery, where she had disguised herself in a nun’s veil to escape the unwanted attentions of certain Norman knights. Consequently, although she had never taken a nun’s vows, it was widely rumoured that she had done so. This of course would have made her subsequent marriage invalid, and provided a convenient excuse for some who later wished to claim that her and Henry’s children were illegitimate. (The reader will soon notice the remarkable lack of variety in women’s names in this period. Henry I, his successor Stephen, and their contemporary David I of Scotland, were all married to queens named Matilda. None of these should be confused with Henry’s daughter [and Stephen’s cousin] Matilda, whose first marriage was to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, and so is generally referred to, even after his death, as the Empress. William the Conqueror’s wife, Stephen’s grandmother, had also been a Matilda. Several others appear in minor roles in the story. Men’s names are slightly more varied, but Williams, Henrys and Roberts all recur frequently enough to risk causing confusion. The appendix on ‘Who Was Who in the Anarchy’ on pages 157–72 may help to clarify matters.) Meanwhile Robert Curthose, politically outmanoeuvred, resorted once again to armed force, but in 1106 he was captured by his brother at the Battle of Tinchebrai in Normandy. Henry, who had now reunited England and Normandy under his own rule, kept him in prison for the rest of his life.

Most writers on the subject have traced the origins of the troubles of Stephen’s reign to the death of Henry I’s heir – and only legitimate son – William in 1120. Henry was returning to England with his fleet after a successful campaign against the French, but one vessel, the Blanche Nef or White Ship belonging to Thomas fitz Stephen, who claimed that his father had ferried the Conqueror to England in 1066, started later than the others. Although exceptionally large, this ship must have closely resembled those illustrated on the Bayeux Tapestry – basically a Viking longship, propelled by both sail and oars. On board were about 300 of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, including William and two of the king’s numerous illegitimate children, Richard and Matilda. They were mostly young, and were said to have become drunk and disorderly, even jeering at some priests who came to bless the voyage. According to the chronicler Orderic Vitalis they forced Thomas fitz Stephen and his crew to row as fast as they could to overtake the king’s party; the master, crew and helmsman were also accused of being drunk, though as none of the chroniclers were eyewitnesses this must have been guesswork. In any case the ship struck a rock and capsized, and even though the disaster occurred within earshot of the shore and the king’s ships, only one man of all those on board survived. It was November, and although the weather was fine the water must have been very cold. We are told that Thomas fitz Stephen almost lived long enough to be rescued, but on being told that Prince William was among the missing he deliberately chose death by drowning. He was probably wise. King Henry, when his courtiers found the courage to tell him, was devastated. For the kingdom, as well as for Henry personally, this was a terrible loss. But more important for the fate of England in the long term were the people who had survived. William’s wife, Matilda of Anjou, was travelling on another ship, but the couple had been married for little more than a year, and they had as yet no children of their own. She never remarried and eventually became a nun. Henry’s legitimate daughter, Matilda, was safe in Germany with her husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V. Another prominent member of the royal family, the king’s nephew Stephen of Blois, along with some of his companions, had disembarked from the White Ship at the last moment, though his sister Lucia, who was married to the Earl of Chester, was drowned. According to Orderic Stephen was unwell, but a number of monks had gone ashore at the same time, and it may have been obvious to anyone who had remained sober that the vessel was heading for trouble.

Stephen was the son of Count Stephen-Henry of Blois and his wife Adela, who was the sister of Henry I of England. Stephen-Henry had been one of the most powerful magnates of his day, but his career was a chequered one. He had been one of the leaders of the First Crusade, but had deserted at the Siege of Antioch in 1098 and returned home with premature tales of the crusaders’ defeat. When his former comrades went on to beat the Turks and capture Jerusalem, Stephen-Henry faced disgrace, but was persuaded by his wife to return to the Holy Land in an attempt to redeem his reputation. He was killed fighting bravely at the Second Battle of Ramla in 1102. Stephen’s older brother Theobald became Count of Blois, and Stephen was sent to the court of his uncle Henry I to be educated. As a grandson of William the Conqueror he was by no means an outsider, and in fact was a great favourite of the king, who granted him, among other lands and honours, the County of Mortain on the western border of Normandy. In 1125 Stephen married Matilda, the daughter of Count Eustace III of Boulogne, through whom he inherited the title of Count of Boulogne on the death of her father. This Matilda was also a woman of strong character and considerable political and diplomatic ability, whose support was later to be vital to Stephen’s kingship. The couple had three children who died in infancy, and three who survived to adulthood. The oldest of these, Eustace, eventually became his father’s heir to the throne of England.

Henry never fully recovered from his grief at the loss of his son and, it was said, never smiled again. But he was well aware that despite the personal tragedy he needed to take steps to ensure a peaceful succession. William would have been in many ways the ideal king; he was descended not only from the Conqueror but, through his mother Queen Matilda, from the Anglo-Saxon and Scottish royal houses as well. But there would be no more such heirs, as the queen had died two years earlier. Henry did marry again, to Adeliza of Louvain, but this marriage produced no offspring. William of Malmesbury assures us that the numerous extra-marital affairs for which the king was notorious were carried on not for pleasure but ‘for the sake of issue’, but his twenty or so illegitimate children could not be considered for the succession even by the relatively flexible rules of the twelfth century. When his son-in-law the Holy Roman Emperor died in 1125, it must have seemed to Henry as though his problems had been solved. He recalled the widowed Empress Matilda to Normandy, and persuaded his barons to take an oath to support her claim to the throne on his death. The implication of this oath, which was followed by several others in the same vein over the next few years, is that the accession of a woman, while legal, was sufficiently controversial to require careful preparation. One of the signatories, Bishop Roger of Salisbury, later stated that he had sworn only on condition that Henry would not arrange another marriage for Matilda without the barons’ consent. The logic of this is obvious; monarchs in this period had an indispensable role as military commanders, which no one would have considered appropriate for a woman. Therefore, by agreeing to support Matilda, the barons were also committing themselves to fight under the command of any future consort that she might have. So when, in 1128, Henry married her off to Geoffrey, the 15-year-old son of Count Fulk V of Anjou, some of those who had taken the oath may well have felt that they had been tricked. An alliance with the County of Anjou, which was situated on Normandy’s southern border, against their mutual enemy the French was always an important policy objective for Henry, who had arranged the shortlived marriage of his son William to Fulk’s daughter Matilda ten years before. Modern writers often refer to the Empress Matilda’s party in the war with Stephen as ‘the Angevins’, and this convention is occasionally followed here for convenience. But it is really applicable only with hindsight, as the struggle led eventually to the succession of Matilda and Geoffrey’s son Henry as King of England as well as Count of Anjou. The Norman nobility regarded the Angevins as traditional rivals, and it is likely that at the time the marriage reduced rather than enhanced the Empress Matilda’s appeal as a future queen. In fact the couple were not particularly happy, and not long after the wedding Matilda left Geoffrey and returned to Normandy, where she remained until 1131. In September of that year Henry arranged a reconciliation, but the couple’s first child, Henry Plantagenet, was not born until about 1133.

It is highly likely that King Henry, who was well aware of the unpopularity of his daughter’s marriage, was hoping that by the time he died his grandson and namesake would be old enough to rule, perhaps with his mother acting as regent. But by this time the king himself did not have long to live. He spent the last three years of his reign in Normandy – distracted, according to the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, by ‘various disputes’ involving Matilda and Geoffrey, which so annoyed him that some people suggested that they had helped to undermine his health. William of Malmesbury concurs that Geoffrey had threatened and insulted the king. The latter was in any case 67 years old, a considerable age for the time, and had endured a hard life of constant travel and campaigning. The Huntingdon chronicler tells how towards the end of November 1135 the king went hunting in the Forest of Lyons near Rouen, and on his return ate a dish of lampreys, a food which he enjoyed but which his doctors had warned him to avoid. This stirred up a ‘destructive humour’ and gave him a chill, followed by a fever, of which he died on 1 December. This story has become very well known, but Henry of Huntingdon is the only contemporary chronicler to implicate the lampreys, which were a popular dish among the medieval upper classes, and are still eaten today without ill effects. William of Malmesbury quotes a letter sent to the Pope by Archbishop Hugh of Rouen, who was present at the death, and who mentions only a ‘sudden illness’. Whatever the fatal affliction was it allowed the king time to make his peace with God and his preparations for the succession. The Archbishop also said that, in front of witnesses including his son Robert of Gloucester and Hugh himself, Henry had ‘assigned all his lands on both sides of the sea to his daughter in lawful and lasting succession’.

It seems likely that he had made some pronouncement on the subject, because a peaceful and uninterrupted succession was vital for the prosperity of the kingdom. According to the account in the Gesta Stephani, it was only the tough personality of King Henry that had kept the turbulent population of England in line so far. Now suddenly the country, ‘formerly the seat of justice, the habitation of peace, the height of piety,’ became ‘a home of perversity, a haunt of strife, a training-ground of disorder, and a teacher of every kind of rebellion … each man, seized by a strange passion for violence, raged cruelly against his neighbour and reckoned himself the more glorious the more guiltily he attacked the innocent’. The modern historian will look for more convincing reasons for the outbreak of disorder than the removal of the influence of a single man, and we should be aware that for the author of the Gesta, concerned to establish Stephen as a rightful king, it was desirable to exaggerate the chaos which preceded his seizure of power. Nevertheless, it is clear that people did have grievances which they hoped to resolve before a successor could impose his own rule. Henry of Huntingdon attempts to give a balanced account of the character of the late king, admitting that many people admired him for his wisdom, his wealth and his military skill, but that others recalled his greed, which led him to impose excessive taxes, his cruelty to his opponents, and his extra-marital affairs. He comments on the fate of the man hired to extract Henry’s brain as part of the embalming process, who despite all his precautions caught a fatal infection from the decaying corpse, that ‘he was the last of many whom King Henry put to death’. But, the chronicler concludes, all ought to admit that the king’s firm rule had brought peace, and that the events which followed his death were worse than any of his tyrannies.

That, however, was hindsight. On the face of things Henry’s daughter Matilda was the obvious successor, being her father’s nominee as well as – the rumours about her validity of her parents’ marriage notwithstanding – his only surviving legitimate child. But no succession in this period was ever straightforward. As we have seen, there was a dispute over the throne after the death of each of the first three Norman kings. And in contrast to the situation in 1100, when the news of the old king’s death became known at the end of 1135 none of the possible contenders for the English throne was actually in England. Matilda and her husband were living in Anjou. Much closer was Henry’s nephew Stephen, whose county of Boulogne was just across the Channel and furthermore had close trading links with London. Other possible candidates included Stephen’s older brother Theobald, Count of Blois, and Henry’s illegitimate son Earl Robert of Gloucester, but both rejected the urgings of their supporters; Theobald already had extensive commitments on the Continent, while Robert, no doubt aware that his illegitimacy would be an insuperable obstacle in the eyes of the Church, preferred to support the cause of his half-sister Matilda. It is interesting to speculate on whether Robert Curthose might have revived his claim for the third time, but he had died in prison at Gloucester only the year before. Stories soon began to circulate that the old king had changed his mind on his deathbed and disinherited Matilda. This must have seemed plausible to many, as it was common knowledge that he disliked her husband – even William of Malmesbury admits as much. An East Anglian baron named Hugh Bigod, whose treachery was later to become notorious, even swore on oath, along with two other knights, that he had heard Henry name Stephen as his preferred heir and release those who had sworn to support Matilda from their oaths. Modern commentators, like Stephen’s contemporaries, disagree about whether Hugh’s claim can be believed. David Crouch and Jim Bradbury suggest that it can, pointing to the fact that the Archbishop of Rouen among others in Henry’s inner circle seems to have believed it, and in fact later argued Stephen’s case before the Pope. Bradbury also points out that there is no evidence that Hugh ever made any deal with Stephen or received any reward from him – though of course he might have expected one even in the absence of a prior agreement to that effect. To Chibnall all these tales are ‘later justifications’ for what amounted to a coup d’état, and it is possible to concur without necessarily regarding Stephen’s grab for the throne as treacherous or unprincipled. In Edmund King’s view Hugh Bigod’s testimony was useful to Stephen, but hardly decisive, since most people accepted that the original oaths that the barons had sworn to Matilda had been made under duress and so were not legally binding.

The real reason for Stephen’s success is that he was the first to move, and that – like his predecessor Henry – he moved quickly and ruthlessly. Crouch argues that he must have had a plan already in place in anticipation of Henry’s demise, and was acting with the support of his brother Theobald, who must have feared that if Matilda and Geoffrey secured England and Normandy his county of Blois would be encircled by a huge Angevin power bloc. As soon as the news of Henry’s death reached him, Stephen set sail from Wissant in the Pas de Calais, taking with him only a small group of knights, as he did not wish to delay the enterprise while he collected an army. We are not told exactly where he landed in England, but he rode swiftly to London, where the relieved citizens greeted him with joy and acclaimed him king. The Gesta Stephani says that an agreement was made according to which the Londoners would support him as long as he lived in return for his promise of protection. According to the same source the citizens actually claimed the traditional privilege of appointing a successor to the throne, and although it is unlikely that this privilege was recognized outside the city, or even universally inside it, it is equally unlikely that Stephen was disposed to dispute it. He quickly cemented his position by taking action against a band of pillagers who were raiding the surrounding countryside under the leadership of a man who once been King Henry’s doorkeeper. Stephen now had under his command not only the militia of London but a large number of knights who had flocked to join him, and with this force he killed or captured many of the bandits, bringing their ringleader back in chains to be hanged. Stephen then led his growing army to Winchester, where he was welcomed by his younger brother Henry, who was the bishop there. It was, says the Gesta, Bishop Henry who persuaded an initially reluctant William de Pont de l’Arche, the former king’s treasurer, to hand over the keys of the castle and the treasury which it contained. This was a particularly important gain as Henry I, though often criticised by his enemies as a grasping miser, had at least left the treasury full. Bishop Henry also negotiated the support of Archbishop William of Canterbury in exchange for a promise from Stephen to restore and uphold the privileges of the Church. So on 22 December 1135 Stephen was anointed by the Archbishop and proclaimed King of England. Henry I had been dead for little more than three weeks.

William of Malmesbury emphasizes that the ceremony was poorly attended, with few nobles, no abbots and only three bishops present – those of Canterbury, Winchester and Salisbury. Given the speed of Stephen’s coup, however, this is not surprising. At Easter 1136 he held his court at Oxford, and there he received the allegiance of most of the English barons. The Gesta Stephani says that they accepted Stephen as king ‘gladly and respectfully’, although this may have been due largely to his generosity in giving gifts and grants of land – a course of action which had been followed by most of his predecessors, including Henry I. During this period he promised reforms in numerous areas, including forest law, the laws governing female inheritance, and the abolition of the Danegeld, a long-obsolete tax originally imposed to pay off Viking invaders. In the event none of these promises was kept, though this failure is more likely to have been a result, rather than a cause, of the civil strife that was to follow. Nevertheless, whatever the legality of the proceedings, the fact that Stephen had been anointed as king with the holy oil was not something that could be disregarded. Even at the lowest point of his fortunes, neither his bitterest opponents nor the least sympathetic among the chroniclers were ever able to argue that he was not the king. But above all, to most people in England, what mattered was not the technicalities of the succession but the desperate need for someone to impose their authority before the country fell further into anarchy. The author of the Gesta Stephani begins his account of the chaos which followed Henry’s death by telling how the ‘ferae’, the wild beasts, which had formerly swarmed in thousands, were rapidly exterminated, to the extent that it soon became a rare event to catch sight of one of the few survivors. There was more logic to this killing than might at first appear. Henry, like his Norman predecessors, had been very keen on hunting and had set aside large tracts of land for the preservation of deer, but most of these were not strictly wild animals at all. Parks and forests throughout the kingdom had been stocked with fallow deer, not a native species but a recent introduction from the Mediterranean, which were enclosed within fences and ditches and often artificially fed in winter. They were protected from poachers by the notorious forest laws which had been introduced by the Conqueror, and which according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle punished anyone who killed the king’s deer with blinding. Clearly the setting-aside of so much land for these animals had given rise to resentment, and being enclosed and semi-tame they made easy targets for anyone wishing to put the land to a different use, or simply looking for a source of free meat. It is possible that more exotic creatures might also have been caught up in the massacre, because we hear no more of the lions, leopards, lynxes and camels that Henry I had kept in semi-natural conditions in his walled park at Woodstock (James, 1990).

Then, says the Gesta, having wiped out the animals, the ‘English’ turned on each other. It is noteworthy, however, that there is no record of any organized uprising on the part of the people who might have been expected to be most oppressed by Henry and his laws. This is unlikely to be because the churchmen who wrote the histories of the times did not notice them; the sufferings of the common people are a common theme in their accounts. But this was an age long before any detectable national or class consciousness among the mass of the people. Most of the real ‘English’, the ordinary people at the bottom of the feudal pyramid, apparently accepted their lot. Although they may have shot a few deer for the pot, and there are isolated reports from Stephen’s reign of small parties of them attacking their social superiors if they could catch them at a disadvantage, we have no reason to suppose that they undertook any real armed resistance. This might at first seem surprising, but it is likely that the popular stereotype of downtrodden Anglo-Saxons harking back to a pre-conquest golden age under their own rulers owes more to nineteenth-century nationalist ideas, and to Walter Scott’s influential novel Ivanhoe, than to any evidence from the Middle Ages. It is true that Matthew Paris, writing in the thirteenth century, says that when the Anglo-Saxon nobility were deprived of their lands after 1066 they had taken to the forests and lived as outlaws: ‘Ashamed to beg, ignorant of how to dig, they and their sons and brothers took refuge in the woods. They robbed and they raided rapaciously, but only when they were lacking in game and other victuals.’ But this sounds more like a matter of personal survival than organized resistance. If th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Maps
• Prologue: A Dynasty of Conquerors
• Introduction: Scholars and Sources
• Chapter 1. Stephen and the English Succession
• Chapter 2. Disorder in the West Country
• Chapter 3. A ‘Land Full of Castles’
• Chapter 4. The Armies of England
• Chapter 5. Wales Liberated
• Chapter 6. Scotland Resurgent
• Chapter 7. The Battle of the Standard.
• Chapter 8. Matilda and Civil War in England
• Chapter 9. Lincoln and its Aftermath
• Chapter 10. Winchester and Oxford: The Turning Points
• Chapter 11. Personal Ambition and Private War
• Chapter 12. Succession and Anarchy in the North: Svein Asleifsson and the Earls of Orkney
• Chapter 13. Henry Plantagenet
• Conclusion: A Graveyard of Reputations?
• Who Was Who in the ‘Anarchy’
• Bibliography
• Plate section