Gone Medieval - King Stephen

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

Was King Stephen a weak ruler who plunged England into chaos, or an unlucky monarch trapped by impossible circumstances? How did one disputed succession unleash nearly two decades of civil war, betrayal and brutality, which inspired George R. R. Martin's House of the Dragon?Matt Lewis and Professor Carl Watkins explore the troubled reign of the king whose seizure of the throne in 1135 helped ignite the devastating conflict remembered as The Anarchy.More:Matilda: Empress, Queen, WarriorListen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Anarchy: Disruptive WomenListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world.

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into aliens, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were. We've gone medieval. Late in the evening of the 25th of November 1120, a sleek, newly fitted white ship

was preparing to set sail from Barfleur Harbour. It was a well-worn route ever since the Norman conquest of England more than 50 years earlier. The 17-year-old heir to the throne of England and Duchy of Normandy was sailing in this white ship with his young friends. They'd been drinking a lot and encouraging the crew to drink too. King Henry the first ship had already left and as darkness gathered around them, the young men decided to put this new ship through its paces

and race the king back to England. Chronicles tell us monks came to bless the voyage but were turned away by the rowdy passengers as they jostled with the crew at the oars and encouraged the captain to make all haste into the channel. Just as they were about to set sail, as the wine continued to flow, the darkness crept over the harbour

and a chilly November wind bit harder. One man decided this all seemed like a bad idea. For reasons, chroniclers would only be able to guess at furiously in the future, but which are lost to us now. Stephen of Blois, who was Henry I's nephew, disembarked. Did he stand on the keyside and watch as the ship left? Or had he already found a warm bed by the time the white ship hit a rock

and scattered its passengers and crew into the icy sea? It must have seemed that Providence had spared Stephen that night. Did God have other plans for this young man? He may have wondered at his luck, or the care the Almighty took of him. Fifteen years after that fateful shipwreck, when Henry I died, the man who might well have been lost to the waves that night too

would become the next king of England. By the end of his 19-year reign, Stephen might well have wondered why he'd been spared that night. Luck, caution, providence, illness, whatever it had been had made him king. But he would never when he would never, the crown with his uncle's regal ease.

To explore the problems of Stephen's reign and his reputation, I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Carl Watkins, a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and author of the Penguin Monarch's series book on King Stephen. Welcome to God Medieval, Carl. It's great to have you with us. That's very good to be with you. I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into King Stephen, a person that I think lots of people tend to overlook and write off.

I think people's general impression of Stephen is often that he's a bit of a a bit of a wally, a bit of an idiot. So I'm quite keen to get to the bottom of what you think about him and see whether that's right or not. Yeah, he certainly has a good press. Yeah, yeah, he did not have good PR, did he? To start off with, can you kind of introduce us to Stephen? Where does he sit in the Norman royal family tree? Right. So Stephen is one of William the Conqueror's grandchildren. He's the son of Adela, who is the daughter of William the Conqueror. So we're now moving on a generation into the Conqueror's grandchildren. We get to Stephen's reign. And what do we know about his mother and father and the kind of influence they may have had on him growing up?

Well, his mother is the really interesting figure here, because she ends up running the lands of Blas, single-handed after the death of her husband on Crusade. And so there's quite a strong matriarchal figure at the head of the family out of which Stephen ultimately emerges. And that strong female role model in his life is quite an interesting figure when you think of the circumstances in which his rain plays out, where he has jumped in and seized the crown at the expense of another powerful female figure. Yeah. And I think also interesting when you get to the role of his wife as well, because she's, He's obviously a significant figure in his reign as well. And how many siblings does Stephen have?

Because he's not the oldest son either, is he? You know, we're going to, I mean, spoiler, he's King Stephen, so he's going to end up on a throne. But he's not the oldest son of his family, is he? No, he's not. And an older brother is pushed aside by his mother as a prospect for running the blois lands. Another brother, Theobald, is countenanced when Henry I dies as another

possible successor to King Henry I. And he has a younger brother, Henry, who ends up as Bishop of Winchester. So it's quite a large family and there are a number of significant political actors within it. And what are our main sources when we're dealing with the life and reign of Stephen and how reliable are they? How many of them do we need to take with a pinch of salt? Well, we probably need to take all of them with a pinch of salt. And what we have is an array of chroniclers. Many of them are, many of them are, many of them are, monastic chroniclers. And the earlier part of the reign is better served by these texts than the latter part. We have some really rather significant chroniclers writing into the early 1140s.

The monk John of Worcester, another monk, William of Malmesbury, and at a distance, a Norman chronicler called Audric Vitalis. We also have another anonymous text called the Gesta Stefani, the Deeds of Stephen. And these different writers split. in their allegiances. Some of them are decidedly pro-Steven, such as the author of the guest to Stefani, as you might guess from the name of the text. Others among them are partisans for the cause of Matilda and the Algevans. So there, an example might be the monastic chronicler William of Malmesbury. Though interestingly, William of Malmsebury looks perhaps to one of Matilda's principal allies, Robert of Gloucester, as the figure he really admired.

Myers, and neither he nor any of the other partisans for Matilda's cause, are really that keen on talking her up specifically. Yeah, interesting. So I guess in having sort of two sets of fairly polarized chronicles, some that are quite pro-Steven and some that quite anti-Steven, we've got ultimately a reasonable balance, and are we looking for somewhere, you know, are we reading between the lines of some of these chronicles to try and find a reasonable middle ground? Yeah, I think that's right. we can see certain points of convergence in the way that different chroniclers sum up the characteristics of some of the principal actors.

So there are points where both Stephen's partisans and his antagonists seem to converge, the points on which they converge, about the nature of his personality, the nature of his rule. So those sort of areas that overlap can be quite interesting for our purposes. Yeah, yeah.

And before we make him king, I'm quite interested to understand his real. relationship with his uncle, Henry I think Stephen is quite often positioned as Henry's kind of favourite nephew. Is that a way in which we can think about him? Yeah, that's a reasonable way to think about him. I mean, he's a very major landholder in England, landed interests beyond England. He's a very significant figure at the court. I don't think it's right to think that Henry imagined him as his future successor, but he's certainly in royal favour. Yeah. And it's interesting with Henry the first, I think, that he seems someone who is very comfortable to lean quite heavily on his,

I guess, extended family, so particularly his illegitimate children and his nephews. He's not afraid of promoting them and building them up as sort of scaffolding for his reign. But as you say, I guess he doesn't view them as necessarily a threat. But I think that's quite striking because lots of medieval kings would have viewed nephews and things like that as it would be dangerous to build them up too far. I think so. But I suppose we have to remember that in the 1120s, the early 1130s, Henry's been on the throne for a very long time. His position is extremely secure.

And there is considerable risk associated with trying to remove a ruling king for the larger landed elite. So I don't think these figures constitute a kind of problem for Henry I himself. So I think he's willing to build them up. Yeah. And everything sort of shifts and moves quite dramatically in 1120 with the white ship disaster. So Henry loses his only legitimate male air and this sparks a big succession crisis. So things change quite dramatically for Henry I first reign in 1120 with the death of his only legitimate son. And I think that kind of changes the dynamic.

He is forced to sort of rely on his daughter, Matilda, and then when Henry eventually dies, it's kind of 15 years later, so, you know, a fair while into this in 1135, what do you make of Stephen's kind of lightning move to make himself king? Should we see some longstanding ambition there? Or should we see someone who is making the most of an opportunity that arises? I think there must have been some ambition there. That sort of move can't come from nowhere. But there is also. a striking opportunity that also presents itself because Matilda and her husband, Jeffrey of Anjou, have been in rebellion against Henry I. They're relatively remote, partly

as a consequence of that from the levers of power. It makes it much more difficult for Matilda to move quickly. So there's a kind of strategic problem for her. But there's also a political problem for her as well in that the fractured relationship that she has with her father, the point of his death, creates a context in which those who previously had sworn oaths of allegiance to her and accepted her as Henry I's successor, now have a reason, if they wish to, to abandon her. And so when Stephen steps into that sort of vacuum that is created with Henry I, he's got certain sorts of practical and also ideological advantages that are moving in his direction.

Yeah. And one of the things that Stephen and his faction will sort of lean into quite heavily is the claim that Henry had changed his mind on his deathbed, that he'd fallen out with Matilda and was kind of favouring Stephen as a potential air

because he wasn't getting on with Matilda. And I guess, you know, there's not any evidence to suggest 100% whether that's true or not, but it must have felt like a believable enough excuse or at least something that people were willing to accept in order to allow Stephen to take the throne.

So I guess my question is, do you think people here are being kind of willfully persuaded by Stephen rather than actually believing that this is true? It's kind of where, you know, I can't disprove it. And it solves so many problems to have Stephen and not Matilda that will just go along with it. Yeah, I mean, we can never penetrate what happened on Henry I, first deathbed, and that's true also for many significant political actors at the time, too.

And I think one could argue that there might be significant advantages for many members of the aristocratic elite in shifting their allegiance from Matilda to Stephen at this juncture. and that is partly bound up with questions of gender, I think, but it's also connected to that, bound up with Matilda's husband, Jeffrey of Anjou, and the bad blood, which is quite longstanding, particularly between some members of the Norman aristocratic elite and the Rolling House of Anjou.

So there's a kind of a problem with Matilda, which is tangled up with the identity of her husband, And so when an alternative seems at this point to present itself and a plausible story can be told about why this alternative might be embraced legitimately, you can start to see why the herd begins to move. Yeah, yeah. And what we make of the notion that is also sort of put around in the chronicles around this time, that Stephen is effectively elected by London? Again, is that allowing people to bypass those oaths of allegiance that they might have sworn to Matilda? Is this London perhaps seizing a bit of power and authority that it's lost since the Norman conquest,

the elite wanting to be more involved in the appointment, if you like, of kings? Do you think there's any element in which there is some manoeuvring going on around this and Stephen's weakness allows them to make the most of it in positioning it almost as an election? I think that's right. And I think the rules of succession at this point are still relatively plastic. If William Adeline had lived, it seems to me very, very likely that he would have succeeded relatively smoothly when his father died. But in the absence of a direct male heir, there is a kind of an open question about who might come to the throne. And Stephen, in seizing the opportunity that's presented in 1135, is clearly able to capitalize on his royal blood, running back through his mother to the conqueror. But then he's trying to assemble a claim to the throne that is based on a series of other factors, which include his military decisiveness, his dash, the fact that he seems to have some of the kind of the martial and political properties that you might expect in a king.

but then also he's capitalising on the other things, the other things too, like acclamation, for instance, and this is where London becomes important and this idea of election is injected. And then also, of course, you get the attention to coronation as something that has a kind of constitutive force, not something that simply sets the seal on a reign that's already begun when the last king died,

but something that actually makes a king. So the fact that he's crowned quickly, relatively quickly, is important. And then on top of this, the sort of the cherry on the cake, if you like, you also get papal confirmation of his coronation, of his claim as well. So Stephen is sort of assembling claims about his legitimacy, claims about his right to rule out of a number of different component parts. Many of them we've seen before, and some of them are mobilised in a new way, like this sort of claim about the role of London. Yeah. I suppose it doesn't help to have a brother who is also the Bishop of Winchester, when Winchester is still an important.

place, so easy to get that part of the government on side as well. I think that's right. Yeah, Henry of Winchester is really important here in the background and be able to get ducks in a row. There's a slight sense as well, perhaps, that Henry of Winchester might be the brains of this outfit. Yeah, yeah. I was going to come on to you.

So we've made Kit Stephen King, and you mentioned earlier, that the Chronicles give us some idea about his personality. So for England in 1135, what might they know about? Stephen, what kind of personality do you think he had? What kind of man do you think he is? He's clearly somebody who has the properties of a king. There are signs of military capacity. There is evidence of political decisiveness. The way in which he moves in 1135 is very striking. and also there are signs of knowing what to do at the very start of his reign, where he moves rapidly to quash violence and to deal with the kind of disorder that often breaks out when a king dies,

when there's a kind of, we might call an interregnum, a space between reigns between the death of one king and the establishment of a new king, firm establishment of a new king, in which people are busy settling schools. So he displays a certain kind of decisiveness there. And these are the kinds of qualities that I think people have already perhaps seen in him, which seem then to play out in the very early politics of the reign. So he clearly has some of the capacities of an effective king, some of the properties that perhaps his immediate predecessors have possessed.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, cards on the table, listeners to God Medieval will probably be aware, but I like Stephen in a world that tends to hate him because he stole Matilda's throne and everybody loves Empress Matilda and that's fine, I completely agree. But I actually find Stephen quite an attractive character, a nice guy and I guess the problem is, is he too nice to be a good medieval king in many ways? Well, I think this gets to the heart of something that we can see even in the text that is strikingly favourable to him, the guest to Stefani, that we see reference to his bravery

So this man is clearly considered to be an effective soldier. He's branded as a kind of Hercules at one point. So he has significant capacity as a warrior. But he's also presented as a man of gentle and modest demeanor as well. And there's a sense about him that he struggles. Once he becomes king, he struggles to raise himself up above his peers. And that is a problem. What was perhaps, a virtue when he was in the court becomes a difficulty for somebody now who aspires to be king. And this might be an element of his character. And it might be a dimension of his transition or his failed transition from a leading nobleman into a king that helps to explain why his reign starts to fall apart. Yeah, that was one of the aspects I found really interesting in your book. You sort of position him as only ever managing to conceive of himself as a, a first amongst equals as a kind of a nobleman with a crown and never managing to make that

step of separating himself as this kind of undisputed superior of everybody else. In the way that Henry I had done, he absolutely had said, I am the one and you guys are all beneath me. I thought it was really interesting. You said, Stephen kind of never manages to shake this idea that these are all his mates still and he's kind of, you know, he's now managing his mates, which is an awkward position for him to be in. And you're absolutely right. Henry I really is able to establish himself very firmly. Henry I was characterized by the chroniclers as the roaring lion, the man with this commanding

voice that no one could withstand. And that sort of pen sketch of him captures something extremely important, I think, about him as a king and the nature of his rule. And it's clear that he was a figure who most feared. and Stephen never ever replicates that. And that's important because obviously the king needs to be able to command men, defend the shores, deal with internal rebellion, all those sorts of things that we might expect. But the king also, and increasingly in Norman England, is becoming important as the arbiter of last resort

when it comes to disputes among the landed elite. this is a competitive, status-conscious, highly ambitious group of men who are armed to the teeth and skilled in combat. And they will quarrel with each other over personal matters, but also they'll quarrel with each other, particularly over property, whence springs their wealth and their power. And so you need a king who has the capacity, the personal authority, to hold the ring with those men. And Henry I could do that, but Stephen ultimately, it seems, could not. And that is something that seems to me absolutely critical in understanding the political fragmentation and violence that characterises his reign. Yeah, yeah. One of the other things that you said in your book that I found very interesting as well was we've talked about, you know, Stephen appears to be a reasonable military leader, a good soldier.

And early in his reign, he does have some good. successes, particularly against David of Scotland. He does seem to restore peace in the way that everybody had wanted him to when he becomes king. But you also point out in your book that he sort of becomes a victim of the state of military technology in the middle of the 12th century, that defensive capabilities are far outstripped offensive ones. And so when his reign becomes essentially, you know, 19 years of castle siege warfare, is that something that we ought to hold against Stephen? Should we absolve him of some responsibility for the problems of his reign because he's facing these difficulties in military technology? I think it's true generally that

Stephen faces a lot of very significant challenges. He's threatened within and he's threatened without. He's threatened without from Scotland, from Wales, where there's political disintegration in the Norman position. And of course, he's threatened on the continent too, where he's rivaled in Normandy by Geoffrey Matilda's husband. But then when we think about the kind of the internal military dynamics, yes, you're quite right. You know, there is a problem here that Stephen confronts, which is the technical difficulties of reducing castles

if they are held against you. And it's not simply the kind of the balance of power between defenders of castles and those besieging them. It's also the problem that during Stephen's reign, there is an awful lot of castle building going on as well. And so there are more of these blockhouses, these strongholds, for the king to reduce. But of course, while all of that is true, there is also a sense in which Stephen is author of his own misfortunes, because the way in which he rules, or the way in which he fails to rule effectively,

also creates conditions in which many of these castles end up being held against it. You kind of get these endless stories in the chronicles, don't you, of castles and countercassals and adulterine castles and everybody's building a castle. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And some of them just can't be taken. I mean, the classic instance of this is probably Wallingford, which is held by Brian Fitzcant, one of Matilda's most loyal lieutenants.

And it resists attempts to take it further across the rain. And so there is a sense in which the balance of military forces between offensive and defensive technologies create circumstances in which a stalemate is likely to eventuate. And of course, that's what we see through much of the 1140s. We see a kind of military stalemate. Yeah, yeah. There's a few moments in Stephen's reign that I really wanted to pick out

and talk about in a bit more detail. So one in particular before Empress Matilda sort of arrives on the scene in England is his arrest of the bishops in 1139. So I wonder if you could talk us through kind of who is he arresting and why is he arresting three bishops? So the bishops are Roger of Salisbury, Alexander of Lincoln, and Nigel of Ely. And these are key figures left over

from the old administration. Roger of Salisbury in particular was a key administrative figure during Henry the first reign. And so he sort of represents a species of continuity across the 1135 divide. But Stephen, appears to be suspicious about the loyalties of these men as Matilda is preparing to make an intervention

in England. And so preemptively he moves to arrest them. And this has some significant consequences for the administration of England, because with their arrest, there is now a fracture. And the really rather sophisticated machinery of royal government is dislocated as a consequence of that. That probably has significant implications for Stephen's capacity to administer the regions to raise revenue. This is probably one of the moments, one of the points at which the efficient and highly sophisticated machinery of rural government that he's inherited from his predecessors begins to work less effectively. And that has long-term implications for his ability to raise resources, to intervene effectively in the localities and also to wage war. Yeah. And does this reveal anything to us about Stevens planning, his strategy or the perception of his own position? Because it feels a little bit like he's moving from a position

of sort of fear and weakness, which is never a good look for a king. I think that's right. And I think we have to perhaps fill in a little bit of the backstory here as well, is that before we get to that arrest in 1139, there's been an unraveling of the Norman position in large parts of Wales, the Welsh are in rebellion. There have been a series of interventions in the north, mounted by David King of Scots. In 11, initially, Stephen himself is able to spearhead resistance to those Scottish incursions. In 1138, the Northern Lords are left to their own devices to try to see off a Scottish invasion, which they successfully do, a group of Northern Lords under the leadership of Archbishop Thurston of York, very old Archbishop,

who is carried around a litter to direct military operations. So those kinds of problems are visible there. He's had to deal with domestic rebellion, major rebellion in 1136, in southwestern England at Exeter. Eventually he loat siege to the castle at Exeter. The rebels there are defeated, but he lets them go in a kind of a demonstration of clemency, which is widely understood by contemporaries to have been a political misjudgment. So he's under political pressure on the frontiers. His ability to intervene in the north now is constrained because he's dealing with problems elsewhere. He's also beginning to display certain sorts of political misjudgments as well.

So that is the context really in which he's becoming suspicious of some of these actors who were significant in the old regime of Henry the Thur. And so all of that is happening as well before the, what I guess we have to consider to be the main crisis of his reign arrives, which is his cousin, Empress Matilda, landing in England towards the end of 1139. And one of the things that Stephen, again, seems to get this kind of almost universal criticism for in the Chronicles for making a mistake is allowing Matilda to get out of Arandall Castle where she's arrived to go and join Robert of Gloucester. And I always wonder, do you think he deserves criticism for that or is that the application of hindsight? Because it's very difficult to see what else he could have reasonably done in that situation. And it does look like an act of misplay chivalry. But given that there's already a challenge in some. South West England, it might have been more sensible simply to let Matilda go and so concentrate the problem in one place. And a lengthy and difficult siege there to extract her might itself have brought

problems for the Kim. So I think it's sort of easy with hindsight to see this as another one of his political miscalculations, but it may have been a more difficult kind of decision to make than it seems to us. Yeah. I mean, I think so, because I I think, as you say, you know, if you let Matilda go, you get all of your eggs into one basket, you put them all in one place. Arundel is tricky because if he lays siege to Arundel, you know, Henry I's widow is in there with one of Stephen's more significant nobleman who you're going to alienate if you start laying siege to his castle.

What do you do, and are you going to risk killing Empress Matilda? Do you really want to kill the daughter of Henry I, all of the choices that weren't letting her go and join Robert feel like they could have had far worse consequences for him than doing what must have felt also like the chivalrous thing of allowing, you know, a woman, again, not militarily persecuting a woman. I think that's right. I think also the display of the right kinds of values is important for a king. This kind of honourable conduct is a, as a virtue, can be displayed as a virtue, just as his clemency when dealing with the reverend. rebels in 1136 might have been construed as a virtue too.

But of course, early in the reign, these sorts of decisions are capable of multiple different representations. And what might seem honorable or clement can also be represented as weakness of miscalculation. And you see these different sorts of explanations being touted by different chronicles. Yeah. And I guess the potential fear of moving against both Matilda and Henry the first widow Adeliza and also potentially the Earl of Arundal, again, might play into

that idea that you mentioned earlier about him failing to separate himself from the rest of the nobility. You know, Matilda is the daughter of a king. And he's not viewing himself as a king. He's viewing himself as someone who can't upset these people too much. Yeah, I think that's right. There's a kind of an element of caution here as well. And that may end up being a sort of a, in a long view, this may end.

that being an unwise political decision. But tracked in the moment, as you've indicated, he doesn't really have good options here. He knows that his predecessors have been rivaled. He knows that Henry I and William Rufus both had to contend with a brother, Robert Kirtos, in Normandy, who had claimed at the throne. But Stephen's problem is becoming even more difficult than that. He's rivaled in Normandy by Matilda and particularly Geoffrey of Anjou, a husband, but also now he's facing threats, significant threats in England as well, right on his own doorstep. So he's dealing with a political problem that is of a different shape and of a different magnitude, even compared to those confronted by his predecessors, his immediate predecessors.

And then kind of, I guess the big kind of pinnacle culmination moment of the rain, or the year of the rain, really, is 1141. There's so much that happens during that year. And it begins in February with the Battle of Lincoln, which is kind of the only real set piece event of Stevens' reign. How significant is the Battle of Lincoln in February 1141? and kind of what happens there and how significant is this for the rest of Stephen's reign? The battle is a relatively rare setpiece confrontation between the two sides in the Civil War. These kinds of set piece battles are high risk operations, and there might sometimes be a reluctance on the part of participants to risk this sort of battle. And it's a measure of the significance of Lincoln, significant Darsus and Centre, a significant castle, that Stephen is prepared to move there and then to engage in a set-piece battle at some place outside the town.

We don't know exactly where the battle took place. we know that well the chroniclers discuss the circumstances around this battle it seems that during mass at Lincoln Cathedral Stephen when

offering a candle drops it and the candle breaks and chroniclers on both sides of the divide between the Aljurans and Stephen acknowledge this event but they interpret it it in different ways. One says that the shattering of the candle is a bad portent, and it indicates

the kind of the disintegration of Stephen's authority. The other suggests that the candle's broken shards are scooped up again, and this is an indication that Stevens' authority will be recovered. But the chroniclers here, obviously writing with the benefit of hindsight, are capturing something quite important about this battle, which is that this is a potential turning point in the Civil War, when you have a confrontation between both sides, high stakes, at an important defended centre of authority in England. And the battle sees Stephen defeated, but it also sees Stephen captured. Yeah. And again, I think the chronicles are quite keen to point out that Stephen was kind of given counsel not to engage. So lots of his nobles are encouraging him to

sort of run away and not fight Robert of Gloucester. But again, much as the situation with Matilda a couple of years earlier, I can't help feeling that this is an awful lot of hindsight being at play, because for Stephen, he's confronted by, you know, Ranulf of Chester has snatched Lincoln Castle, so he's got a fairly significant nobleman who is making a bid for authority that isn't really his. is Ranulf is also Robert of Gloucester's son-in-law, so he calls out his father-in-law for help when he's in a bit of trouble.

For Stephen to have run away from that, feels like it would have been so damaging to his authority, that everything he's hinged his reign on on being this firm military leader who can restore order to the country. That bit of his authority would have utterly evaporated. So we know that he loses the battle and we know that he is. captured. And for me, it often feels like criticising his decision to engage is just allowing hindsight to play out there. Because again, like Arundel, what other real option did he have in that circumstance? I think that's right. And I think the context for this as well is that Stephen is increasingly in danger of losing control in the regions of England. That process starts

quite early on in the late 1130s, further north in Yorkshire, Northumbria, Cumbria, where a combination of Scottish royal power is intruding into that space, but also one of Stevens and Earl's, William Romal in Yorkshire, is emerging as an autonomous ruler, effectively in that space.

And so there's a sort of risk here, which we can see coming into being, that parts of England, away from the southeast, risk functioning under a kind of devolved authority. And some of those actors will remain notionally loyal to the king. Others will throw in their lot with Matilda and the Angevancourt. And so it's important for Stephen to be active in the region. So he's not simply pushed back into a core. And this is also connected as well with the problems of the broader malfunctioning of royal government, which is arguably something that becomes more of an issue, more of a problem after the arrest of the bishops, will the dislocation that produces.

Yeah, yeah. And so Stephen, after the Battle of Lincoln, Stephen spends kind of nine months in captivity until eventually, Empress Matilda almost gets herself crowned, but is forced to flee from London. Her half-brother Robert of Gloucester is captured trying to fight a rearguard to protect her. And then we end up in this prisoner exchange situation. It's quite interesting in some of the chronicles that they position Robert of Gloucester as almost insisting that he shouldn't be exchanged for Stephen because, you know, I'm an earl and he's a king. That's not a fair kind of exchange. But does it point to one of the weaknesses in Matilda's cause that she is so desperate to get Robert back as the kind of military strong arm of her cause that she's forced to release Stephen,

having managed to take the King of England captive? Yes, that's right. Robert of Gloucester really is a significant figure in Matilda's enterprise. He is her sword arm, if you like. And so to be deprived of him as a military strategist, it clearly is very significant. So it absolutely makes sense from his point of view, suggesting that it's a critical mistake to let Stephen go,

but from her position, even if she holds on to Stephen and keeps him in captivity. She arguably needs Robert of Gloucester. And part of the point here is that the war hasn't simply gone into abeyance when Stephen is captured. It continues and it continues because Stephen's wife, his queen, also confusingly Matilda, this time, Matilda of Bologne, she keeps the political and the military show on the road, the military show with the assistance, particularly of William Riep. And so Matilda is still under military threat in this interstitial period when Stephen's in captivity

and then when Robert of Gloucester is also captured by the other side. And so, again, it's easy here. to think that Matilda makes a strategic mistake in letting Stephen go in return for Robert of Gloucester. This is another moment where we look back on it and think, why did she this time decide to do that? But there is a logic to the decision that she makes, given the military situation in which she finds herself. And also there's a sense in which Matilda is in a kind of impasse, really. You know, she has been rejected by the Londoners. She's been driven out.

And also then there has been disaster at Winchester with her own very near capture and the loss of Robert of Gloucester. So she's in a vulnerable position herself. Both of the principal parties are in weak positions at this point. Yeah. And I guess from Stephen's point of view, the fact of his release, because you do get this impression that initially the chroniclers are thinking, well, that's Stephen over and done with, you know, he's going to speak. spend the rest of his life in prison like Robert Kirthos had done. And if capture looked like some kind of divine punishment, losing in battle was God's judgment on him,

then Stephen's cause feels like it's almost revitalised by his release because that feels a bit like more divine rehabilitation. God is back on his side. He's made him king again. Yes, that's right. All of these sorts of events can be providentially coded. And clearly that some of the chronicler's narration of the portents that surrounded his defeat at Lincoln.

It's connected with that, the idea that he passes through these vicissitudes, but he ultimately prevails. So I think you're right, that there's a sense in which Stephen's cause enjoys a kind of resurgence at this point. But, of course, the political and the military realities

militate against either side at this juncture, being able to land the decisive blow. Yeah, it's almost like they're both too strong to lose, but both too weak to win as well. And there's an interesting impact to consider, I think, as well on sort of the institution of the crown. We've had a situation where the king of England has been a prisoner of his enemies for nine months, and yet he emerges almost unscathed. And the institution of the crown has persisted, as you said, William of Epe, Matilda of Boulogne. I love Matilda of Boulogne.

I think she's a fantastic figure who doesn't get enough credit for the things that she does during Stephen's reign. They have managed to keep his cause going and it's almost proven that the institution of the English crown can't be affected even by the king being a prisoner. So the institution is becoming stronger on its own. Is that fair to say? The institution of the that's the institution of the crown survives. The turmoil of Stephen's reign as a whole is very striking. And what happens in this period seems to me striking too. both with regard to the institution, as you've just indicated, but also with regard to the person of Stephen, the fact that there is not an attempt to strip Stephen of the crown. There's not an attempt to reverse the consequences of his coronation. And also, he's not simply killed. So there is a respect for Stephen's person as somebody has been crowned as a king, even if there is clearly a move now to remove him and replace him with the Lady of the English as Matilda is. initially styled.

There is that move afoot. But he is not stripped of the dignity that he has acquired in virtue of his succession to the throne. Yeah. And what do you think we should make of the role of the various barons in Stephen's reign too? The chroniclers seem quite keen to paint them as

perpetrators of the conflict for their own game. They're all absolutely reveling in all of this conflict and fighting and unrest. But as we get later on in the conflict, it's the barons that we see beginning to make peace agreements amongst themselves to kind of mitigate the effects of the war. So are they gaining from this or are they suffering from this or is there a bit of both going on? So the barons are a group of status conscious, ambitious, heavily are men who butt up against each other. The quarrel about property who quarrel about other things, but particularly quarrel about land. And so in a sense, they are perpetrators of the violence of Stephen's reign.

But that's in virtue of their quarrels with each other, not being contained by effective royal authority. So it seems to me that the rocket fuel, if you like, that is powering the violence in Stephen's reign. A lot of it is coming from there. It's coming from disputes within the baronage that then become entangled within the succession dispute because they find no effective resolution because of the failure of royal authority. So you get different parties in different disputes, joining different sides in the succession

struggle for their own advantage. So that's the particular way, I think, in which the barons are sort of implicated in the violent of Stephen's reign. It feels like the barons also highlight a way in which this was tricky for Stephen, because how does a king, you know, even allowing that Stephen is failing to set himself as a king, how does a king rule over a nation and barons who have an alternative, who if you come down heavily on them and you upset them, they can go, well, fine, we'll just go and support your rival then. This is a fundamental problem. And it's a conundrum for which there is no, there is no resolution. Once you have a situation in which you have a rival pole of authority embedded in Normandy

and then also in southwestern England, where Matilda's cause is based, you have a fundamental problem in the functioning of royal justice. Because the thing that makes royal justice work is the authority of the king, but the authority of the king is challenged. And if the king makes a decisive move in a dispute, the discomfited party in that adjudication can go and seek assistance from the Angevans. And if he doesn't act, then he looks weak. If the king doesn't act, the king simply looks weak. So there's a kind of fundamental malfunctioning of royal justice at this point, and that's making the violence of Stephen's reign worse. And it also explains why the violence isn't simply violence that is coming about

because you have field armies contending with each other at the top. You also have a lot of violence at lower levels as well. Yeah, yeah. And it seems to be ultimately, you know, Empress Matilda will eventually withdraw from England and begin to focus on the cause of her son, Henry, Fitz Empress at the future, Henry the second who will himself later on invade England and it's Henry who comes to this

kind of compromise arrangement with Stephen that seems to be kind of helped by the fact that the barons appear to have had enough of all of this by now they kind of want it settled, they don't want this dragging into the next generation and I just wonder they make this agreement where effectively you know

Stephen adopts Henry and appoints him as his heir and I wonder whether you think it's significant that that arrangement never really gets stress tested because Stephen sort of passes away within a year of that arrangement. So it's never really put to the test, is it? Yeah, that's true. But I think it is the case that the barons are are war-weary. In the 1140s, you can see various barons who seem constantly be changing sides. Some of them are held up for a probium in The Chronicles. Perhaps the most prominent is Geoffrey de Manderville, powerful actor in East Angier.

But in many ways, what those barons are doing when they seem to be operating capriciously is simply tacking this way and that in order to try to defend their interests in a world of profound political instability where they fear the loss of property, they fear the loss of their name, they fear the future of their line. So you can sort of see barons responding in that way to the disturbed politics of the 1140s. But you also start to see other kinds of responses. you start to see barons engaging in private treaties with each other in order to limit the extent to which they might come to blows if they are called upon by the sides they support to fight on the battlefield. And you're also starting to see a reluctance on the part of the barons to fight, perhaps most strikingly at the Battle of Wallingford or the non-battle of Wallenford, where the two armies are drawn up towards the end of Stephen's reign against each other.

the two parties, the two aristocratic parties, don't want to fight and they force the principles, Stephen on one side and Henry of Anjou on the other, to negotiate with each other. So, in a way, the sort of the agreement that is eventually hammered out between Stephen and Henry of Anjou is not likely to be stress tested because the larger political community desperately wants a resolution to the war, and they want that resolution to take the form of an agreement about the succession. And it's quite striking that when Stephen dies, Henry of Anjou does not hurry immediately to England. So he's confident that the security measures that have been established in the treaty are going to work, and that the succession is at this point secure.

And of course, this is a rare instance in the recent history of England of the succession actually passing off smoothly. Yeah, I always wonder whether Henry takes a moment before he comes to England almost to allow any enemies to show themselves so that when he arrives he can be comfortable that, you know, you had your chance, you had your moment. And if anyone does stick their head above the parapet, that maybe he's confident enough that he can deal with them. But Henry also seems It's almost as if Henry the second is as lucky in the circumstances of his accession as Stephen was unlucky in his Stephen has facilitated this reconciliation of both sides

So both sides now want Henry To be the next king There isn't really an opposition And even more widely David of Scotland has gone There's a child on the throne of Scotland And Henry just sort of marches up there And says right we'll have all our land back please

And they're not really in a position to stop him So it's almost like every bit of bad luck that Stephen had that perhaps he exacerbated as well. Henry is replacing with good luck and looking incredibly strong from the very opening of his reign, which creates this really jarring contrast with Stephen, I think, doesn't it? That's true. Luck is a kind of an essential constituent of the consolidation of authority at this point, and Henry II has it in spades. You've already mentioned the great Scottish king, King David, is dead.

Not only is David dead, but his son and heir, Prince Henry, has pre-deceased him. And so, as you indicate, the Crown in Scotland has now devolved to a child, Malcolm. Also, own son, Eustace, who gets a very bad press in many of the chronicles, but was a dearly an effective military operator. He's dead. And there seems to be no ambition on Stephen's part to look to a younger son, William, to carry on his cause, to carry on his line. So, yes, it is definitely the case that many of the people who might have posed problems for Henry Vanjou, now Henry II, have been cleared by fortune

from the field. Doesn't mean that he doesn't face any enemies. There are some barons who are prepared to resist him fairly early in the new reign. Interestingly, these tend to be figures that enjoy concentrated blocks of property from which they seem to think they have a chance of resisting the new king. But what's striking is that magnates that have those sorts of concentrated power bases are perhaps the exception rather than the rule and the generality of the baronial class is really to fall in behind the new king. They clearly see a better future in the reconstitution of royal authority, rather as it stood in 1135, when Henry I died,

rather than looking to a different kind of political configuration of England, which, for instance, saw royal authority restricted, attenuated, and perhaps more power in the hands of regional magnates of the earls. This has been absolutely fascinating. And I just wanted to end with a question that, you know, I don't know how reasonable it is. is to answer this in any kind of a quick way. How anarchic was the anarchy?

We call it the anarchy because we have this sense that it was 19 years of complete and utter chaos. Do you think it really was that anarchic? In recent decades, there's been a certain amount of revisionism here among historians who've wanted to suggest that actually the stories of violence, associated with Stephen's reign are overdone. And this notion of Stephen's reign as the anarchy

is the product of attaching too much importance to the words of rich, but also ideologically interested, ecclesiastical chroniclers. Historians have looked to other sources to argue that, for instance, aspects of royal government, at least in parts of the country, it continued to function quite effectively. And of course, some of the most famous characterisations of the anarchy are with the benefit of hindsight, specifically with the benefit of hindsight from Henry II's reign,

where there's an obvious incentive to turn the failings of Stephen's rule into a foil for the effectiveness of Henry II's rule of England and the wider empire. So for all those reasons, we need to perhaps take the narratives of epidemic, violence with a pinch of sod, but it remains the case that the chroniclers were portraying an England under Stephen, but they expected their audiences to recognise. And in order for this rhetoric of the effective reconstitution of royal authority under Henry the second to work, there must be some substance. There must at least be some perception in the part of the audience for those chronicles.

That there was a lot of violence under Stephen. There was a lot of disorder. That there was dysfunctional rule. So I think we can't push this kind of revisionism that downplays the disorders of the anarchy too far. I think we have to come back to the chronicles and the way in which their reputage of the reign must have resonated with contemporaries. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I tend to think anarchy is a really hard word for what happened there, because what you see is the fracturing of England, and, you know, there is authority in various

places. Stephen seems to maintain his authority really effectively in the southeast, and up as far as York on occasions, the south-west is not ungoverned, it's just ungoverned, it's governed by Matilda. The north of England seems to actually relish being governed by David. They enjoy being part of Scotland, and it's absolutely fine, and they don't have a problem. So it's not necessarily that it's anarchic. And I always can't help wondering whether it's this kind of almost this whiggish British Empire view of history that looks at this period when England fractured. You know, England has been an entity for kind of 200 years by this point. And in Stephen's reign, seems to be moving towards splitting again. And that almost wiggish view of

history that everything needs to be this relentless move towards the great British empire, that this looks like a backward step and therefore must be something really horrible that we have to characterize as an evil moment in English history? It's certainly the case that Stevens reign forces us to think a little bit about wearing the Nends, particularly in the north, because it's not an implausible world that circumstance might have fortunate it, that David did manage to make good, or David's successors did manage to make good, those gains that they made in the north, in Cumbria, in Northumbria, maybe even in parts of Yorkshire. So it reminds us that the English kingdom was perhaps capable of being reconfigured at this particular juncture.

Yeah, yeah. And so just to end on, if my assessment of Stephen is that I think he's a good man who didn't make a very good king, does that seem fair to you? Was he too nice to be a good medieval king? I think he's a brave man. He's a man capable of remarkable political dash. it's not so clear that he's capable of strategising, of strategic vision. And what might be important there is that while he's been around the court a lot, he hasn't really had an apprenticeship as a prospective king.

So that seems in some ways to contribute to his rather inhibited performance as a king. Come back again to that problem of Stephen being unable to transcend his own political circumstances. as a very prominent and senior members of the aristocracy, but still ultimately a member of the aristocracy, who happens to have ended up wearing a crown. Yeah, I think that might be a really good place to leave it. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Carl, and introducing us a bit more closely to King Stephen and his rail.

I found it really, really fascinating, so thank you very much for joining us. No, a pleasure. Thank you. I hope you've enjoyed this discussion. You can find more about this period in our back catalogue with episodes on Empress Matilda, The White Ship Disaster, and on Henry I's reign.

There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

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