WERE THE MIDLANDS ‘WASTED’ DURING STEPHEN'S REIGN?

Abstract

The reign of King Stephen (1135–54) is unusually rich in the coverage afforded by contemporary chroniclers. The story they tell is of a disputed succession to the throne between Stephen, grandson of William the Conqueror, and Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and of prolonged civil war as a result. It is possible to divide the war into phases: 1136–8 when Stephen having taken the crown failed to deal decisively with baronial rebels; 1139–48 when his adversary Empress Matilda was in the country as a focus of opposition; 1149–53 when Matilda's son the future Henry II emerged to lead the fight against the king and eventually to win the promise of the throne for himself. Less than a year after peace had been agreed at Winchester in November 1153, Stephen was dead, leaving his rival to take the kingdom unchallenged. The chroniclers give remarkably similar verdicts on the effects this protracted struggle had upon the conditions of the country. We read in the Gesta Stephani of ‘everywhere … in a turmoil … reduced to a desert’, in John of Worcester's chronicle, that ‘in many places … pillage and plunder scarcely ceased,’ in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that ‘wherever the ground was tilled the earth bore no corn, for the land was ruined’ William of Malmesbury wrote of knights from castles ‘pillaging the dwellings of the wretched countrymen to the very straw’ and Henry of Huntingdon saw ‘everywhere clamour, mourning and terror’. All this needs, of course, to be treated with caution. Although the physical impact of the war was clearly widespread in both time and place, Stephen's reign was much more than simply nineteen years of unrelieved suffering when ‘men said openly that Christ and his saints slept’. There is room for debate over how badly different parts of the country were affected at different times — and the fortunes of the midlands, in particular, deserve to be reconsidered.