The Anarchy, 1135 to 1154: Stephen, Matilda and nineteen long winters

A drowned prince and a broken oath

The war began with a shipwreck. On 25 November 1120 the White Ship went down in the Channel and drowned Prince William, the only legitimate son of Henry I. Henry's hopes then rested on his daughter Matilda, who had married the Holy Roman Emperor in 1114 and kept the title of empress after his death in 1125. In 1126 and 1127 Henry made his barons swear to receive her as Lady of England, and in 1128 he married her to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou.²

Henry died on 1 December 1135. His nephew Stephen of Blois had sworn the oath like everyone else, but he hurried across from Normandy, won the backing of the Church and of enough Norman nobles, and was crowned shortly before Christmas. Stephen Roberts, writing in Military History Matters, notes that his rule soon looked weak: Scotland invaded in 1136 and again in 1137, and in 1138 King David I came south a third time, to be beaten at the Battle of the Standard near Northallerton on 22 August.³

The empress lands

In September 1139 Matilda landed at Arundel. Her half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, was the most important of the barons who rallied to her, and from his headquarters at Bristol she soon held most of the west. England now had two rulers, and the war that followed was mostly a war of castles.⁴

Kate Ravilious, reporting for Archaeology on the work of a University of Exeter team, describes how the struggle filled the country with new fortifications. Barons built more castles, besiegers threw up counter castles beside them, and some were left half dug. At Wallingford on the Thames, held for Matilda by Brien fitz Count, the castle was besieged again and again between 1139 and 1153, with major sieges in 1139 and 1140, in 1146 and in 1152 and 1153. Across the river Stephen built a siege castle at Crowmarsh, which excavators found in 2011.⁵

Lincoln and a captive king

The one great battle of the war came at Lincoln. Stephen arrived outside the city on 6 January 1141 to besiege the castle, which had been seized by Ranulf, Earl of Chester. Ranulf and Robert of Gloucester came up with a relief army on 1 February, and the next day they attacked. Much of the royal cavalry fled, Stephen fought on, and in the end he was struck down by a stone and taken prisoner. Our account of the Battle of Lincoln, 1141 follows the day from the chroniclers' point of view.⁶

Victory should have given Matilda the kingdom. She was acknowledged as queen, but her heavy taxation and haughty manner turned the Londoners against her, and they rose and drove her out before she could be crowned. Then the tide turned again. On 14 September 1141, at Winchester, her army was routed by a relief force raised by Stephen's wife, who was also named Matilda, and Robert of Gloucester was captured covering the retreat. In November the two prisoners were exchanged, the earl for the king, and the war began again almost where it had started.⁷

Escape across the snow

In the winter of 1142 Stephen nearly ended the war at Oxford, where he besieged the empress in the castle. One night she slipped out with three knights, all dressed in white against the snow, and walked about six miles through snow and ice to Wallingford. Ravilious adds that she crossed the frozen Thames on the way.⁸

Neither side could finish the other. Roberts dates the heaviest fighting to about 1145. The war was cruel to the countryside rather than bloody on the battlefield: Ravilious notes that sixty royal archers were beheaded by Matilda's supporters, that Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, ravaged the Fens from the Isle of Ely until an arrow killed him in 1144, and that buried coin hoards became far more common in the west during Stephen's reign, a sign of people hiding their wealth.⁹

Henry Plantagenet and the peace

Robert of Gloucester died in 1147, and early in 1148 Matilda left England for Normandy. Her cause passed to her son Henry, who tried his luck in 1147 and 1149. By 1152 he was Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou and husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the pope had refused to let Stephen crown his son Eustace in his own lifetime.¹⁰

In January 1153 Henry crossed to England with a larger army. In August Eustace died, and with him Stephen's reason to fight on. On 6 November 1153 the Treaty of Winchester, sometimes called the Treaty of Wallingford, settled the war: Stephen would reign until his death and Henry would succeed him. The peace terms also required the siege castle at Crowmarsh to be destroyed. Stephen died on 25 October 1154, and Henry II, grandson of Henry I and great-grandson of William the Conqueror, began a reign that lasted until 1189.¹¹

Why it is called the Anarchy

No one at the time called it that. A chronicle of the period spoke of Stephen's reign as nineteen long winters, and the name Anarchy was coined by the Victorian historian William Stubbs. Modern historians argue over both the name and the dates, starting the war in 1135 or 1139 and ending it in 1153 or 1154. What is not in doubt is the result: the crown passed to Matilda's son and to the house of Anjou, the dynasty of Henry II and of his son Richard the Lionheart.¹²