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]

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]

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]

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]

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]