The subtitle "New Interpretations" added to earlier Boydell omnibus volumes on Anglo-Norman Kings--those on Henry II edited by Christopher Harper-Hill and Nicholas Vincent and on John edited by S.D. Church--is absent in this case, and appropriately so. The collection of ten studies, which originated as papers presented at a conference at Liverpool Hope University in 2005 but have been updated for publication, isn't so much a radical break with previous scholarship as a contribution to a revisionist treatment of the reign of King Stephen that has been ongoing for decades. The general thrust of the articles concurs with doubts cast on the description of the reign as a period of anarchy by such notable nineteenth-century figures as Round and Stubbs--a characterization, based largely on chronicle testimony, that was routinely repeated, and largely unchallenged, from their time down to the biography by R.H.C. Davis that became standard following its publication forty years ago. [1] More recent researchers have increasingly focused on mounting a challenge to that straightforward but, in their opinion, oversimplified portrait of a complex era. [2] One can see the results of their efforts in newer overviews of the reign, which depict the king in far less critical terms and argue that the level of disorder during his rule has been greatly exaggerated. [3] Little wonder that one revisionist scholar mimicked the title of the famous article in which Edward Jenks rejected the anachronistic interpretation of Magna Carta that had prevailed until the twentieth century by describing the idea of an anarchy during the reign as a myth. [4]
The nineteen-year reign of Stephen of Blois was, of course, a period of conflict in England, occasioned by his decision to claim the throne following the death of his uncle Henry I. In taking this action, he challenged the succession of the late king's sole surviving child Matilda, the widow of the German emperor whom her father had remarried to a prospective champion, Count Geoffrey of Anjou, and to whom Henry had compelled his followers--including Stephen--to swear allegiance in 1127-28. The result was a war between him and his followers and Matilda's forces, led by her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, which dragged on for years. A settlement was achieved only in 1153, when Stephen recognized Henry Plantagenet, Matilda's son by Geoffrey, as his successor. According to the chronicles, mostly monastic in origin, the disorder and devastation that befell the land during this period was substantial and widespread, and Round, Stubbs and their followers therefore thought it accurate to refer to it as anarchy--placing blame for the situation on Stephen, whose weakness as a ruler left him unable to control the aristocracy that ravaged the kingdom. His inability to maintain order was in sharp contrast to his predecessor and his successor, both of whom curbed the nobles and thereby suppressed the chaos that feudal practice invited, perfecting a royal administration that showed the way to a strong, centralized regime. Stephen thus became an aberration in English history, an unhappy, but thankfully temporary, obstacle to the development of a form of government which, it was assumed in accordance with what is often termed the Whig interpretation of history, was England's political destiny.
The revisionists have challenged this view in terms of both evidence and conclusions. They asked whether the chroniclers could in fact be relied upon--whether the disorder of Stephen's reign had actually been as prevalent and unusual as they claimed. If not, they reasoned, it was an exaggeration to refer to the period as a time of anarchy. And some, inspired in part by Thomas N. Bisson's argument that a "feudal revolution" occurred in Europe during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, [5] have attributed it to an anachronistic misunderstanding of the political realities of the epoch, based on a flawed conception of the natural power relationships of a feudal age and an uncritical assumption that the concentration of authority under the crown represented an inevitable, and necessarily beneficial, process.
The present volume fits snugly into the revisionist argument, with most of the papers devoted to determining the extent of the disorder that prevailed in England during Stephen's reign. It begins with an introduction by Marjorie Chibnall, editor of the magisterial Oxford edition of the Ecclesiastical History of the Norman monk Ordericus Vitalis, one of the most important sources for the time, and herself the author of a fine study of Matilda. [6] She not only covers the major events of the reign but elegantly incorporates reference to the articles that follow, all in a mere nine pages.
The papers proper begin with a glance back at the events that preceded Stephen's accession by Judith A. Green, "Henry I and the Origins of the Civil War" (11-26). She demonstrates that during the fifteen-year period after the death of his son in 1120, and even after the birth of his grandson in 1133, Henry failed to make his wishes clear, particularly with respect to the precise roles to be assumed by the boy's parents in governance. Instead he kept all his options open through 1133, and then postponed making definitive arrangements, perhaps because of the press of other events, until his sudden fatal illness made it impossible for him to act. It was that lack of foresight, Green argues, that left a vacuum of which Stephen could take advantage, and one can hardly blame him for doing so.
Nonetheless, as David Crouch contends in "King Stephen and Northern France" (44-57), the new monarch can be criticized for his failure to take the steps that could have secured the throne early on and made it less likely for Matilda to raise a significant challenge to him. The crux of the matter centered not only on his failure to appreciate the importance of Normandy--demonstrated in his virtual abandonment of the duchy after a visit in 1137--but on his "blank incomprehension of the use of castles, which were the essential tools of medieval geopolitics." In these matters, Crouch believes, Stephen was distinctly inferior to Henry I and Louis VI of France, and also to his older brother Theobald, all of whom possessed "quite a sophisticated view of the geopolitics of their world" that was essential to devising coherent policy rather than merely reacting to events (57). In this view, it was Stephen's inability to see the big picture and make decisions accordingly that doomed his reign to disorder.
The nature and extent of that disorder are the particular subjects of three of the book's chapters. Graeme J. White, "Royal Income and Regional Trends" (27-43), uses the Pipe Rolls to investigate the economic realities of the time, particularly in terms of the royal administration's ability to raise the funds needed to finance military operations. Of course, since no Rolls survive from Stephen's reign, White must argue from inference, comparing the 1130 roll of Henry I to four from the reign of Henry II--those of 1156, 1164-65, 1176-77 and 1188-89--to try to discern the contours of the intervening period. (Those records are of special importance, of course, because the extensive mention of "wastage" in those of Henry II served as an important evidence for scholars who argue that there was anarchy during Stephen's time.) He concludes that the shires that Stephen controlled were by and large more lucrative than the areas of strong Angevin support, but he adds that it cannot be assumed that the king had the administrative ability to tap those resources very effectively. What is certain is that whatever the extent of damage during 1135-1153, it was quickly repaired under Henry II: there was "no lasting impact on the capacity of the kingdom to supply the royal treasury" (43). The effect is to minimize the extent of the destruction that occurred during Stephen's reign, which certainly supports White's belief that anarchy per se did not exist.
On the other hand, Hugh M. Thomas, "Violent Disorder in King Stephen's England: A Maximum Argument" (139-170), suggests that the effort to downplay the level of violence in England under Stephen has gone too far, and the chronicle evidence has been unduly dismissed. Thomas is quick to express agreement with many of the minimalist scholars' arguments and allows that the chroniclers were guilty of hyperbole, but he argues that to a large extent researchers have "sanitized the reign...[and] badly overcorrected" for the excesses of contemporary accounts. He combs through the sources to count incidents of various types of violence that were recorded during the reigns of Stephen and Henry II, and plots their occurrence on a series of maps to show that their number was far larger under Stephen, especially if one subtracts the figures for the periods of Henry's reign that were marked by rebellion. He adds that perhaps the time has come to return to the old topic of strong versus weak royal power, which could be resurrected without reverting to the admittedly problematic "statist" form of history that automatically portrays the rise of powerful monarchy as progress. Thomas' article stands out among those in the volume in the direct challenge it poses to what has become a new orthodoxy--the denial of the anarchy of King Stephen's reign. Even if it couches its conclusions in very respectful and limited terms, it actually represents an assault, however tentative, on the revisionism of the past forty years, a swing of the pendulum back to the moderate center of the spectrum--not to the extreme of anarchy but away from the notion that the anarchy should be dismissed as mere myth.
That shift is supported less directly by T.N. Bisson, "The Lure of Stephen's England: Tenserie, Flemings, and a Crisis of Circumstance" (171-81). Bisson, who formulated the thesis of a broad feudal revolution in the eleventh and twelfth centuries representing a resurgence of lordship against centralized monarchy, concentrates on a single practice that arose in England during Stephen's reign--a sort of protection racket that was said to be new to the realm. Using both philology and the historical record, Bisson argues that it was imported by ambitious, French-speaking Flemings who crossed the channel because the situation in England created opportunities for advancement unavailable on the continent. Though he makes it clear that his analysis is not meant to suggest that England was in fact experiencing anarchy, his study does show that there were new forms of disorder that attended Stephen's reign. The twist is that they were not unique to England, but must be situated in a broader geographical context as part of a movement encompassing much of western Europe.
Two of the papers take up the question of why the civil war dragged on so long and took so many curious turns. Edmund King, "A Week in Politics: Oxford, late July 1141" (58-79), uses charters as well as chronicle evidence to focus on a moment when the war might well have ended--the period following the capture of Stephen early in 1141, when Matilda might have negotiated a settlement of the conflict in her favor. King's argument is that ambiguity about the precise character of the Empress' stewardship of the realm and the related inability to come to terms over land dispositions made general consensus impossible before the capture of Robert of Gloucester led to the king's release. Paul Dalton, "Allegiance and Intelligence in King Stephen's Reign" (80-97), points out that the conflict was prolonged by the fact that under feudal custom loyalty to the king could be circumscribed in a complicated variety of ways, especially since Stephen's own position in that respect was suspect, charged as he was by some as a perjurer for negating his oath to Matilda. He further argues that the avoidance of combat in many cases suggests that there were frequent exchanges of information between the two sides that impeded a decisive resolution and kept the conflict simmering.
Two other papers address the role of ecclesiastical institutions in the troubles of the reign. In "Reeds Shaken by the Wind? Bishops in Local and Regional Politics in King Stephen's Reign" (115-38), Stephen Marritt challenges the view that the episcopate proved cowardly and weak during the years of conflict. Taking as examples (though not necessarily representative of all the others) three dioceses--Hereford, Chester and Lincoln, which among them had six bishops over the period--he argues that the prelates should not be judged too harshly because their office was an extremely complex one, grounded on both spiritual and temporal functions and complicated by connections with both sides of the conflict that allowed them at times to act the role of peacemaker but could also require them to take strongly partisan positions. The monastic side of the religious establishment is the focus of Janet Burton, "English Monasteries and the Continent in the Reign of King Stephen" (98-114). She addresses the surprising expansion of the monastic order in England during so turbulent a time, particularly in terms of the foundation of reform houses, not only Cistercian but, until their union with Cîteaux, Savigniac. Burton's major concern is how the political conditions of the time affected patronage to the new monasteries, with special emphasis on the negative impact that Bernard of Clairvaux's intervention in the disputed York episcopal election of the late 1140s--pitting the king's candidate William fitz Herbert against Henry Murdac, appointed and consecrated by Bernard's protégé Pope Eugenius III--had on Stephen's attitude toward the Cistercians, and the increased support for them it encouraged from Angevin partisans.
Finally, Bruce R. O'Brien, "Legal Treatises as Perceptions of Law in Stephen's Reign" (182-95) studies law under Stephen not from the standpoint of judicial practice, but of the theory expressed in treatises of his time. The texts considered are the Leges Edwardi, which O'Brien dates to 1136 and the years immediately after, and the Leis Willelme, the first legal treatise in French, datable to later in the reign. These works, O'Brien says, evince a "focus on peace and destructive crimes," but whether they were "inspired or provoked by the war and violence of Stephen's reign" or "evidence of functioning government...depends on how we read the Anarchy" (191). His reading is that the legal writers, less prone to bias and exaggeration than the chroniclers, suggest that a violent world became more violent during Stephen's reign, but that the violence was localized and limited.
Taken together, the essays included in this volume represent a moderating turn in the revisionist movement concerning Stephen's reign that has been ongoing for four decades, with the change most clearly seen in Thomas' contribution but present elsewhere as well. It deserves a place on the shelf beside the collection that Edmund King, who had been instrumental in initiating the reconsideration of the reign, edited fifteen years ago. [7]
------- Notes.
1. R.H.C. Davis, King Stephen, 1135-1154 (London-New York: Longman, 1990[3]). Davis understandably based much of his argument on the studies of his father H.W.C. Davis, who had concentrated on mention of widespread "wastage" in the early Pipe Rolls of Henry II to prove that Stephen's reign represented a national breakdown of order on a large scale.
2. The process can be said to have begun with Edmund King, "King Stephen and the Anglo-Norman Aristocracy," History 59 (1974), 180-94.
3. Of the two most recent biographies, that of David Crouch, The Reign of King Stephen, 1135-1154 (London-New York: Longman, 2000) is relatively moderate in expressing this view. That of Donald Matthew, King Stephen (London: Hambledon, 2002), is far more passionate in its defense of the monarch.
4. G.J. White, "The Myth of the Anarchy," Anglo-Norman Studies 22 (2000), 190-203.
5. Thomas N. Bisson, "The 'Feudal Revolution,'" Past and Present 142 (1994), 6-42, which generated a debate in the pages of that journal over the next several years.
6. Marjorie Chibnall, The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
7. E. King (ed.), The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign (Oxford, 1994).