of some king to meet the outbreak of anarchy which followed Henry’s death, secured Stephen the voice of the baronage.  He was crowned at Christmas-tide; and soon joined by Robert Earl of Gloucester, a bastard son of Henry and the chief of his nobles; while the issue of a charter from Oxford in 1136, a charter which renewed the dead king’s pledge of good government, promised another Henry to the realm.  The charter surrendered all forests made in the last reign as a sop to the nobles, and conciliated the Church by granting freedom of election and renouncing all right to the profits of vacant churches; while the king won the people by a promise to abolish the tax of Danegeld.

[Sidenote:  Battle of the Standard]

The king’s first two years were years of success and prosperity.  Two risings of barons in the east and west were easily put down, and in 1137 Stephen passed into Normandy and secured the Duchy against an attack from Anjou.  But already the elements of trouble were gathering round him.  Stephen was a mere soldier, with few kingly qualities save that of a soldier’s bravery; and the realm soon began to slip from his grasp.  He turned against himself the jealous dread of foreigners to which he owed his accession by surrounding himself with hired knights from Flanders; he drained the treasury by creating new earls endowed with pensions from it, and recruited his means by base coinage.  His consciousness of the gathering storm only drove Stephen to bind his friends to him by suffering them to fortify castles and to renew the feudal tyranny which Henry had struck down.  But the long reign of the dead king had left the Crown so strong that even yet Stephen could hold his own.  A plot which Robert of Gloucester had been weaving from the outset of his reign came indeed to a head in 1138, and the Earl’s revolt stripped Stephen of Caen and half Normandy.  But when his partizans in England rose in the south and the west and the King of Scots, whose friendship Stephen had bought in the opening of his reign by the cession of Carlisle, poured over the northern border, the nation stood firmly by the king.  Stephen himself marched on the western rebels and soon left them few strongholds save Bristol.  His people fought for him in the north.  The pillage and cruelties of the wild tribes of Galloway and the Highlands roused the spirit of the Yorkshiremen.  Baron and freeman gathered at York round Archbishop Thurstan and marched to the field of Northallerton to await the foe.  The sacred banners of St. Cuthbert of Durham, St. Peter of York, St. John of Beverley, and St. Wilfrid of Ripon hung from a pole fixed in a four-wheeled car which stood in the centre of the host.  The first onset of David’s host was a terrible one.  “I who wear no armour,” shouted the chief of the Galwegians, “will go as far this day as any one with breastplate of mail”; his men charged with wild shouts of “Albin, Albin,” and were followed by the Norman knighthood of the Lowlands.  But their repulse was complete; the fierce hordes dashed in vain against the close English ranks around the Standard, and the whole army fled in confusion to Carlisle.