APPENDIX B.
THE APPEAL TO ROME IN 1136.
(See p. [8].)
One of the most interesting and curious discoveries that I have made in the course of my researches has been the true story of the appeal to Rome as arbiter between Stephen and Maud. Considering the exceptional importance of this episode, in many ways, it has received strangely little attention, with the result that it has been imperfectly understood and almost incredibly misdated.
Mr. Freeman, working, in the Norman Conquest, from the Historia Pontificalis,[748] writes of this episode as taking place on and in consequence of Stephen's attempt to secure the coronation of Eustace in 1152.[749] Miss Norgate has gone into the matter far more fully than Mr. Freeman, but at first assigned the debate described in the Historia Pontificalis to "1151."[750]
In so doing, she was guided merely by the Historia passage itself, which she did not connect, as did Mr. Freeman, with the episode of the proposed coronation in 1152. But on investigating the matter more closely, she was clearly led to reject the date she had first given:—
"From the way in which the trial is brought into the Historia Pontificalis, it would at first sight seem to have taken place in 1151. But the presence of Bishop Ulger of Angers and Roger of Chester, both of whom died in 1149, and the account of the proceedings written by Gilbert Foliot to Brian fitz Count, clearly prove the true date to be 1148."[751]
As to the time of the bishop's death, Roger died, not in 1149, but in April, 1148, and at Antioch, so that the chronology is no less fatal to Miss Norgate's date than to Mr. Freeman's own. But the additional evidence she obtains from Gilbert Foliot's letter requires a special examination.
The sequence of events at which she arrives is this:—
(1) Theobald goes, in defiance of Stephen, to the council convened at Rheims by Eugenius III. for Mid-Lent Sunday, (March) 1148 (N.S.).
(2) Stephen forfeits Theobald, and is threatened in consequence by the Pope.