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- [00:02]
Matt Lewis
From long lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Elena Jarninger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life. Only on History Hit with your subscription. You'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:43]
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At Edward Jones we believe rich isn't about having life all figured out. It's opening yourself to all the possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor provides long term planning built around you, meeting you where you are and helping you get closer to where you are want to be. So no matter where you're starting from, you can move forward with confidence. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich Edward Jones Member, SIPC Everyone treats summer like it owes you happiness. Long days, pool parties. Your best life on a loop. So what does it mean when you feel worse? The summer blues are real. It's why summer is one of the busiest stretches of the year for people starting Therapy Grow Therapy is here for all the moments when you decide you want more. More support, more clarity, more tools. Grow connects you with thousands of high quality licensed therapists across the US Offering both virtual and in person sessions, nights and weekends. The therapist you want takes Your insurance on Grow Grow accepts over 125 insurance plans. Sessions average $21 with insurance and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. Visit growththerapy.com acast today to get started. That's growthherapy.com acast growtherapy.com acast availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.
- [02:13]
Matt Lewis
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to Popes to the Crusades, we cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders. To find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got Here, find out who we really were with. Gone medieval. Late in the evening of 25th November, 1120, a sleek, newly fitted white ship was preparing to set sail from Barfleur Harbor. It was a well worn route ever since the Norman Conquest of England. More than 50 years earlier, the 17 year old heir to the throne of England and Duchy of Normandy was sailing in this white ship with his young friends. They'd been drinking a lot and encouraging the crew to drink too. King Henry I's ship had already left and as darkness gathered around them, the young men decided to put this new ship through its paces and race the King back to England. Chroniclers tell us monks came to bless the voyage, but were turned away by the rowdy passengers as they jostled with the crew at the oars and encouraged the captain to make all haste into the channel just as they were about to set sail. As the wine continued to fly flow, the darkness crept over the harbor and a chilly November wind bit harder. One man decided this all seemed like a bad idea for reasons chroniclers would only be able to guess at furiously in the future, but which are lost to us now. Stephen of Blois, who was Henry I's nephew, disembarked. Did he stand on the quayside and watch as the ship left, or had he already found a warm bed? By the time the white ship hit a rock and scattered its passengers and crew into the icy sea, it must have seemed that Providence had spared Stephen that night. Did God have other plans for this young man? He may have wondered at his luck or the care the Almighty took of him 15 years after that fateful shipwreck. When Henry I died, the man who might well have been lost to the waves that night too, would become the next King of England. By the end of his 19 year reign, Stephen might well have wondered why he'd been spared that night. Luck, caution, providence, illness, whatever it had been, had made him king. But he would never wear the crown with his uncle's regal ease. To explore the problems of Stephen's reign and his reputation, I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Carl Watkins, a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge and author of the Penguin Monarch series book on King Stephen. Welcome to God Medieval Carl, it's great to have you with us.
- [05:49]
Professor Carl Watkins
Very good to be with you.
- [05:50]
Matt Lewis
I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into King Stephen, a person that I think lots of people tend to overlook and write off. I think people's general impression of Stephen is often that he's a bit of a. A bit of A wally, a bit of an idiot. So I'm quite keen to get to the bottom of what you think about him and see whether that's right or not.
- [06:06]
Professor Carl Watkins
Yeah, he certainly has a good press.
- [06:09]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. He did not have good pr, did he? To start us off with, can you kind of introduce us to Stephen? Where does he sit in the Norman royal family tree?
- [06:18]
Professor Carl Watkins
Right, so Stephen is one of William the Conqueror's grandchildren. He's the son of Adela, who is the daughter of. Of William the Conqueror. So we're now moving on a generation into the Conqueror's grandchildren. When we get to Stephen's reign and
- [06:33]
Matt Lewis
what do we know about his mother and father and the kind of influence they may have had on him growing up?
- [06:39]
Professor Carl Watkins
Well, his mother is the really interesting figure here because she ends up running the lands of Blois single handed after the death of her husband on Crusader. And so there's quite a strong matriarchal figure at the head of the family, out of which Stephen ultimately emerges. And that strong female role model in his life is quite an interesting figure when you think of the circumstances in which his reign plays out, where he has jumped in and seized the crown at the expense of another powerful female figure.
- [07:17]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. And I think also interesting when you get to the role of his wife as well, because she's obviously a significant figure in his reign as well. And how many siblings does Stephen have? Cause he's not the oldest son either, is he? You know, we're going to. I mean, spoiler. He's King Stephen, so he's going to end up on a throne. But he's not the oldest son of his family, is he?
- [07:36]
Professor Carl Watkins
No, he's not. And an older brother is pushed aside by his mother as a prospect for running the Blois lands. Another brother, Theobald, is countenanced when Henry I dies as another possible successor to King Henry I. And he a younger brother, Henry, who ends up as Bishop of Winchester. So it's quite a large family and there are a number of significant political actors within it.
- [08:04]
Matt Lewis
And what are our main sources when we're dealing with the life and reign of Stephen? And how reliable are they? How many of them do we need to take with a pinch of salt?
- [08:13]
Professor Carl Watkins
Well, we probably need to take all of them with a pinch of salt. And what we have is an array of chroniclers, many of them who are. Many of them are monastic chroniclers. And the earlier part of the reign is better served by these texts than the latter part. We have some really rather significant chroniclers writing into the early 1140s, the monk John of Worcester, another monk William of Malmesbury, and at a distance, a Norman chronicler called Auderic Vitalis. We also have another anonymous text called the Gesta Stephani, the deeds of Stephen. And these different writers split in their allegiances. Some of them are decidedly pro Stephen, such as the author of the Gesta Stephani, as you might guess from the name of the text. Others among them are partisans for the cause of Matilda and the Angevins. So there, an example might be the monastic chronicler William of Malmesbury. Though, interestingly, William of Malmesbury looks perhaps to one of Matilda's principal allies, Robert of Gloucester, as the figure who he really admires. And neither he nor any of the other partisans for Matilda's cause are really that keen on talking her up specifically.
- [09:32]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, interesting. So I guess in having sort of two sets of fairly polarized chronicles, some that are quite pro Stephen and some that quite anti Stephen, we've got ultimately a reasonable balance. And are we looking for somewhere, you know, are we reading between the lines of some of these chronicles to try and find a reasonable middle ground?
- [09:49]
Professor Carl Watkins
Yeah, I think that's right. And also we can see certain points of convergence in the way that different chroniclers sum up the characteristics of some of the principal actors. So there are points where both Stephen's partisans and his antagonists seem to converge, the points on which they converge about the nature of his personality, the nature of his rule. So those sort of areas of overlap can be quite interesting for our purposes.
- [10:16]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. And before we make him king, I'm quite interested to understand his relationship with his uncle Henry I. Because I think Stephen is quite often positioned as Henry's kind of favourite nephew. Is that a way in which we can think about him?
- [10:31]
Professor Carl Watkins
Yeah, that's a reasonable way to think about him. I mean, he's a very major landholder in England, landed interests beyond England. He's a very significant figure at the court. I don't think it's right to think that Henry imagined him as his future successor, but he's certainly in royal favour.
- [10:46]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. And it's interesting with Henry, I. I think that he seems someone who is very comfortable to. To lean quite heavily on his, I guess, extended family, so particularly his illegitimate children and his nephews. He's not afraid of promoting them and building them up as sort of scaffolding for his reign. But as you say, I guess he doesn't view them as necessarily a threat. But I think that's quite striking because Lots of medieval kings would have viewed nephews and things like that as it would be dangerous to build them up too far.
- [11:15]
Professor Carl Watkins
I think so. But I suppose we have to remember that in the 1120s, the early 1130s, Henry's been on the throne for a very long time. His position is extremely secure and there is considerable risk associated with trying to remove a ruling king for the larger landed elite. So I don't think these figures constitute a kind of problem for Henry I himself. So I think he's willing to build them up.
- [11:47]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. And obviously everything sort of shifts and moves quite dramatically in 1120 with the white Ship disaster. So Henry loses his only legitimate male heir and this sparks a big succession crisis. So things change quite dramatically for Henry I's reign in 1120 with the death of his only legitimate son. And I think that kind of changes the dynamic. He is forced to sort of rely on his daughter Matilda. And then when Henry eventually dies, it's kind of 15 years later. So, you know, a fair while into this in 1135, what do you make of Stephen's kind of lightning move to make himself king? Should we see some long standing ambition there, or should we see someone who is making the most of an opportunity that arises?
- [12:37]
Professor Carl Watkins
I think there must have been some ambition there. That sort of move can't come from nowhere. But there is also a striking opportunity that also presents itself because Matilda and her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, have been in rebellion against Henry I. They're relatively remote, partly as a consequence of that, from the levers of power. It makes it much more difficult for Matilda to move quickly. So there's a kind of strategic problem for her, but there's also a political problem for her as well in this. The fractured relationship that she has with her father at the point of his death creates a context in which those who previously had sworn oaths of allegiance to her and accepted her as Henry I's successor now have a reason, if they wish to, to abandon her. And so when Stephen steps into that sort of vacuum that is created with Henry I dies, he's got certain sorts of practical and also ideological advantages that are moving in his direction. Yeah.
- [13:45]
Matt Lewis
And one of the things that Stephen and his faction will sort of lean into quite heavily is the claim that Henry had changed his mind on his deathbed, that he, you know, he'd fallen out with Matilda and was kind of favoring Stephen as a potential heir because he wasn't getting on with Matilda. And I guess, you know, there's not any evidence to suggest 100% whether that's true or not. But it must have felt like a believable enough excuse, or at least something that people were willing to accept in order to allow Stephen to take the throne. So I guess my question is, do you think people here are being kind of willfully persuaded by Stephen rather than actually believing that this is true? It's kind of. Well, you know, I can't disprove it, so. And it solves so many problems to have Stephen and not Matilda that will just go along with it.
- [14:33]
Professor Carl Watkins
Yeah. I mean, we can never penetrate what. What happened on Henry I deathbed. And that's true also for many significant political actors at the time, too. And I think one could argue that there might be significant advantages for many members of the aristocratic elite in shifting their allegiance from Matilda to Stephen at this juncture. And that is partly bound up with questions of gender, I think, but it's also unconnected to that, bound up with Matilda's husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, and the bad blood, which is quite longstanding, particularly between some members of the Norman aristocratic elite and the ruling house of Anjou. So there's a kind of a problem with Matilda which is tangled up with the identity of her husband. And so when an alternative seems at this point to present itself and a plausible story can be told about why this alternative might be embraced legitimately, you can start to see why the herd begins to move.
- [15:48]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. And what ought we make of the notion that is also sort of put around in the chronicles around this time that Stephen is effectively elected by London again? Is that allowing people to. To bypass those oaths of allegiance that they might have sworn to Matilda? Is this London perhaps seizing a bit of power and authority that it's lost since the Norman Conquest? The. The elite wanting to be more involved in the. The appointment, if you like, of kings. Do you think there's any element in which there is some maneuvering going on around this, and the. Stephen's weakness allows them to make the most of it in positioning it almost as an election?
- [16:29]
Professor Carl Watkins
I think that's right. And I think the rules of succession at this point are still relatively plastic. If William Adelin had lived, it seems to me very, very likely that he would have succeeded relatively smoothly when his father died. But in the absence of a direct male heir, there is a kind of an open question about who might come to the throne. And Stephen, in seizing the opportunity that's presented in 1135, is clearly able to capitalize on his royal blood running back through his mother to the conqueror. But then he's trying to assemble a claim to the throne that is based on a series of other factors, which include his military decisiveness, his dash, the fact that he seems to sort of have some of the kind of the martial and political properties that you might expect in a king. But then also he's capitalizing on the other things. Other things, too, like acclamation, for instance. And this is where London becomes important and this idea of election is injected. And then also, of course, you get the attention to coronation as something that has a kind of constitutive force, not something that simply sets the seal on a reign that's already begun when the last king died, but something that actually makes a king. So the fact that he's crowned quickly, relatively quickly, is important. And then on top of this, the sort of the cherry on the cake, if you like, you also get papal confirmation of his coronation, of his claim as well. So Stephen is sort of assembling claims about his legitimacy, claims about his right to rule, out of a number of different component parts, many of them we've seen before, and some of them are mobilized in a new way, like this sort of claim about the role of London.
- [18:14]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. I suppose it doesn't help to have a brother who is also the Bishop of Winchester, when Winchester is still an important place. So easy to get that part of the government on side as well.
- [18:24]
Professor Carl Watkins
I think that's right. Yeah. Henry of Winchester is really important here in. In the background, in. Be able to get ducks in a row. There's a slight sense as well, perhaps that Henry of Winchester might be the brains of this outfit.
- [18:36]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah, I was going to come on to. So. So we've. We've made Stephen King. And you mentioned earlier that the chronicles give us some idea about his personality. So for England in 1135, what might they know about Stephen? What kind of personality do you think he had? What kind of man do you think he is?
- [18:54]
Professor Carl Watkins
He's clearly somebody who has the properties of a king. There are signs of military capacity. There is evidence of political decisiveness. The way in which he moves in 1135 is very striking. And also there are signs of knowing what to do at the very start of his reign, where he moves rapidly to quash violence and to deal with the kind of disorder that often breaks out when a king dies, when there's a kind of what we might call an interregnum, a space between reigns, between the death of one king and the establishment of a new king, firm establishment of a new king, in which people are busy Settling schools. So he displays a certain kind of decisiveness there. And these are the kinds of qualities that I think people have already perhaps seen in him, which seem then to play out in the very early politics of Lorraine. So he clearly has some of the capacities of an effective king, some of the properties that perhaps his immediate predecessors have possessed. Yeah, yeah.
- [20:07]
Matt Lewis
I mean, cards on the table, listeners to God Medieval will probably be aware. But I like Steven in a world that tends to hate him because he stole Matilda's throne and everybody loves Empress Matilda, and that's fine. I completely agree. But I actually find Stephen quite an attractive character, a nice guy. And I guess the problem is, is he too nice to be a good medieval king in many ways?
- [20:30]
Professor Carl Watkins
Well, I think this gets to the heart of something that we can see even in the text that is strikingly favourable to him, the guest of Stefani that we see reference to his bravery. So this man is clearly considered to be an effective soldier. He's branded as a kind of Hercules at one point, so he has significant capacity as a warrior. But he's also presented as a man of gentle and modest demeanour as well. And there's a sense about him that he struggles once he becomes king, he struggles to raise himself up above his peers. And that is a problem. What was perhaps a virtue when he was in the court becomes a difficulty for somebody now who aspires to be king. And this might be an element of his character and it might be a dimension of his transition, or his failed transition from a leading nobleman into a king. That helps to explain why his reign starts to fall apart.
- [21:33]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, that was one of the aspects I found really interesting in your book. You sort of position him as only ever managing to conceive of himself as a first amongst equals, as a kind of a nobleman with a crown, and never managing to make that step of separating himself as this kind of undisputed superior of everybody else in the way that Henry I had done. If he absolutely had said, I am the one and you guys are all beneath me, I thought it was really interesting. You said Stephen kind of never manages to shake this idea that these are all his mates still, and he's kind of, you know, he's now managing his mates, which is an awkward position for him to be in.
- [22:11]
Professor Carl Watkins
And you're absolutely right. Henry I really is able to establish himself very firmly. Henry I is characterized by the chroniclers as the roaring lion, the man with this commanding voice that no one could withstand. And that sort of pen sketch of him captures something extremely Important. I think about him as a king and the nature of his rule, and it's clear that he was a figure who most feared, and Stephen never, ever replicates that. And that's important because obviously the king needs to be able to command men, defend the shores, deal with internal rebellion, all those sorts of things that we might expect. But the king also, and increasingly in Norman England, is becoming important as the arbiter of last resort when it comes to disputes among the landed elite. This is a competitive, status conscious, highly ambitious group of men who are armed to the teeth and skilled in combat. And they will quarrel with each other over personal matters, but also they'll quarrel with each other, particularly over property, whence springs their wealth and their power. And so you need a king who has the capacity, the personal authority, to hold the ring with those men. And Henry, I could do that. But Stephen ultimately, it seems, could not. And that is something that seems to me absolutely critical in understanding the political fragmentation and violence that characterizes his reign.
- [23:50]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. One of the other things that you said in your book that I found very interesting as well was we've talked about, you know, Stephen appears to be a reasonable military leader, a good soldier, and early in his reign he does have some good successes, particularly against David of Scotland. He does seem to restore peace in the way that everybody had wanted him to when he becomes king. But you also point out in your book that he sort of becomes a victim of the state of military technology in the. The middle of the 12th century, that defensive capabilities are far outstripped offensive ones. And so that when his reign becomes essentially, you know, 19 years of castle siege warfare, is that something that we ought to hold against Stephen? Should we absolve him of some responsibility for the problems of his reign because he's facing these difficulties in military technology?
- [24:42]
Professor Carl Watkins
I think it's true generally that Stephen faces a lot of very significant challenges. He's threatened within and he's threatened without. He's threatened without from Scotland, from Wales, where there's political disintegration in the Norman position. And of course, he's threatened on the. The continent too, where he's rivaled in Normandy by Geoffrey, Matilda's husband. But then when we think about the kind of the internal military dynamics. Yes, you're quite right. There is a problem here that Stephen confronts, which is the technical difficulties of reducing castles if they are held against you. And it's not simply the balance of power between defenders of castles and those besieging them. It's also the problem that during Stephen's reign, there is an awful lot of castle building going on as well. And so there are more of these block houses, these strongholds, for the King to reduce. But of course, while all of that is true, there is also a sense in which Stephen is author of his own misfortunes, because the way in which he rules, or the way in which he fails to rule effectively also creates conditions in which many of these castles end up being held against it.
- [25:53]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, you kind of get these endless stories in the chronicles, don't you, of castles and counter castles and adulterine castles and everybody's building a castle.
- [26:00]
Professor Carl Watkins
Yes, yeah, absolutely. And some of them just can't be taken. I mean, the classic instance of this is probably Wallingford, which is held by Brian Fitzcant, one of Matilda's most loyal lieutenants, and it resists attempts to take it further across the reign. And so there is a sense in which the balance of military forces between offensive and defensive technologies creates circumstances in which a stalemate is likely to eventuate. And, of course, that's what we see through much of the 1140s. We see a kind of military stalemate.
- [26:35]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. There's a few moments in Stephen's reign that I really wanted to pick out and talk about in a bit more detail. So one in particular before Empress Matilda sort of arrives on the scene in England is his arrest of the bishops in 1139. So I wonder if you could talk us through kind of, who is he arresting and why is he arresting three bishops?
- [26:56]
Professor Carl Watkins
So the bishops are Roger of Salisbury, Alexander of Lincoln and Nigel of Ely. And these are key figures left over from the old administration. Roger of Salisbury in particular was a key administrative figure during Henry I's reign, and so he sort of represents a species of continuity across the 1135 divide. But Stephen appears to be suspicious about the loyalties of these men as Matilda is preparing to make an intervention in England, and so preemptively he moves to arrest them. And this has some significant consequences for the administration of England, because with their arrest there is now a fracture and the really rather sophisticated machinery of royal government is dislocated as a consequence of that. That probably has significant implications for Stephen's capacity to administer the regions, to raise revenue. This is probably one of the moments, one of the points at which the efficient and highly sophisticated machinery of royal government that he's inherited from his predecessors begins to work less effectively. And that has long term implications for his ability to raise resources, to intervene effectively in the localities and also to wage war.
- [28:23]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. And does this reveal anything to us about Stephen's planning, his strategy or the perception of his own position? Because it feels a little bit like he's moving from a position of sort of fear and weakness, which is never a good luck for a king.
- [28:39]
Professor Carl Watkins
I think that's right. And I think we have to perhaps fill in a little bit of the backstory here as well, that before we get to that arrest in 1139, there's been an unraveling of the Norman position in large parts of Wales. The Welsh are in rebellion. There have been a series of interventions in the north, mounted by David, King of Scots, in 11. Initially, Stephen himself is able to spearhead resistance to those Scottish incursions. In 1138, the Northern Lords are left to their own devices to try to see off a Scottish invasion, which they successfully do. A group of northern lords under the leadership of Archbishop Thurston of York, very old archbishop, who is carried around a litter to direct military operations. So those kinds of problems are visible there. He's had to deal with domestic rebellion, Major rebellion in 1136 in southwestern England at Exeter. Eventually, he lays siege to the castle at Exeter. The rebels there are defeated, but he lets them go in a kind of a demonstration of clemency, which is widely un Understood by contemporaries to have been a political misjudgment. So he's under political pressure on the frontiers. His ability to intervene in the north now is constrained because he's dealing with problems elsewhere. He's also beginning to display certain sorts of political misjudgments as well. So that is the context, really, in which he's becoming suspicious of some of these actors who was significant in the old regime of Henry I. Yeah.
- [30:25]
Matt Lewis
And so all of that is happening as well before the. What I guess we have to consider to be the main crisis of his reign arrives, which is his cousin, Empress Matilda, landing in England towards the end of 1139. And one of the things that Stephen, again, seems to get this kind of almost universal criticism for in the Chronicles, for making a mistake, is allowing Matilda to get out of Arundel Castle, where she's arrived, to go and join Robert of Gloucester. And I always wonder you, do you think he deserves criticism for that, or is that the application of hindsight? Because it's very difficult to see what else he could have reasonably done in that situation.
- [31:05]
Professor Carl Watkins
I mean, it does look like an act of misplaced chivalry, but given that there's already a challenge in southwest England, it might have been more sensible simply to let Matilda, Matilda go and so concentrate the problem in one place, and a lengthy and difficult siege there to extract her might itself have brought problems for the King. So I think it's sort of easy, with hindsight, to see this as another one of his political miscalculations, but it may have been a more difficult kind of decision to make than it seems to us.
- [31:53]
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- [33:07]
Matt Lewis
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- [34:11]
Professor Carl Watkins
Refreshers contain caffeine.
- [34:29]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I. I mean I. I think so. Because I think, as you say, you know, if you let Matilda go, you get all of your eggs into one basket, you put them all in one place. Arendelle is tricky because if he lays siege to Arendel, you know, Henry I's widow is in there with one of Steven's more significant noblemen, who you're going to alienate if you start laying siege to his castle. What do you do? Are you going to risk killing Empress Matilda? Do you really want to. To kill the daughter of Henry I? All of the choices that weren't letting her go and join Robert feel like they could have had far worse consequences for him than doing what must have felt also like the chivalrous thing of allowing, you know, a woman again, not. Not militarily persecuting a woman.
- [35:13]
Professor Carl Watkins
I think that's right. I think also the display of the right kinds of values is important for a king. This kind of honorable conduct is a virtue, can be displayed as a virtue. Justice's clemency when dealing with the rebels in 1136 might have been construed as a virtue, too. But of course, early in the reign, these sorts of decisions are capable of multiple different representations. And what might seem honorable or clement can also be represented as weakness, of miscalculation. And you see these different sorts of explanations being touted by different chronicles. Yeah.
- [35:55]
Matt Lewis
And I guess the potential fear of moving against both Matilda and Henry I's widow, Adeliza, and also potentially the Earl of Arundel, again, might play into that idea that you mentioned earlier about him failing to separate himself from the rest of the nobility. You know, Matilda is the daughter of a king, and he's not viewing himself as a king. He's viewing himself as someone who can't upset these people too much.
- [36:20]
Professor Carl Watkins
Yeah, I think that's right. There's a kind of an element of caution here as well, and that may end up being a sort of. In the long view, this may end up being an unwise political decision. But trapped in the moment, as you've indicated, he doesn't really have good options here. He knows that his predecessors have been rivaled. He knows that Henry I and William Rufus both had to contend with a brother, Robert Curthose, in Normandy, who had claimed the throne. But Stephen's problem is becoming even more difficult than that. He's rivaled in Normandy by Matilda and particularly Geoffrey of Anjou, her husband. But also now he's facing threats, significant threats in England as well, right on his own doorstep. So he's dealing with a political problem that is of a different shape and of a different magnitude, even compared to those confronted by his predecessors, his immediate predecessors.
- [37:26]
Matt Lewis
And then kind of, I guess the big kind of pinnacle, culmination moment of the reign or the year of the Reign really is 1141. There's so much that happens during that year and it begins in February with the Battle of Lincoln, which is kind of the only real set piece battle, set piece event of Stephen's reign. How significant is the Battle of Lincoln in February 1141? Kind of what happens there. And how significant is this for the rest of Stephen's reign?
- [37:58]
Professor Carl Watkins
The battle is a relatively rare set piece confrontation between the two sides in the Civil War. These kinds of set piece battles are high risk operations and there might sometimes be a reluctance on the part of participants to risk this sort of battle. And it's a measure of the significance of Lincoln, significant Darcissan Center, a significant castle, that Stephen is prepared to move there and then to engage in a set piece battle at some place outside the town. We don't know exactly where the battle took place. We know that. Well, the chroniclers discuss the circumstances around this battle. It seems that during mass at Lincoln Cathedral, Stephen, when offering a candle, drops it and the candle breaks. And chroniclers on both sides of the divide between the Angevins and Stephen acknowledge this event, but they interpret it in different ways. One says that the shattering the candle is a bad portent and it indicates the kind of the disintegration of Stephen's authority. The others suggest that the candles broken, shards are scooped up again and this is an indication that Stephen's authority will be recovered. But the chroniclers here, obviously writing with the benefit of hindsight, are capturing something quite important about this battle, which is that this is a potential turning point in the Civil War when you have a confrontation between both sides, high stakes at an important defended centre of authority in England. And the battle sees Stephen defeated, but it also sees Stephen captured.
- [40:00]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, and again, I think the chroniclers are quite keen to point out that Stephen was kind of given counsel not to engage. So lots of his nobles are encouraging him to sort of run away and not fight Robert of Gloucester. But again, much as the situation with Matilda a couple of years earlier, I can't help feeling that this is an awful lot of hindsight being at play, because for Steven, he's confronted by, you know, Randolph of Chester has, has snatched Lincoln Castle. So he's got a fairly significant nobleman who is making a bid for authority that isn't really his. Ranulph is also Robert of Gloucester's son in law. So, you know, he calls out his father in law for help when he's in a bit of trouble. For Stephen to have run away from that feels like it would have been so damaging to his authority that everything he's hinged his reign on, on being this firm military leader who can restore order to the country, that bit of his authority would have utterly evaporated. So we know that he loses the battle and we know that he is captured. And for me, it often feels like criticizing his decision to engage is just allowing hindsight to play out there. Because again, like Arundel, what other real option did he have in that circumstance?
- [41:20]
Professor Carl Watkins
I think that's right. And I think the context for this as well is that Stephen is increasingly in danger of losing control. In the regions of England. That process starts quite early on, in the late 1130s. Further north in Yorkshire, Northumbria, Cumbria, where a combination of Scottish royal power is intruding into that space. But also one of Stephen's owners, William of Ormal in Yorkshire, is emerging as an autonomous ruler effectively in that space. And so there's sort of a risk here, which we can see coming into being, that parts of England away from the southeast risk functioning under a kind of devolved authority. And some of those actors will remain notionally loyal to the king, others will throw in their lot with Matilda and the Angevin cause. And so it's important for Stephen to be active in the region so he's not simply pushed back into a corpse. And this is also connected as well with the problems of the broader malfunctioning of royal government, which is arguably something that becomes more of an issue, more of a problem after the arrest of the bishops. Will the dislocation that that produces.
- [42:41]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. And so Stephen, after the Battle of Lincoln, Stephen spends kind of nine months in captivity until eventually, you know, Empress Matilda almost gets herself crowned, but is forced to flee from London. Her half brother, Robert of Gloucester is captured trying to fight a rear guard to protect her. And then we end up in this prisoner exchange situation. It's quite interesting in some of the chronicles that they position Robert of Gloucester as almost insisting that he shouldn't be exchanged for Stephen, because, you know, I'm an earl and he's a king. That's not a fair kind of exchange. But does it point to one of the weaknesses in Matilda's cause that she is so desperate to get Robert back as the kind of military strong arm of her cause that she's forced to release Stephen having managed to take the King of England captive?
- [43:29]
Professor Carl Watkins
Yes, that's Right. Robert of Gloucester really is a significant figure in Matilda's enterprise. He is her sword arm, if you like. And so to be deprived of him as a military strategist clearly is very significant. So it absolutely makes sense from his point of view, suggesting that it's a critical mistake to let Stephen go. But from her position, even if she holds on to Stephen and keeps him in captivity, she arguably needs Robert of Gloucester. And part of the point here is that the war hasn't simply gone into abeyance when Stephen is captured, it continues. And it continues because Stephen's wife, his queen, also confusingly, Matilda, this time, Matilda of Boulogne. She keeps the political and the military show on the road. The military show with the assistance particularly of William of Eep. And so Matilda is still under military threat in this interstitial period when Stephen's in captivity and then when Robert of Gloucester is also captured by the other side. And so again, it's easy here to think that Matilda makes a strategic mistake in letting Stephen go in return for Robert of Gloucester. This is another moment where we look back on it and think, why did she this time decide to do that? But there is a logic to the decision that she makes, given the military situation in which she finds herself. And also there's a sense in which Matilda is in a kind of impasse, really. You know, she has been rejected by the Londoners, she's been driven out. And also then there's been disaster at Winchester with her own very near capture and the loss of Robert of Gloucester. So she's in a vulnerable position herself. Both of the principal parties are in weak positions at this point.
- [45:37]
Matt Lewis
Yeah,
- [45:54]
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- [47:24]
Matt Lewis
And I guess for. From Steven's point of view, the fact of his release, because you do get this impression that initially the chroniclers are thinking, well, that's Stephen over and done with. You know, he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison, like Robert Curthose had done. And if capture looked like some kind of divine punishment, you know, losing in battle was God's judgment on him, then Stephen's cause feels like it's almost revitalized by his release, because that feels a bit like more divine rehabilitation. God is back on his side. He's made him king again.
- [47:54]
Professor Carl Watkins
Yes, that's right. All of these sorts of events can be providentially coded, and clearly some of the chronicler's narration of the portents that surrounded his defeat at Lincoln, it's connected with that, the idea that he passes through these vicissitudes, but he ultimately prevails. So I think you're right that there's a sense in which Stephen's cause enjoys a kind of resurgence at this point. But of course, the political and the military realities militate against either side at this juncture, being able to land a decisive blow.
- [48:30]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, it's almost like they're both too strong to lose, but both too weak to win as well. And there's an interesting impact to consider, I think, as well, on sort of the institution of the crown. We've had a situation where the crown, King of England, has been a prisoner of his enemies for nine months, and yet he emerges almost unscathed. And the institution of the crown has persisted, as you said, William of Eep, Matilda of Bologne. I love Matilda of Bologne. I think she's a fantastic figure who, you know, doesn't get enough credit for the things that she does. During Stephen's reign, they have managed to keep his cause going, and it's almost proven that the. The institution of the English crown can't be affected even by the king being a prisoner. So the institution is becoming stronger on its own.
- [49:14]
Professor Carl Watkins
Is that fair to say the institution of the. That the institution of the crown survives the turmoil of Stephen's reign as a whole is very striking. And what happens in this period seems to me striking too, both with regard to the institution, as you've just indicated, but also with regard to the person of Stephen, the fact that there is not an attempt to strip Stephen of the crown there's not an attempt to reverse the consequences of his coronation. And also he's not simply killed. So there is a respect for Stephen's person as somebody who has been crowned as a king. Even if there is clearly a move now to remove him and replace him with the lady of the English, as Matilda is initially styled, there is that move afoot, but he is not stripped of the dignity that he has acquired in virtue of his succession to the throne.
- [50:10]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. And what do you think we should make of the role of the various barons in Stephen's reign, too? The chroniclers seem quite keen to paint them as perpetuators of the conflict for their own gain, that, you know, they're all absolutely reveling in all of this conflict and fighting and unrest. But as we get later on in the conflict, it's the barons that we see beginning to make peace agreements amongst themselves to kind of mitigate the effects of the war. So are they gaining from this or are they suffering from this, or is there a bit of both going on?
- [50:43]
Professor Carl Watkins
So the barons are a group of status conscious, ambitious, heavily armed men who butt up against each other, who quarrel about property, who quarrel about other things, but particularly quarrel about land. And so, in a sense, they are perpetuators of the. The violence of Stephen's reign. But that's in virtue of their quarrels with each other not being contained by effective royal authority. So it seems to me that the sort of the rocket fuel, if you like, that is powering the violence in Stephen's reign. A lot of it is coming from there. It's coming from disputes within the baronage that then become entangled within the succession dispute because they find no effective resolution because of the failure of royal authority. So you get different parties in different disputes joining different sides in the succession struggle for their own advantage. So that's the particular way, I think, in which the barons are sort of implicated in the violence of Stephen's reign.
- [51:46]
Matt Lewis
It feels like the barons also highlight a way in which this was tricky for Stephen, because how does a king, you know, even allowing that Stephen is failing to set himself as a king, how does a king rule over a nation? And barons who have an alternative, who, if you come down heavily on them and you upset them, they can go, well, fine, we'll just go and support your rival then.
- [52:06]
Professor Carl Watkins
This is a fundamental problem and it's a conundrum for which there is no resolution. Once you have a situation in which you have a rival pole of authority embedded in Normandy, and then also in southwestern England, where Matilda's cause is based, you have a fundamental problem in the functioning of royal justice, because the thing that makes royal justice work is the authority of the king. But the authority of the king is challenged. And if the king makes a decisive move in a dispute, the discomforted party in that adjudication can go and seek assistance from the Angevins. And if he doesn't act, then he looks weak. If the king does not act, the king simply looks weak. So there's a kind of fundamental malfunctioning of royal justice at this point, and that's making the violence of Stephen's reign worse. And it also explains why the violence isn't simply violence that is coming about because you have field armies contending with each other at the top. You also have a lot of violence at lower levels as well.
- [53:13]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. And it seems to be ultimately, Empress Matilda will eventually withdraw from England and begin to focus on the cause of her son, Henry Fitzempress, the future Henry ii, who will himself later on invade England. And it's Henry who comes to this kind of compromise arrangement with Stephen that seems to be kind of helped by the fact that the barons appear to have had enough of all of this by now. They kind of want it settled. They don't want this dragging into the next generation. And I just wonder, you know, they make this agreement where effectively, you know, Stephen adopts Henry and appoints him as his heir. And I wonder whether you think it's significant that. That that arrangement never really gets stress tested because Stephen sort of passes away within a year of that arrangement. So it's never really put to the test, is it?
- [54:03]
Professor Carl Watkins
Yeah, that's true. It's not. But the. I think it is the case that the barons are. Are war weary. In the 1140s, you can see various barons who seem constantly to be changing sides. Some of them are held up for opprobrium in the Chronicles. Perhaps the most prominent is Geoffrey de Mandeville, powerful actor in East Anglia. But in many ways, what those barons are doing, when they seem to be operating capriciously, is simply tacking this way and that in order to try to defend their interests in a world of profound political instability, where they fear the loss of property, they fear the loss of their name, they fear the future of their line. So you can sort of see barons responding in that way to the disturbed politics of the 1140s, but you also start to see other kinds of responses. You start to see barons engaging in private treaties with each other in order to limit the extent to which they might come to blows if they are called upon by the sides they support to fight on the battlefield. And you're also starting to see a reluctance on the part of the barons to fight, perhaps most strikingly at the Battle of Wallingford or the non Battle of Wallingford, where the two armies are drawn up towards the end of Stephen's reign against each other. And they don't. The two parties, the two aristocratic parties, don't want to fight and they force the principles, Stephen on one side and Henry of Anjou on the other, to negotiate with each other. So in a way, the sort of the agreement that is eventually hammered out between Stephen and Henry of Anjou is not likely to be stress tested because the larger political community desperately wants a resolution to the war and they want that resolution to take the form of an agreement about the succession. And it's quite striking that when Stephen dies, Henry of Anjou does not hurry immediately to England. So he's confident that the security measures that have been established in the treaty are going to work and that the succession is at this point secure. And of course, this is a rare instance in recent. The recent history of England, of the succession actually passing off smoothly.
- [56:28]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. I always wonder whether Henry takes a moment before he comes to England almost to allow any enemies to show themselves so that when he arrives, he can be comfortable that, you know, you had your chance, you had your moment, and if anyone does stick their head above the parapet, that maybe he's confident enough that he can deal with them. But Henry also seems. It's almost as if Henry II is as lucky in the circumstances of his accession as Stephen was unlucky in his. Stephen has facilitated this reconciliation of both sides. So both sides now want Henry to be the next king. There isn't really an opposition. And even, you know, more widely, David of Scotland has gone, there's a child on the throne of Scotland and Henry just sort of marches up there and says, right, we'll have all our land back, please. And they're not really in a position to stop him. So it's almost like every bit of bad luck that Stephen had that perhaps he exacerbated as well. Henry is replacing with good luck and looking incredibly strong from the very opening of his reign, which creates this really jarring contrast with Stephen, I think, doesn't it?
- [57:29]
Professor Carl Watkins
That's true. Luck is a kind of essential constituent of the consolidation of authority at this point, and Henry II has it in spades. You've already mentioned the great Scottish king, King David is dead. Not Only is David dead, but his son and heir, Prince Henry, has predeceased him. And so, as you indicate, the crown in Scotland has now devolved to a child, Malcolm. Also own son, Eustace, who gets a very bad press in many of the chronicles, but was clearly an effective military operator. He's dead and there seems to be no ambition on Stephen's part to look to a younger son, William, to carry on his cause, to carry on his line. So, yes, it is definitely the case that many of the people who might have posed problems for Henry of Anjou, now Henry ii, have been cleared by fortune from the field, doesn't mean that he doesn't face any enemies. There are some barons who are prepared to resist him fairly early in the new reign. Interestingly, these tend to be figures that enjoy concentrated blocks of property from which they seem to think they have a chance of resisting the new king. But what's striking is that magnates that have those sorts of concentrated power bases are perhaps the exception rather than the rule. And the generality of the baronial class is really to fall in behind the new king. They clearly see a better future in the reconstitution of royal authority, rather as it stood in 1135 when Henry I died, rather than looking to a different kind of political configuration of England, which, for instance, saw royal authority restricted, attenuated, and perhaps more power in the hands of regional magnates of the earls.
- [59:30]
Matt Lewis
This has been absolutely fascinating, and I just wanted to end with a question that I don't know how reasonable it is to answer this in any kind of a quick way. How anarchic was the anarchy? We call it the anarchy because we have this sense that it was 19 years of complete and utter chaos. Do you think it really was that anarchic?
- [59:53]
Professor Carl Watkins
In recent decades, there's been a certain amount of revisionism here among historians who've wanted to suggest that actually the stories of violence associated with Stephen's reign are overdone. And this notion of Stephen's reign as the anarchy is the product of attaching too much importance to the words of rich, but also ideologically interested ecclesiastical chroniclers. Historians have looked to other sources to argue that, for instance, aspects of royal government, at least in parts of the country, continued to function quite effectively. And, of course, some of the most famous characterizations of the anarchy are, with the benefit of hindsight, specifically with the benefit of hindsight from Henry II's reign, where there's an obvious incentive to turn the failings of Stephen's rule into a foil for the effectiveness of Henry II's rule of England and indeed the wider empire. So for all those reasons, we need to perhaps take the narratives of epidemic violence with a pinch of sod. But it remains the case that the chroniclers were portraying in England under Stephen, that they expected their audiences to recognize. And in order for this rhetoric of the effective reconstitution of royal authority under Henry II to work, there must be some substance, there must at least be some perception in the part of the audience for those chronicles that there was a lot of violence under Stephen, there was a lot of disorder, that there was dysfunctional rule. So I think we can't push this kind of revisionism that downplays the disorders of the anarchy too far. I think we have to come back to the chronicles and the way in which their reportage of the reign must have resonated with contemporaries.
- [62:04]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I tend to think anarchy is a really hard word for what happened there, because what you see is the fracturing of England and, you know, there is authority in various places. Stephen seems to maintain his authority really effectively in the southeast and up as far as York on occasions. The southwest is not ungoverned, it's just. It's governed by Matilda. The north of England seems to actually relish being governed by David. They enjoy being part of Scotland and it's absolutely fine and they don't have a problem. So it's not necessarily that it's anarchic. And I always can't help wondering whether it's this kind of almost this wiggish British Empire view of history that looks at this period when England fractured. You know, England has been an entity for kind of 200 years by this point. And in Stephen's reign seems to be moving towards splitting again. And that almost Whiggish view of history, that everything needs to be this relentless move towards the Great British Empire, that this looks like a backward step and therefore must be something really horrible that we have to characterize as an evil moment in English history.
- [63:08]
Professor Carl Watkins
It's certainly the case that Stephen's reign forces us to think a little bit about where England ends, particularly in the north, because it's not an implausible world. That circumstance might have fortuned it that David did manage to make good. David's successors did manage to make good those gains that they'd made in the north, in Cumbria, in Northumbria, maybe even in parts of Yorkshire. So it's sort of. It reminds us that the English kingdom was perhaps capable of being reconfigured at this particular juncture.
- [63:45]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. Yeah. And so just to end on if my assessment of Stephen is that I think he's a good man who didn't make a very good king, does that seem fair to you? Was he too nice to be a good medieval king?
- [63:56]
Professor Carl Watkins
I think he's a brave man. He's a man capable of remarkable political dash. It's not so clear that he's capable of strategizing, of strategic vision. And what might be important there is that while he's been around the court a lot, he hasn't really had an apprenticeship as a prospective king. So that seems in some ways to contribute to his rather inhibited performance as a king. Come back again to that problem of Stephen being unable to transcend his own political circumstances as a very prominent and senior member of the aristocracy, but still, ultimately a member of the aristocracy who happens to have ended up wearing a crew crown.
- [64:43]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I think that might be a really good place to leave it. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Carlin, and introducing us a bit more closely to. To King Stephen and his reign. I found it really, really fascinating. So thank you very much for joining us.
- [64:56]
Professor Carl Watkins
No, a pleasure. Thank you.
- [64:58]
Matt Lewis
I hope you've enjoyed this discussion. You can find more about this period in our back catalog, with episodes on Empress Matilda, the White Ship Disaster, and on Henry I Reign. There are new installments of God Medieval every Tuesday and Friday. So please come back to join Elena and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com forward/subscribe. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit. At Edward Jones.
- [66:04]
Professor Carl Watkins
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Matt Lewis
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