Anarchy under Stephen?

Historical debate on the reign of Stephen has too often descended into sterile point-scoring over the extent to which this was a period of ‘anarchy’. Like ‘feudalism’, ‘anarchy’ is an anachronistic term, invented only in the eighteenth century. Lacking any sort of ‘anarchy-meter’ for the 1140s, historians have debated the relative significance of coinage, baronial castles, peace treaties and charters as if these can somehow be calibrated into a verdict for or against the ‘anarchic’. In reality, the blood libel may be a much more significant and, in European terms, easily the most baneful of the legacies of King Stephen’s chaotic reign. Two other legacies are worth mentioning, not just of Stephen’s reign, but of the interaction between Church and secular society over the first fifty years of the twelfth century.

Monastic chroniclers, most famously the compiler of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle still being written at Peterborough, tended to play up the disasters of the 1140s, writing of Stephen’s reign as the nineteen years ‘when Christ and his saints slept’. In fact, far from being a time of inactivity, this was a period when the public face of both Christ and the Church was transformed. The internecine warfare of Stephen’s reign undoubtedly left a bitter legacy of property disputes, with two or more families ever afterwards convinced that they had proper title to the same estate. Land was the chief symbol of wealth and status, and its confiscation or violent dispossession, as in the late 1130s or 40s, was all the easier to effect given that there were few major landholding families in England whose title to their land, by 1135, was more than seventy years’ old. One set of violent seizures, after 1066, only paved the way for another, after 1135.

Some of these new disputes were resolved via the law courts and the new assizes of Henry II’s reign, whose effect was principally to reward those who could prove longstanding possession. In other cases, where two or more families had longstanding claims, a resolution was more difficult. It might be achieved by political persuasion, by the King’s friendship, or by simple bribery. More often, it led to endless bitterness and litigation via the sorts of process that activate several of the more law-ridden novels of Trollope or Dickens. Jarndyce versus Jarndyce, give or take a bit of armour and quite a lot more physical violence, is easily rivalled by such cases as those of Stuteville versus Mowbray for possession of Kirby Moorside, fitz Harding versus Berkeley for the honour and castle of Berkeley, or the earls of Gloucester versus the earls of Chester for possession of Chipping Camden. All of these disputes had their origin in the reign of Stephen.