Then was corn dear, and flesh, and cheese, and butter; for there was none in the land. Wretched men died of hunger. [...] They said openly that Christ and his saints slept.
The Peterborough Chronicle, entry for 1137
King Stephen
parents: Stephen-Henry, Count of Blois, and Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror
date and place of birth: about 1092-1096, at Blois
wife: Matilda of Boulogne
date of marriage: about 1125
children: Baldwin, Eustace, William, Matilda, Mary
years of reign: 1135-1154
date of coronation: 22 December 1135 at Westminster Abbey
date and place of death: 25 October 1154 at Dover
place of burial: Faversham Abbey, Kent
Empress Matilda
parents: Henry I and Matilda of Scotland
date of birth: 7 February 1102
husbands: Emperor Henry V (married 1114); Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou (married 1128)
children: Henry II, Geoffrey, William
title in England: Lady of the English, 1141
date and place of death: 10 September 1167 at Rouen
place of burial: Bec Abbey; now Rouen Cathedral
Stephen of Blois owed everything to his uncle. His mother Adela was William the Conqueror's daughter, and Henry I brought the boy to his court, knighted him, and gave him estates across England and Normandy that made him one of the richest men in both. He married him to Matilda, heiress to the county of Boulogne, whose mother was a princess of the old English royal line. In November 1120 Stephen was due to sail on the White Ship, but, according to Orderic Vitalis, he got off before it left Barfleur with an attack of diarrhoea. The ship went down with Henry's only legitimate son on board. Seven years later Stephen was among the first of the barons to swear to accept Henry's daughter, the Empress Matilda, as heir to England and Normandy.
Stephen Seizes the Crown
Henry I died in Normandy on 1 December 1135. Matilda was in Anjou with her husband Geoffrey, who was fighting her father over border castles. Stephen was in Boulogne, a short crossing from Kent. He sailed at once, won over the Londoners, and went to Winchester, where his younger brother Henry of Blois was bishop. Bishop Henry persuaded the keeper of the treasury to hand over the keys and the Archbishop of Canterbury to set aside the barons' oath. Hugh Bigod, the late king's steward, swore that Henry I had released the barons from their oath on his deathbed. Stephen was crowned at Westminster on 22 December, three weeks after his uncle's death.
Most of the barons accepted him. He was brave, charming and generous, and he found it hard to refuse anyone. Those qualities made him a poor king. He gave away royal lands and castles to buy loyalty, forgave rebels who then rebelled again, and quarrelled with the church. In 1139 he arrested Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, the man who had run Henry I's government, along with Roger's nephews the Bishops of Lincoln and Ely, and seized their castles. The arrests turned much of the church against him, including his own brother.
Matilda Invades
Matilda's great asset in England was her half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the most powerful of Henry I's illegitimate sons. In 1138 he renounced his allegiance to Stephen. In September 1139 Matilda and Robert landed at Arundel, where Henry I's widow Adeliza received them. Stephen besieged Arundel and then, in a gesture his supporters thought chivalrous and everyone else thought foolish, let Matilda go under escort to join Robert at Bristol. The west country became her base, and England split in two.
The war that followed rarely saw pitched battles. It was fought by barons from castles, many of them built without royal licence, raiding each other's lands and extorting protection money from the villages around them. The Peterborough Chronicle's description of the years after 1137 is the most famous passage in the whole chronicle: castles "filled with devils and evil men," prisoners hung up by their thumbs or heads with smoke under them, knotted cords twisted round their heads, cellars filled with adders and toads. Historians now think the chronicler exaggerated, and large parts of England stayed peaceful, but the Fens, the Thames Valley and the west suffered badly.
The Battle of Lincoln
On 2 February 1141 Stephen besieged Lincoln Castle, and Robert of Gloucester marched to relieve it with an army that included Welsh troops and men who had lost lands to Stephen. Stephen's earls fled early in the fight. The king fought on foot with a sword until it broke, then with a Danish battleaxe until a stone knocked him down. He was taken to Bristol in chains.
For a few months Matilda held the upper hand. Bishop Henry of Blois changed sides and a church council at Winchester recognised her as "Lady of the English," the title she used until she could be crowned. She reached London in June. There her manner undid her. The chroniclers, most of them hostile, describe her as haughty and demanding: she refused to confirm the citizens' old privileges, demanded money from them, and kept the bishop and earls who supported her standing while she sat. Stephen's queen, Matilda of Boulogne, brought an army to the south bank of the Thames, and on 24 June the Londoners rang the bells and rose against the empress as she sat down to dinner. She fled to Oxford, and she never came back to Westminster to be crowned.
The Rout of Winchester
Bishop Henry now changed sides again. Matilda besieged him in Winchester in August, and Queen Matilda's army surrounded the besiegers in turn. When the empress's forces tried to break out in September, the retreat turned into a rout. The empress escaped, according to one account riding astride like a man, but Robert of Gloucester was captured guarding the rear. Neither side could win without its leader, and in November Robert was exchanged for the king. Stephen wore his crown again at Canterbury at Christmas 1141.
The Escape from Oxford
In September 1142 Stephen trapped Matilda in Oxford Castle and besieged it through the autumn. By December the garrison was starving. One night, with snow on the ground and the Thames frozen, Matilda and a small escort, dressed in white, were let down from the castle, walked across the ice through the royal lines and made their way on foot to Abingdon and then to Wallingford. The castle surrendered the next day. It was her most famous exploit, and it ended her last real chance of taking London.
The Stalemate
Neither side could finish the war. Stephen held London and the south-east; Matilda held the west. Across the Channel, Geoffrey of Anjou fought on his wife's behalf and by 1144 had conquered Normandy, which ended Stephen's rule there. When Robert of Gloucester died in 1147, Matilda lost her main support in England, and she left for Normandy early in 1148. She never returned. She spent the last twenty years of her life in Rouen, where she advised her son, founded religious houses and died in 1167.
Her cause passed to her son Henry. He had first come to England in 1147, aged fourteen, with a small band of mercenaries he could not pay; Stephen, with typical generosity, paid them to go home. Henry returned in 1149 and again in January 1153, by which time he was Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou and husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine. The church refused to crown Stephen's son Eustace in his father's lifetime, and the barons on both sides were tired of war. When the two armies faced each other across the Thames at Wallingford in 1153, their leaders pressed Stephen and Henry to negotiate.
The Settlement
Eustace died suddenly in August 1153. Stephen had a younger son, William, but he did not have Eustace's ambition. In November, by the Treaty of Winchester, confirmed at Westminster in December, Stephen adopted Henry as his son and heir. He would keep the crown for life; William would keep his father's family lands. Stephen died at Dover on 25 October 1154 and was buried beside his wife and son at Faversham Abbey, which he had founded. Henry crossed from Normandy and was crowned Henry II that December, the first of the Plantagenet kings.
Matilda never became queen, but she lived to see her son on the throne. Her epitaph at Bec summed up her life in the terms of her time: "Great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in her offspring: here lies the daughter, wife and mother of Henry." England would not have a queen regnant until Mary I, four hundred years later.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "King Stephen, Empress Matilda and the Anarchy" https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/king-stephen-and-the-anarchy/, September 30, 2026