CHAPTER 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.

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]

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.

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]