Page:A School History of England (1911).djvu/70

 ‘White Ship’ in crossing the Channel; and when Henry died, in 1135, his heir was his only daughter, Matilda, whose second husband was Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou in France. Now no woman had ever reigned in England, and so, when Count Stephen of Blois, son of William I’s daughter Adela, appeared in London and claimed the crown, he was welcomed as king, although he and most of the barons had already promised to uphold the claim of Matilda. Stephen was known to be a kind-hearted fellow who would not rule too strictly; he was, in fact, just like his uncle Robert.

Alas for England! Matilda, naturally enough, claimed her ‘rights’, and civil war began almost at once. Nothing could have suited the barons better. They changed sides continually, and fought now for Stephen and now for Matilda, as long as there was any one left to fight. ‘For nineteen winters,’ says the old English chronicler, who was still writing in his monastery at Peterborough, ‘this went on.’ Castles sprang up everywhere, ‘full of devils,’ who tortured men for their riches, made war for sport, burnt towns and corn-crops, coined their own money and compelled the poor to take it in payment. At the end of the reign it was said there were over three hundred unlicensed castles in England. Poor Stephen did his best; he flew hither and thither besieging these castles, but seldom had patience to take one. He and Matilda (who was just as bad, and a horrid female into the bargain) could only think of bribing the great barons to fight for them by heaping lands, riches and offices on them; and, between the pair of them, the treasures of the crown of England were soon spent. The King of Scots, David I, who was Matilda's cousin, rushed in at the very beginning with a great army of wild men,