Stephen of Blois & The Shipwreck

Stephen of Blois Usurps the Throne – When Christ and His Saints Slept – The Campaigns of David I of Scotland –The Outbreak of Civil War – Empress Matilda Invades England – The Battle of Lincoln – The Empress is Ejected from London – The Rout of Winchester – The Empress Dons Ice Skates – The Battle of Wilton – The Angevin Cause Weakens – The Second Crusade – An Inept King – Henry in England – The Death of Eustace – The Treaty of Wallingford

Stephen of Blois had lost his father, Count Stephen-Henry of Blois, in the Battle of Ramlah during the First Crusade. Stephen was just a boy at the time, and because he was the third of his father’s sons and unable to inherit any of his father’s lands, his mother, Adela of Normandy, daughter of William the Conqueror, sent him to the court of his uncle, Henry I, in the hope that he would win titles and land to make a name for himself. Stephen won his uncle’s favor, rising in rank in the king’s court. He was granted the county of Mortain at age 18 and knighted after the Battle of Tinchebray. Stephen married Matilda of Boulogne, a marriage by which he procured copious amounts of land. He had been slated to sail to England on the infamous White Ship but had decided to take another vessel across the Channel, a decision that saved his life. He pledged his support to Henry I’s daughter, Empress Matilda (called the “Empress” because of her former marriage to Emperor Henry V of the Holy Roman Empire), but when Henry I died, Stephen made a move for the throne. 

Many English barons didn’t like the idea of being ruled by a woman, especially one who had married into an Angevin family (Normandy and Anjou weren’t good neighbors), and the leading lords and bishops (including his brother, who was the Bishop of Winchester) welcomed Stephen (who didn’t have a spot of Angevin blood in him) with open arms when he crossed the Channel to take the crown. He presented himself before the English as one who would uphold Henry I’s favorable policies, and he won support from the barons by acknowledging their earldoms. Empress Matilda had been in France at the time of her father’s death and couldn’t beat Stephen to the punch. Stephen was crowned on 22 December 1135, much to Matilda’s rage—but she would have to bide her time, for she was pregnant with her and Geoffrey Plantagenet’s third child and was in no state to make a move to take what had been promised her. Stephen needed his ascension to the throne to be certified by the Pope, and to this end his brother, Bishop of Winchester, convinced Stephen’s older brother Theobold and Louis VI of France to send letters of commendation to Pope Innocent III; the Pope confirmed Stephen as the King of England later that year, and Stephen’s advisers wasted no time sending copies of the confirmation throughout England. 

Stephen of Blois was likeable enough. He was energetic, brave, jovial, forgiving, and mild-mannered—but these were traits more suited for a bartender than for a ruler. He lacked the firm resolve needed to keep his subjects, especially his jealous and greedy lords, in line. The barons recognized these weaknesses in their new king and didn’t hesitate to exploit them. Though Stephen was able to maintain the status quo of England for the first few years of his reign, “robber barons” began to crop up in the countryside. These were self-made lords who built their own castles absent the king’s consent and terrorized neighboring areas, plundering and killing for their own profit. The medieval chronicler Robert of Torigny reported that as many as 1,115 rogue castles had been built during the Shipwreck, but as he elsewhere reports a more precise number of 126, the first number is likely an exaggeration. This general period of lawlessness, coupled with the coming civil war that would lay waste the country for fifteen years, has been called The Anarchy by historians but was known to contemporaries as “The Shipwreck,” since it was fallout from the wreck of the White Ship. Had Henry I’s son William not met his death in 1120, England’s fate would have been different. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle minces no words in its treatment of this period in English history:

In the days of [King Stephen] there was nothing but strife, evil and robbery, for quickly the great men who were traitors rose against him. When the traitors saw that Stephen was a mild good humoured man who inflicted no punishment… they committed all manner of horrible crimes. They had done him homage and sworn oaths of fealty to him, but not one of their oaths was kept. They were all forsworn and their oaths broken. For every great man built him[self] castles and held them against the king; they sorely burdened the unhappy people of the country with forced labour on the castles; and when the castles were built they filled them with devils and wicked men. By night and by day they seized those they believed to have any wealth, whether they were men or women; and in order to get their gold or silver, they put them into [dungeons] and tortured them with unspeakable tortures, for never were martyrs tortured as they were. They hung them up by the feet and smoked them with foul smoke. They strung them up by the thumbs, or by the head, and hung coats of mail on their feet. They tied knotted cords round their heads and twisted it until it entered the brain. They put them in dungeons wherein were adders and snakes and toads and so destroyed them. Many thousands they starved to death. I know not how to, nor am I able to tell of, all the atrocities nor all the cruelties which they wrought upon the unhappy people of this country... Never did a country endure greater misery, and never did the heathen act more vilely than they did. And so it lasted for nineteen long years while Stephen was king, till the land was undone and darkened with such deeds [that] men said openly that Christ and his saints slept.

Before lawlessness became the mark of the land, there were signposts to what lie ahead: from the start of his reign, Stephen was faced with unrest from numerous English barons, rebellious Welsh princes, and Scottish invaders. As to the latter, King David I of Scotland supported the Empress Matilda, as she was his niece. Upon hearing of Henry I’s death, David took swift advantage of England’s political instability and launched an invasion of Northumbraland, seizing both Carlisle and Newcastle before being repulsed by the royal army. A protracted war in 1137 resulted in a brief truce; after the truce expired, David outrageously demanded that Stephen give him the whole of Northumbraland; the Scottish king claimed it was his by virtue of his marriage to the daughter of a former Northumbrian earl. Stephen, of course, refused, and in 1138 David marched south against him yet again, and the English army, commanded by William of Aumale, met him near York. The majority of William’s force comprised local militia and knights from Northumbraland supplemented by Flemish mercenaries (most of the royal army was to the south with Stephen putting down restive barons). King David found the English army drawn up and moved to attack: his unarmored spearmen threw themselves against William’s front line, which consisted heavily of dismounted knights. Despite having support from their archers, the Scottish soldiers were routed—except for small parties of men-at-arms protecting David and his son Henry. Henry made a valiant counterattack that gave David and his entourage time to fall back, and Henry followed suit. The English didn’t pursue them far, but the Scottish losses were so great that David had no choice but to return home. He and Stephen eventually came to a peace that would last twenty years. It was good that Stephen was able to secure his northern border, for he still had to deal with rebellious barons—and the return of Empress Matilda.

The Empress’ half-brother Robert of Gloucester supported her claim to the throne, and in 1139 he landed at Wareham with the goal of securing a port for her upcoming invasion—and in doing so he inaugurated the era of English history known as “The Shipwreck.” Stephen confronted Gloucester’s forces and forced him to retreat to the southwest. The Empress found another friend in the Dowager Queen Adeliza who lived in Arundel, about fifty miles southwest of London; Adeliza invited the Empress to find sanctuary at her castle, and on 30 September both the Empress and her half-brother arrived at Arundel with forty knights. The Empress enjoyed Adeliza’s hospitality while Robert marched northwest with the twin aims of raising support and joining hands with Miles of Gloucester, who had renounced his allegiance to Stephen. The English king besieged the Empress in Arundel Castle, but the siege ended when she and Stephen negotiated a truce with Stephen’s younger brother Henry of Blois. Stephen, in his eagerness to reveal his chivalric ideals, didn’t expel her from the island but, rather, kindly escorted her southwest to Bristol where she reunited with Robert. It soon became clear that chivalry should have been damned, for their reunited forces soon wrested from Stephen’s control large swathes of territory stretching from Gloucester and Bristol in the south to Devon and Cornwall in the east, and then north into the Welsh marches and as far east as Oxford and Wallingford.

London was under threat, and Stephen had to move fast to uproot the rebels. He assaulted the Empress’ Angevin supporters at Wallingford Castle, but its defenses were too stout to make any inroads. He left a spattering of soldiers in Wallingford to keep the rebels cooped up and marched west into Wiltshire to root the rebels from Trowbridge, recapturing a string of lesser castles en route. Miles of Gloucester harassed Stephen’s forces camped outside Wallingford and threatened London. Stephen, with an enemy at his rear, had no option but to abandon his goal of Trowbridge and return east to protect the capital. Stephen’s troubles worsened in 1140 when the Bishop of Ely rebelled against him, hoping to turn East Anglia against Stephen. The bishop established his headquarters on the marshy Isle of Ely. Stephen responded by taking an army into the marshes, and he built a causeway of boats lashed together and launched a surprise attack on the bishop’s forces. The bishop managed to escape and find sanctuary in Gloucester, but his men and castles were recaptured and East Anglia pacified. While Stephen was occupied in East Anglia, Robert of Gloucester snatched some of the land Stephen had retaken the year prior. Thus Stephen’s gain was supplanted by a loss. Making matters worse, in late 1140 Ranulf, the Earl of Chester, revolted. Stephen gathered his forces and marched north. Ranulf, hearing that the king was on his way, fled his base of operations in Lincoln Castle. When Stephen arrived at Lincoln, Ranulf was long gone, but he besieged the castle anyways. Ranulf lacked the strength to drive him out, so in a bid for support he pledged his fealty to the Empress and joined hands with Robert of Gloucester. Their combined forces advanced on Stephen’s besieging army. Hearing word of their approach, Stephen held a frenzied council to determine whether they should stand and fight or pack their bags and flee. Stephen decided to fight, and on 2 February 1141 his forces outside Lincoln were arrayed against those of the Empress and her followers. 

The Battle of Lincoln

Stephen commanded the center of his army; his right wing was under the command of Alan of Brittany, and his left was commanded by William of Aumule. Stephen dismounted many of his knights and formed them into solid blocks of infantry. He dismounted, too, and joined them in the center, wielding a massive battle-axe. Robert and the turncoat Ranulf sent their first wave of Welsh infantry against Stephen’s left wing, but Aumule’s soldiers made quick work of them. During the melee, the Angevin cavalry encircled Stephen’s troops. The king was surrounded, and he knew it; a number of his followers despaired and fled the field. Stephen, too stubborn and proud to quit, fought on, defending himself with his battle-axe. The Angevin warriors closed in on him, and the medieval writer Roger de Hoveden, in his Annals, captures this pivotal moment of the battle:

Then might you have seen a dreadful aspect of battle, on every quarter around the king’s troop fire flashing from the meeting of swords and helmets—a dreadful crash, a terrific clamor—at which the hills re-echoed, the city walls resounded. With horses spurred on, they charged the king’s troop, slew some, wounded others, and dragging some away, made them prisoners… No rest, no breathing time was granted them, except in the quarter where stood that most valiant king [Stephen], as the foe dreaded the incomparable force of his blows. The earl of Chester, on perceiving this, envying the king in his glory, rushed upon him with all the weight of his armed men. Then was seen the might of the king, equal to a thunderbolt, slaying some with his immense battle-axe, and striking others down… Then arose the shouts afresh, all rushing against him and against all. At length through the number of the blows, the king’s battle-axe was broken asunder. Instantly, with his right hand, drawing his sword, well worthy of a king, he marvelously waged the combat, until the sword as well was broken asunder… On seeing this William [de Keynes], a most powerful knight, rushed upon the king, and seizing him by the helmet, cried with a loud voice, ‘Hither, all of you come hither! I have taken the king!’

Thus Stephen was captured, and it appeared his cause was lost. Surely, with his imprisonment, the Empress could take what she and her Angevin supporters (along with vast numbers of English barons) considered to be rightfully hers. Sensing the undeniable shift in power, many of Stephen’s most die-hard supporters abandoned him. The Empress, smug in her half-brother’s victory at the Battle of Lincoln and confident with Stephen in chains, arrogantly marched into London to be crowned Queen of England. London, however, was Stephen’s strongest bastion of support, and his supporters, disgusted with the Empress’ haughty egotism, drove her out of the city. She took up station in Oxford to the west, undeterred in her ambition of being crowned Queen of England. No matter what the commoners of London thought, she had won and Stephen was in chains. What could go wrong? As it turns out, the Empress’ fortunes would make a 180-degree turn that summer. Her unraveling fortunes began when a number of her supporters took control of Winchester’s royal castle. Henry of Blois, Stephen’s younger brother, was bishop of that city, and he gathered a force loyal to his brother and besieged the Angevins in the royal castle. Receiving news of the siege, the Empress gathered an army of her own and left Oxford on 28 July to deal with the annoying bishop. She appeared outside the city gates on 31 July, catching the bishop wholly off-guard. The bishop fled the city, and his soldiers retreated to Wolvesy Castle, another fortress in Winchester, which belonged to the church. Thus the Angevins in the royal castle were relieved, and the Empress set up her headquarters in their midst and arrayed her forces against the ecclesiastical fortress. Her half-brother Robert arrived with his own forces, and he set up a separate base of operations near Winchester Cathedral. They settled down for a long siege, but then a new and unexpected enemy came to the forefront: Queen Matilda, the wife of the imprisoned Stephen.

Queen Matilda mustered an army that included numerous mercenaries and the thousand-strong London militia. She set up camp on the east side of Winchester, besieging the Empress’ besieging army. The Angevin forces began to suffer as their food supplies dwindled. Robert of Gloucester tried to fortify an abbey six miles north of the city, but Flemish mercenary cavalry made quick work of his forces. Robert knew they had to abandon Winchester before their army was whittled away by starvation and disease, and he and the Empress decided to push out of Winchester, even though it would mean inevitable clashes with Queen Matilda’s forces. Because much of the Queen’s forces were untrained militia, they may have been more optimistic than their situation warranted. On 14 September they streamed out from the west side of the city, hurrying down the road to Salisbury. Just under ten miles to the northwest, the road crossed the River Test at Stockbridge. The Queen’s forces harassed the Angevins the whole way, and though the Empress was able to escape over the river with her vanguard, the Queen’s forces laid waste to the main body of the Empress’ march. Robert of Gloucester was able to keep a tight reign on his forces, but by the time they reached the bridge, they were encircled by the Queen’s forces and the bridge was packed with panicked Angevin refugees. Robert had no choice but to surrender with his men. 

The Empress may have had Stephen, but the Queen had captured her half-brother in the so-called “Rout of Winchester”. Only three months after Robert’s capture, the opposing forces managed to make an exchange, Stephen for Robert, and on Christmas 1141 Stephen and his brave queen enjoyed a fresh coronation as King and Queen. A church council led by Stephen’s brother, Bishop Henry of Blois, determined that Stephen rather than the Empress had the right to rule England. Over the past two years Stephen had been through a whirlwind of shifting fates: he had been able to keep hold of his reign and bring numerous rebels to heel, but he had failed to expel the Angevin threat; he had been captured at the Battle of Lincoln, but the Londoners had rejected the Empress; he had been consigned to live out the rest of his days imprisoned, but his wife had risen up in his defense and bested those who had captured him. He had been released, enjoyed a fresh coronation, and his rule had the backing of the English church. As 1142 dawned, things were looking up for Stephen—but they were far from over. Large portions of England remained in the hands of the Angevins, and rebellious barons were carving their own territories in the “borderlands” between those areas staunchly loyal to the opposing sides in this burgeoning civil war.

The Empress Matilda Escapes Oxford

Stephen’s first aim of the new year was to bring the Earl of Chester back into line; he was able to get Ranulf to pledge him fealty, and then Stephen turned to demolishing numerous Angevin castles built during his imprisonment the year before. The Empress stationed herself in Oxford Castle, protected not only by stout walls but also by the River Thames. Stephen, hoping to capture the Empress and put an end to her ambitions once-and-for-all, launched a quick attack across the river, leading the charge in the vanguard and even swimming part of the way across the Thames. Once on the other side, his forces stormed the town and trapped the Empress in the castle. The castle, however, was too strong to be raided, and Stephen lacked the equipment to bring it down; so he settled down for a long siege. Right before Christmas that year, the Empress managed an escape that has gone down in legend: donning nothing but white to blend into the snow-drenched landscape, she escaped the castle, slipped through Stephen’s cordon, and crossed the frozen Thames on ice skates. Avoiding roads and navigating thick woodlands, she found sanctuary in the Angevin-held town of Wallingford. The Angevins in Oxford Castle surrendered shortly after, and Stephen was more than dismayed to find that the Empress was not among them. 

Come 1143, it was Stephen’s turn to be under siege: while tending to business at Wilton Castle, Robert of Gloucester’s troops appeared and laid siege to the fortress. Stephen attempted a breakout, which resulted in the Battle of Wilton. The Angevin cavalry cut a swathe through Stephen’s forces, and for a moment it appeared Stephen would know chains once more. But the king’s steward, William Martel, led a brutal rearguard defense that allowed Stephen to escape the battle. Martel was captured, but Stephen showed his gratitude by relinquishing Sherborne Castle to the Angevins for his steward’s release. Angevin pressure in the west was weakened when Miles of Gloucester died in a hunting accident, but fresh baronial rebellions would offset any gains in Miles’ death. Stephen summoned the unlikeable Geoffrey, Earl of Essex, to court, and he threatened to have his head lopped off unless he relinquished control over the castles in or near London that were under his supervision, including the Tower of London. Geoffrey had no recourse but to submit, but he rebelled as soon as he was free of Stephen’s clutches. He set up his headquarters in the Isle of Ely and launched a campaign against Cambridge, hoping to leapfrog his way to London to wrest control of the capital. Stephen was already engaged with another rebellious earl in Norfolk, so he couldn’t send a force large enough to oppose Geoffrey directly. He settled for constructing a screen of castles between Ely and London to halt the Essex earl’s advance. A new year, that of 1144, dawned, and the Earl of Chester became a turncoat once again; meanwhile Robert of Gloucester raided territories loyal to the king. Stephen’s attentions could only be focused on the island, so when news came that Geoffrey Plantagenet, who had been ravaging the duchy of Normandy, sacked the duchy’s capital city of Rouen in 1144, the king could do nothing but weep. Louis VII, the King of France, recognized Geoffrey Plantagenet as the Duke of Normandy, and Stephen lacked the strength to reassert his authority. Even if he weren’t embroiled in civil war on the island, the English earls and barons couldn’t be relied upon to fulfill their feudal duties and send him soldiers and support. In September Geoffrey of Essex died during an attack on Burwell Castle, which Stephen had built as a bulwark against him, and in 1145 Stephen recaptured the long-Angevin stronghold of Faringdon Castle in western England. The next year Stephen won back Ranulf’s loyalty, but then the king pulled the same shenanigans he had with Geoffrey of Essex: he summoned Ranulf to his court and threatened to have him killed unless he handed over a number of castles, including Lincoln. Like Geoffrey, Ranulf submitted, but also like Geoffrey, the moment he was back home he rebelled again; this time, however, he lacked the castles needed to launch any formidable attack on the king. His revolt, in this regard, is understandable, and likewise understandable is how English barons, even those who had been die-hard supporters of Stephen, grew to distrust the king.  

By 1147 England had been in the throes of civil war for seven years, and the results could be seen throughout the country. Rogue castles had popped up all across England, and barons wary of Stephen were likely to either ally with the Angevins or strike out on their own. England’s coinage system collapsed: at one point Stephen, the Empress, and independent lords all minted their own coins. Most of the chaos was felt in the “borderlands” between the king’s bastion of loyalty in the southeast and the Angevin core around Gloucester and Bristol. But things were about to cool down. In 1147 the Empress received two blows to her power: her half-brother died and Pope Eugene III called for the Second Crusade. 

European Leaders on Second Crusade

A number of her Angevin supporters, worn down by their lack of success in the civil war, disheartened by Robert’s death, and drawn to the promise of riches against the Muslims, abandoned the Empress’ cause and answered the call to fight for Christ against the heathens. The Second Crusade would last from 1147-1149, and it was sparked by the loss of the County of Edessa—the first crusader kingdom founded in 1098 by Baldwin of Boulogne—to Turkish forces under the Turkish noble Zengi in 1144. King Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany led their separate armies through Byzantium and into Anatolia, but each were separately bested by the Seljuk Turks (a rumor spread that the Byzantine emperor had betrayed them to the Turks). Their tattered armies eventually made it to Jerusalem, and in 1148 they partook in the failed siege of Damascus. The defenders so harried them that the crusaders refused to attack the walled city. The kings beat a retreat to Jerusalem, harassed by Turkish archers the entire way. While the Second Crusade was a disaster in the east, it was a success in western Iberia. The kings of Leon and Portugal were engaged in the Reconquista, a military movement to expel the Muslims (known in Iberia as Moors) from modern-day Spain. Angevin forces bound for the Holy Land set sail from England, but a storm beached them on the Portuguese coast. They decided to join up with King Alfonso I of Portugal against the Moors, and they helped him attack the Moorish city of Lisbon. The siege lasted from July to October 1147, and when the Moors surrendered the city, most of the crusaders settled down and made Lisbon their own. Others hurried on to the Holy Land in search of more riches. Anglo-Norman crusaders also fought alongside King Alfonso VII of Leon: in October 1147 they took the Moorish port city of Almeria, and in December 1148 they captured Tortosa on the Ebro River. 

Having lost support in England, the Empress Matilda decided to cut her losses in 1148 and abandoned England for home in Normandy. But though the Empress had called it quits, her legacy—and claim—was carried on by her son Henry FitzEmpress, who would become known in history as Henry II of England. Henry, along with a small contingent of mercenaries, invaded England but failed to assert himself, largely due to the fact that he lacked the funds to pay his hired goons. In an odd show of chivalry, Stephen ended up paying Henry’s mercenaries out of his own pocket and allowed Henry to return home safely. Stephen’s chivalry may have been a courtesy paid to a member of his extended family, or perhaps with the civil war winding down to a stalemate, Stephen wanted to build bridges rather than walls with Anjou. In 1149 Henry returned to England and forged an alliance with Ranulf of Chester. Ranulf agreed to relinquish his claim to the town of Carlisle, which was held by the Scots; in return Ranulf would receive rights to the whole Honour of Lancaster (a large estate in northwest England). Ranulf gave homage to both King David of Scotland and Henry of Anjou, and he made Henry his liege lord. With the terms of the alliance settled, Henry and Ranulf agreed to attack York, probably with help from the ageing King David I of Scotland. The Scottish king was Henry’s great uncle, and he knighted the hotheaded Angevin on May 22 (the Scottish king would die just two days later). Their coalition marched on York, but when Stephen showed up to oppose them, the attack wavered. Henry returned to Normandy, and his father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, declared him duke of Normandy. Henry may have failed in England, but the duchy of Normandy was no small picking; his prestige grew even more in 1152 when he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the recently divorced wife of Louis VII. By this marriage Henry was made the future ruler of large swathes of French territory. 

While Henry was consolidating his power base in Normandy and beyond, Stephen worked to regain a modicum of control over his realm. Nevertheless he lacked the authority to ensure that justice reigned supreme and to mediate between warring nobles. His attention should have been on securing peace throughout his realm, but he left the kingdom submerged in wanton violence and cruelty and focusing all his energies on (unsuccessfully) ensuring that his son Eustace would succeed him on the English throne. Henry showed his head in England once more in early 1153. He sailed across the Channel with 36 ships and led a force of 3000 footmen and 140 horses. Upon landing, he entered a quaint village church observing the Festival of the Three Kings. Before the feast they proclaimed, quite prophetically, “Behold the Lord the ruler comes, and the kingdom is in his hand.” Henry was supported by Ranulf of Chester and Hugh Bigod, the Earl of Norfolk who had rebelled against Stephen ten years earlier. Henry besieged the royalist-held castle at Malmesbury, and Stephen marched west to relieve it. He tried dividing Henry’s army but failed. As the wintry weather became worse, the two sides agreed to a truce; Stephen returned to winter in London, but Henry marched north and convinced the formidable Earl of Leicester to throw in with him. In this fell swoop Henry and his allies controlled southwest England, much of northern England, and all the Midlands. 

That summer Stephen ordered the drawn-out siege on Wallingford Castle, long an Angevin stronghold, to be intensified. Henry marched to Wallingford’s aid, besieging Stephen’s forces outside the castle. Hearing of his besieging army under siege, Stephen marched from Oxford, and in July the royalists and Angevins faced off across the River Thames. Though Henry and Stephen itched to slug it out, the church wanted to avoid bloodshed, and they brokered a truce. Stephen’s son Eustace, enraged at the truce, stormed off to Cambridge to begin preparations for a campaign against Henry. His plans came to nothing: he became sick and died that August. The loss of his oldest son, coupled with the loss of his wife two years earlier, plunged Stephen into a debilitating depression. To add salt to the wound, Stephen’s efforts to ensure Eustace’s succession were for naught: his only remaining son, William, was too young to lead a country plunged in civil war, England was falling apart, and he was growing old. Fighting between the royalists and Angevins continued, but it was half-hearted: a skirmish there, a siege here. 

Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury wanted to hash out a more permanent truce, and in November 1153 Stephen and Henry met at Winchester and ratified terms of peace. The Shipwreck had come to an end. The Treaty of Winchester ended fifteen years of violence and bloodshed. According to the terms of the treaty, Stephen would be left in peace to rule England until his death, at which point Henry would take the reins. King Stephen died on 25 October 1154 in Dover, just under a year after the forging of the treaty, and Henry took the throne, adopting the regal name “Henry II.” This marked the end of the Norman Kings and the beginning of the Angevin Kings (the first in the line of the Plantagenets, who would rule England until the beginning of the 15th century).