The Reign of King Stephen

1135-1154

David Crouch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317892960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

At last: an authoritative, up to date account of the troubled reign of King Stephen, by a leading scholar of the Anglo-Norman world. David Crouch covers every aspect of the period - the king and the empress, the aristocracy, the Church, government and the nation at large. He also looks at the wider dimensions of the story, in Scotland, Wales, Normandy and elsewhere. The result (weaving its discussions around a vigorous narrative core) is a a work of major scholarship. A must for specialist and amateur medievalists alike.

Part One
The Causes of the Civil War Stephen as Count and King, 1113-1139

Chapter 1
The Count of Mortain

Stephen of Blois was born around the year 1096; it is impossible to be sure exactly when.¹ He was named after his father, the count of Blois-Chartres and Meaux, the ruler of one of the key regional principalities of northern France. Blois-Chartres was in fact the boss-stone of the power structures of northern France: a compact principality wedged between Normandy to the north, the French king's domain around Paris to the east, and the county of Anjou to the west. From his accession in 1089 his father, Count Stephen (sometimes called Stephen-Henry), had used the natural advantages of his position well, and was a successful ruler. He had consolidated his power by military means and by an excellent political marriage - made at some time between 1080 and 1084 - to Adela, daughter of King William the Conqueror and elder sister of Kings William Rufus and Henry I of England.² In this way he allied with the powerful king of the Anglo-Norman realm to the north, as a means of pursuing his ambitions against his dangerous neighbours, whether Anjou to the west or the French king to the east. Count Stephen did rather less well when, in 1096, he was seduced by the nobility and glamour of the Crusade to recover Jerusalem. He became the principal leader of this great expedition as it entered Syria, but, while beseiged in Antioch in 1098, the count panicked and fled the city. This was a piece of bad judgement, for the city in the end held out against the Turks. He returned home in disgrace the same year. He died at the battle of Ramlah in May 1102 while attempting to recover his reputation in a further expedition to the Holy Land.

1 For the rough calculation of his birthdate, see R.H.C. Davis, King Stephen (3rd edn., London, 1990), 1n, 7n.

2 For the date of the marriage, see K.A. LoPrete, 'The Anglo-Norman card of Adela of Blois', Albion, 22 (1990), 572n.

Stephen the boy cannot have grown up with much memory of his father. His childhood was lived out in a court dominated by his mother: a woman of grand connections (and not shy about mentioning them), admired for her piety, and quite capable of ruling everything and everyone around her. Her sons were no exception. The eldest of them was naturally brought forward as his father's successor. The young William, named after his grandfather, the conqueror of England, was accepted and designated as count of Blois even before his father's departure on his second crusading venture in 1102. In 1104 this William married the heiress of the lordship of Sully, in northern Berry. By now he must have reached or was approaching adulthood, and was still being referred to as count in 1105. But in 1107, it was the second son, Theobald, who was finally and formally installed as count of Blois.³ There is no knowing the reason why this happened, although there is every reason to believe that Countess Adela was behind the exclusion. Count William had certainly been hot-headed enough to get into trouble with the Church in 1103, in his violent support of his mother against the bishop of Chartres in a dispute over chapter appointments. However, that was a sin of which many a greater man than he was guilty. After 1107 Count William settled in the lordship of Sully, and produced children who were later to join their uncle, the younger Stephen, in England.

3 For Count Stephen and his disgrace, see Davis, Stephen, 1-4. For William's mysterious relegation from Blois to Sully, and his mother's apparent part in it, see LoPrete, 'Anglo-Norman card', 580; K.A. LoPrete, 'Adela of Blois and Ivo of Chartres: piety, politics, and the peace in the diocese of Chartres', ANS, xiv, ed. M. Chibnall (Woodbridge, 1990), 147-8; Davis, Stephen, 4. However, note that Robert de Torigny, writing in the 1130s, believed that the marriage alliance between William and the daughter of Gilo de Sully had been planned by his father, Count Stephen, before his departure to the Holy Land in 1102, William of jumièges, Gesta Normannorum Ducum, ed. E.M.C, van Houts (2 vols, Oxford, 1992-95) ii, 263.

Stephen, the third son, was involved in the family settlement. It seems to have been his mother's intention that the number of her sons should not lead to the weakening of Blois-Chartres, by dividing it up to provide for each. So William, although overlooked for the big prize, was provided for by a strategic marriage outside the ancestral lands. The third son, the young Stephen, also had to be found opportunities outside Blois-Chartres, and no better place could be found than the distinguished household of his mother's brother, Henry I of England. It is not known with any certainty when Stephen entered his uncle's household. One writer implies that it was soon after the battle of Tinchebray (1106) when King Henry defeated his brother, Duke Robert of Normandy, and took over the duchy.⁴ The battle (almost the reverse of Hastings, forty years on) led to the deprivation of the Norman magnates loyal to Duke Robert. One of them was the king's rebel cousin, Count William of Mortain. The writer, Orderic Vitalis (a monk of the abbey of St Evroult on the southern Norman frontier), gives the impression of believing that William was immediately replaced at Mortain by Stephen of Blois, who would still then only have been a boy of about ten. There is no way of confirming the date of 1106 for the grant. But the fact that Stephen's mother settled the succession to Blois at about this time makes it possible that she prevailed on her royal brother (and now neighbour) to provide for the boy Stephen by at least a promise of Mortain and by adopting him into his household, hence Orderic's confusion.

4 OV vi, 42.

Adela of Blois also had a fourth son, Henry, a few years younger than Stephen and born after his father returned from the Holy Land.⁵ This, the youngest surviving boy, was provided for by placing him in the Church, another way of avoiding cutting into the core patrimony. Adela's wide network of connections included the abbot of the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny; she was to retire to a Cluniac priory on the Loire. This vast house had dominated Benedictine monasticism in western Europe since the tenth century. Its reputation for liturgical elaboration and excellence was high, and its monks were frequently recruited to provide abbots for other great monasteries in England, Italy and France. On occasion Cluny took direct control of other houses, which were subordinated to it as dependent priories under its monarchical abbot; eventually there were well over 1,500 of them. By the time of King Henry I of England, Cluny had long been powerful at the papal court also. Pope Urban II (1088-99) was a Frenchman and a Cluniac and under him and his successor the papacy's finances were reformed under a fellow monk, Peter. Henry of Blois was professed as a monk and was cloistered in the mother house itself.⁶ Thus he was educated in a great centre of Church politics and papal ideology, at a time also when the great abbey church at Cluny was being rebuilt in grand Romanesque style. The young Henry was a novice monk in a house that was the very apex of ecclesiastical power, art and architecture, and the mixture left its mark on him.

5 English Episcopal Acta viii, Winchester, 1070-1204, ed. M.J. Franklin (British Academy, 1993) XXXV suggests that Henry was born as early as 1090, a line followed also by N.E. Stacy, 'Henry of Blois and the lordship of Glastonbury', EHR, 114 (1999), 4 (who has Henry arriving at Glastonbury in his 'mid-thirties'). But Ralph Davis's persuasive argument is that Stephen, his elder brother, was born around 1096. Their father returned from Crusade late in 1098, and it is possible that Henry of Blois, born in 1099, was the result of the passionate reunion of his parents. This date of 1099 could also be supported by the observation that if Henry was nominated to a bishopric at the earliest possible age (thirty), then 1129 would have been that year.

6 Henry himself said, when writing of the troubles he met at Glastonbury, Ί would far rather have been a poor man at Cluny with the rest, than to lord it over others under such a burden', Adam of Domerham, Historia de rebus gestis Glastoniensibus, ed. T. Hearne (2 vols, London, 1727) i, 305.

In 1126, when he was probably in his mid-twenties, his royal uncle offered Henry of Blois the abbacy of the great royal Benedictine abbey of Glastonbury in Somerset, one of the wealthiest in England. In 1129, when he must have reached the canonical age of thirty, he was nominated by the king to the wealthy see of Winchester, and permitted to continue to hold Glastonbury in plurality. His relative youth may have been a slight embarrassment to him. It was observed by John of Salisbury at the papal curia in 1149 that Henry affected a full patriarchal beard, and he appears bearded in the portrait of him on a dedicatory plaque (now in the British Museum) which was once attached to some object or reliquary that he donated to one of his churches, and he also is bearded on his seal.⁷ Since the seal would have been cut in or soon after 1129, he must have grown a beard before his promotion to Winchester, when he was an abbot in his twenties. The nature of the man was already apparent by then. He has left a series of autobiographical memoranda about his stewardship of Glastonbury (written at some time between 1139 and 1141 during the period of his political eclipse at court) which demonstrate that he was insecure, acquisitive and politically very alert. These two latter qualities were to be deployed on his brother's behalf in due course, and the insecurity and self-importance were to be the devil in the relationship between them.

7 Historia Pontificalis, 79; English Romanesque Art, 1066—1200, ed. J. Alexander and others (London, 1984), no. 277a-b; Stacy, 'Henry of Blois', 4 and n.

The Anglo-Norman Realm

Because of family circumstances Stephen, and later his brother, Henry, were both sent to their uncle, the king of England, to further their careers. There was no better place than his court to make a career in the early twelfth century. King Henry had succeeded his brother, William Rufus, in 1100, after Rufus's accidental death in a hunting accident in the New Forest. The then Count Henry had been living at his elder brother's court in England, and, by making key friends in Rufus's household, was able to seize power in the brief period of uncertainty that followed the king's death. He was able to survive the challenge to his rule in 1101 by his remaining elder brother, Duke Robert II of Normandy. By 1103 he had so consolidated his power that he was freely intervening in the affairs of Normandy, where he sponsored a party of dissident magnates against his brother. In 1106, Henry was powerful enough graciously to invade the duchy at the invitation of his supporters so as to restore order. At Tinchebray he and his army defeated and captured Duke Robert and seized his principality. Robert spent the rest of his life in honourable captivity, dying at Cardiff castle in 1134. Robert's son and heir, William, called 'Clito', spent most of the rest of his young life as a refugee in the courts of his uncle Henry's political enemies. Henry became duke and king of the realm he had forcibly united.

Under King Henry after 1106 the great artificial condominium of the kingdom of England and duchy of Normandy which had existed under the Conqueror between 1066 and 1087 (and briefly under Rufus from 1096 to 1099) was restored. Modern historians call this political entity the 'Anglo-Norman realm', echoing the phraseology of the so-called 'Hyde abbey chronicler' (actually more likely to have been a secular clerk connected with the earls of Surrey). The word 'Anglo-Norman' is a convenient label, although it does not comprehend the full breadth of King Henry's influence. He inherited from his Anglo-Saxon predecessors a claim to overlordship of the kings of Wales, and the Scottish king also had to be wary of his power. In France, as duke of Normandy, he claimed rights to intervene in the affairs of Brittany to the west and Maine to the south; and Henry soon extended his power to ally with many of the lesser princes around his borders: Flanders, Boulogne, Ponthieu, Perche and Meulan.⁸

8 The adjective 'Anglo-Norman' is first found used at the beginning of this century in connection with the sort of Norman French spoken in England, see J. Le Pat ou rei, The Norman Empire (Oxford, 1976), 252. For the extent of Anglo-Norman influence, ibid, 319-54.

The Anglo-Norman realm at its widest extent had little resemblance to a modern state, but was a continuation of the sort of tributary over-kingship which had been a political feature of western Europe since the end of the Roman empire. Yet within it, England and Normandy formed two nuclei of organised lordship which were developing new forms of administration. As we will see later, King Henry's remorseless drive to accumulate power and wealth, when combined with the growth of literacy in society, produced innovation. His government's need for information and control produced greater centralisation on the court in matters of finance and justice. This was so much so that in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps and Genealogical Table
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Feudalism, Anarchy, the Baron de Montesquieu and Bishop Stubbs
• PART ONE: THE CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR: STEPHEN AS COUNT AND KING, 1113-1139
• PART TWO: THE CIVIL WAR, 1139-1147
• PART THREE: SETTLING THE KINGDOM, 1147-1154
• PART FOUR: THE IMPACT OF STEPHEN'S REIGN
• Maps
• Index