Henry made his way south from Carlisle, possibly bound directly for Normandy, possibly intending to fight Stephen and Eustace. But whatever Henry’s intentions, Stephen and Eustace were determined to obliterate him. Henry at sixteen – knighted and head of the Angevin party – was a far greater threat than the fourteen-year-old boy who had sailed to England to help his mother. The chronicler John of Hexham captured the spirit of exactly what was at stake: ‘There was between [Henry] and Eustace … a contest of arms, for they were rivals for the same crown.’124 It would be a fight to death.
Henry evaded capture, taking back roads to Bristol, despite Eustace’s dogged quest. The Gesta Stephani recorded the devastation of Eustace’s campaign: ‘They took and plundered everything they came upon, set fire to houses and churches, and, what was more cruel and inhuman to behold, fired the crops which had been reaped and stoked all over the fields, and consumed or destroyed everything edible they found.’125 This bitter civil war had terrible consequences for ordinary men and women, particularly those who lived in the path of battles. The period was peppered with crop failure, famine, wanton destruction, crime and disorder.
Atrocities were committed on both sides; when Matilda’s ally Miles of Gloucester sacked Worcester in 1139, he burned the city; his army (made up of domestic forces, not foreign mercenaries), ‘rabid and debauched, took those citizens who were not killed in the pillaging and led them away, coupled like dogs, into wretched captivity’.126 In revenge, Stephen saw nothing amiss when he attacked the countryside rather than Hereford or Bristol castles, destroying everything in his path that could feed the population; he left ‘nothing at all, as far as it lay in his power, that could serve his enemies for food or any purpose’.127 It was commonplace to kill all the livestock and burn the crops, to prevent them falling into enemy hands. Livestock levels would still not return to normal even by the middle of the 1150s.128
In the West Country, scene of some of the bitterest fighting, the author of the Gesta wrote of famine, the death of the local peasant population, with no one alive or able to bring in the harvest. Stephen’s domains were ‘reduced to a desert’.129 Henry of Huntingdon wrote despairingly in 1140: ‘Gaunt famine, following, wastes away, whom murder spares, with slow decay.’130 Neither side left anything for the general population to live on. Those people who survived the path of the marauding armies often starved to death.
In the counties beleaguered by war, acts of generosity and kindness were considered unusual enough by the chroniclers to record them. A local landlord in Gloucestershire, the Angevin stronghold, paid for a chapel to be built at Winchcombe Abbey, ‘so that both he and his men could have some refuge there from the incursions of robbers and the ruthless machinations of evil men’.131 Similarly, Waleran of Meulan was considered kind when he freed those prisoners he had taken hostage after he attacked Tewkesbury.132
It was not just Stephen’s and Matilda’s forces who ravaged the land; some opportunists took it upon themselves to establish their own armies in areas with little rule of law. The author of the Gesta wrote bitterly of the atrocities carried out by the Caldret brothers, who he thought were Flemish.133 The author of the Peterborough Chronicle, meanwhile, recorded that ‘both men and women [were] put in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured with pains unspeakable’, captured by local lords and held in their dungeons.134 It was generally not the nobility who suffered during this dreadful war, but the innocent local population who stood in the way of their sieges, occasional battles and devastation of the countryside.
The chroniclers recorded tales of torture and ransom to appropriate wealth, the fear engendered by Stephen’s Flemish mercenaries, and the lack of respect for church property. These sacred places were stripped of their valuables and graves were desecrated, often to build more castles upon. Some local lords even extorted money from villages in the form of a ‘protection’ tax, treating the chaos in those areas riven with fighting as a moneymaking opportunity.135
Oxfordshire experienced some of the bitterest fighting of the civil war, owing to Matilda’s presence after Londoners threw her out in 1141, and then her close proximity at Devizes. Both sides had held the county at various points during the war. Oxford, the county’s most important town, was the scene of an annual fair, and its central location made it a magnet for trade. It was a wealthy town, about the sixth richest in the kingdom.136 But Stephen partially burned and sacked it, and besieged the castle in an attempt to capture Matilda in 1142. Local people fled for their lives, leaving all their possessions behind. Matilda had eluded Stephen; but for the people of the town, the burning of Oxford and the loss of their possessions and income were catastrophic. Oxfordshire, one of the most agriculturally prosperous counties in England, suffered regular crop burnings and pillagings, with peasants conscripted into local armies and communities attacked, leaving widows and orphans unprotected. Oxford had still not completely recovered economically by 1155.
In many large towns, however, trade, markets and annual fairs tended to continue as usual, as did the inhabitants’ pleasures – their cockfighting, their wrestling matches, and their football matches where, if the town was large enough, members of the trades and the schools would align themselves into teams, cheered on by their friends and relatives.137
Chroniclers who recorded the woes of the civil war were for the most part from the areas affected by the fighting. If you lived in Essex, firmly in royal hands throughout the period, you would hardly have known that a war was happening at all.
Peasants continued to till their land and bring in the harvest, unimpeded by either army. Villagers went to church on Sundays and feast days, where they would stand for services presided over by a priest speaking Latin, which they did not understand. Churches were a riot of brilliant colour, from the lurid wall paintings depicting the horrors or joys of the Day of Judgement, to the effigies, tombs and carvings of saints decorated with the congregants’ favourite baubles and trinkets.
Community activities held in churches continued too – they were not just a place of prayer, baptism, weddings and funerals, but also the scene of festivals and plays. ‘Church-ales’ would be held here, effectively fundraisers for the church, which elicited money by selling ale.
Anarchy did not therefore exist in all areas, all of the time. Some form of government was exercised nearly everywhere – whether controlled by Stephen, Matilda, or the great magnates such as Ranulf of Chester, Robert’s son-in-law, who acted more or less independently. And each party of power minted coins and collected taxes.
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Henry left England in January 1150. He would not return for three years, although Eustace continued to pursue him obsessively. Only one of them could be king.
He returned to Normandy to great acclaim, where his father officially pronounced him ‘duke’. As Henry’s star rose, Eustace’s declined. Although Henry was absent from England, he was now taken seriously as one of two contenders for the throne. Many believed he would be England’s next king, and as such his favour was frequently courted more than Stephen’s by the self-interested magnates whose lands straddled the English Channel.
In Normandy, Geoffrey finally captured Gerard Berlai, Louis’ friend and seneschal for the county of Poitou, in June 1150 after a year-long siege. Geoffrey, inspired by his reading of the Roman writer Vegetius, had bombarded Gerard’s seemingly impregnable double-walled castle with ‘Greek Fire’, a feared incendiary device of the ancient world.138
A desperate Eustace joined his brother-in-law Louis to attempt to annihilate Henry on the continent. Louis was pious. In 1147 he and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had left their kingdom for two years for Jerusalem with the Second Crusade. Militarily it was a disaster, an utter humiliation for Louis. On his return he was dismayed not only at Henry’s and Geoffrey’s victories in Normandy, but also at the stupendous progress Henry