Carl Watkins, Stephen: The Reign of Anarchy. (Penguin Monarchs.) London: Allen Lane, 2015. Pp. ix, 109. $19.95. ISBN: 978-0-141-97714-0.

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Previous articleNext article FreeReviewsCarl Watkins, Stephen: The Reign of Anarchy. (Penguin Monarchs.) London: Allen Lane, 2015. Pp. ix, 109. $19.95. ISBN: 978-0-141-97714-0.David CrouchDavid CrouchUniversity of Hull Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe reign of King Stephen (1135–54) remains one of the most historiographically complex of the English Middle Ages, with perhaps only that of John as a serious rival. The reason is that Stephen’s failures as a king became an obsession of the Oxford constitutional history school in the 1860s, and the profession has not really stopped worrying away at them till recently. Generation after generation of historians have used the reign to explore major themes. Was “anarchy” innate in any feudal society, as Montesquieu suggested? How did the supposedly nascent constitution of medieval England survive the reign to be revived by the jurist king Henry II, Stephen’s successor, and thus set a course for Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and its apotheosis in the Victorian British state? Is the turbulence of the reign a result of a seismic shift in perceptions of property law? The richness of the source material for the reign, which has been edited, discussed and analyzed, and indeed continually added to until the present generation has tantalizingly augmented the historiography, offering, as it does, some possibility of resolution to these large questions. Despite their complexity and the length of the bibliography the questions have generated, the study of Stephen’s reign has actually been advanced by some slim but influential volumes. One of the most stimulating, elegant, and sometimes amusing of these was R. H. C. Davis’s remarkable little study King Stephen, first published in 1969 (London: Longman) and a mere 178 pages even in its augmented third edition (1990). Yet between its covers Davis suggested quite a revolutionary explanation of the reign: that the aristocracy of England provided the resolution to the political crisis of the reign, rather than the cause. Similarly, Keith Stringer’s Reign of Stephen (London: Routledge, 1993) provided in a mere 93 pages a cool and analytical study of why “anarchy” was an insufficient term to cover what was happening in mid-twelfth-century England. Carl Watkins’s brief study is another instance of what can be done with the reign in very few pages. The series in which his book appears is one of those that offer reign-by-reign summaries of the history of England and is intended for a broad readership. So Watkins is not offering anything new to the historian of the reign; his guiding genius (if any) seems to be principally Davis. He adopts Davis’s curious Cold War image that waiting for Henry I’s death in the early 1130s was like “waiting for the Bomb.” The comparison with expectation of imminent extinction by nuclear flame always seemed to me a bit overstated as a simile, even as a child of the “duck-and-cover” generation. What Watkins aims to do and achieves with some panache is to offer a vivid study of the personality of Stephen of Blois and its impact on the political community of his realm, which is something that the depth of the sources allows. He has a very good ear for the way the theological rhetoric of contemporary writers can illustrate the broader insecurities of the day. Like Davis, he explains the reign as a catastrophe brought on by Stephen’s overambition—a man born to be a count, not a king. The historical verdict on Stephen as a human being has been increasingly favorable in recent years. Davis thought him shifty and treacherous, which seems to be Watkins’s tendency too, countenancing the view that there was “something of the night” about him. Stephen was, however, in person brave, dogged, courtly, and (as Edmund King has recently illustrated) intensely religious; the tragedy of the man was that as a politician he was vacillating and sadly lacking in judgment. Watkins weaves all these ideas seamlessly into his narrative of the reign, which becomes an excellent illustration of the way that kingship as a way of organizing a nation was too vulnerable to the inadequacies of the king’s own personality (38–39). But what the reign also illustrated for the first time was one potential solution to its problems: for the king to be brought into dialogue with the community he ruled and to accept a conciliar check on his executive power. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 92, Number 1January 2017 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689998 Copyright 2017 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.