Robert her struggle became a hopeless one, and in 1148 she withdrew to Normandy.  The war was now a mere chaos of pillage and bloodshed.  The royal power came to an end.  The royal courts were suspended, for not a baron or bishop would come at the king’s call.  The bishops met in council to protest, but their protests and excommunications fell on deafened ears.  For the first and last time in her history England was in the hands of the baronage, and their outrages showed from what horrors the stern rule of the Norman kings had saved her.  Castles sprang up everywhere.  “They filled the land with castles,” say the terrible annals of the time.  “They greatly oppressed the wretched people by making them work at these castles, and when they were finished they filled them with devils and armed men.”  In each of these robber-holds a petty tyrant ruled like a king.  The strife for the Crown had broken into a medley of feuds between baron and baron, for none could brook an equal or a superior in his fellow.  “They fought among themselves with deadly hatred, they spoiled the fairest lands with fire and rapine; in what had been the most fertile of counties they destroyed almost all the provision of bread.”  For fight as they might with one another, all were at one in the plunder of the land.  Towns were put to ransom.  Villages were sacked and burned.  All who were deemed to have goods, whether men or women, were carried off and flung into dungeons and tortured till they yielded up their wealth.  No ghastlier picture of a nation’s misery has ever been painted than that which closes the English Chronicle whose last accents falter out amidst the horrors of the time.  “They hanged up men by their feet and smoked them with foul smoke.  Some were hanged up by their thumbs, others by the head, and burning things were hung on to their feet.  They put knotted strings about men’s heads, and writhed them till they went to the brain.  They put men into prisons where adders and snakes and toads were crawling, and so they tormented them.  Some they put into a chest short and narrow and not deep and that had sharp stones within, and forced men therein so that they broke all their limbs.  In many of the castles were hateful and grim things called rachenteges, which two or three men had enough to do to carry.  It was thus made:  it was fastened to a beam and had a sharp iron to go about a man’s neck and throat, so that he might noways sit, or lie, or sleep, but he bore all the iron.  Many thousands they starved with hunger.”

[Sidenote:  Religious Revival]

It was only after years of this feudal anarchy that England was rescued from it by the efforts of the Church.  The political influence of the Church had been greatly lessened by the Conquest:  for pious, learned, and energetic as the bulk of the Conqueror’s bishops were, they were not Englishmen.  Till the reign of Henry the First no Englishman occupied an English see.  This severance of the higher