overwhelming difficulties, and over limited districts.  Sheriffs were no longer appointed over the shires, and the local administration broke down as the central government had done.  Civil war was added to the confusion of anarchy, as Matilda again and again sought to recover her right.  In 1139 she crossed to England, wherein siege, in battle, in council, in hair-breadth escapes from pursuing hosts, from famine, from perils of the sea, she showed the masterful authority, the impetuous daring, the pertinacity which she had inherited from her Norman ancestors.  Stephen fell back on his last source—­a body of mercenary troops from Flanders,—­but the Brabancon troops were hated in England as foreigners and as riotous robbers, and there was no payment for them in the royal treasury.  The barons were all alike ready to change sides as often as the shifting of parties gave opportunity to make a gain of dishonour; an oath to Stephen was as easy to break as an oath to Matilda or to her son.  Great districts, especially in the south and middle of England, and on the Welsh marches, suffered terribly from war and pillage; all trade was stopped; great tracts of land went out of cultivation; there was universal famine.

In 1142 Henry, then nine years old, was brought to England with a chosen band of Norman and Angevin knights; and while Matilda held her rough court at Gloucester as acknowledged sovereign of the West, he lived at Bristol in the house of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, the illegitimate son of Henry I., who was still in these troubled days loyal to the cultured traditions of his father’s court, and a zealous patron of learning.  Amid all the confusion of a war of pillage and slaughter, surrounded by half-wild Welsh mercenaries, by the lawless Norman-Welsh knights, by savage Brabancons, he learned his lessons for four years with his cousin, the son of Robert, from Master Matthew, afterwards his chancellor and bishop of Angers.  As Matilda’s prospects grew darker in England, Geoffrey recalled Henry in 1147 to Anjou; and the next year he joined his mother in Normandy, where she had retired after the death of Earl Robert.  There was a pause of five years in the civil war; but Stephen’s efforts to assert his authority and restore the reign of law were almost unavailing.  All the country north of the Tyne had fallen into the hands of the Scot king; the Earl of Chester ruled at his own will in the northwest; the Earl of Aumale was king beyond the Humber.

With the failure of Matilda’s effort the whole burden of securing his future prospects fell upon Henry himself, then a boy of fifteen.  Nor was he slow to accept the charge.  A year later, in 1149, he placed himself in open opposition to Stephen as claimant to the English throne, by visiting the court of his great-uncle, David of Scotland, at Carlisle; he was knighted by the Scot king, and made a compact to yield up to David the land beyond the Tyne when he should himself have won the English throne.