Performing Violence: Arms, Armour and Military Apparel

This chapter considers military apparel in in the mid-twelfth century and explores the interrelationship between changes in arms and armour and the creation of knightly identities. Outwardly, the mid-twelfth century knight looked quite similar to the Norman warriors depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, although with some subtle differences. By the 1130s and 40s the knight was a little better protected with mail covering more of the bodily extremities. A slightly wider range of military personnel would have been armoured, and minor stylistic differences are distinguishable in showier swords, shields, spurs and scabbards. More important in the actual prosecution of warfare was the changing use of the crossbow, which saw widespread use alongside ‘armour-piercing’ bodkin-type arrowheads. The battles of the period were also the first major military clashes in England where heraldic display was visible — in particular on banners and shields, but also more subtly on horse harness pendants. Such devices created a new means for displaying knightly allegiance, rank and affinities to elite social networks.

Architecture and Authority: Castles

This core chapter analyses the archaeological and documentary evidence for the militarisation of the twelfth-century landscape through castle-building. The considerable challenges of identifying and dating castles built and strengthened during the civil war mean that the total picture of fortification in the period will always remain murky at best, irrespective of how much new archaeological evidence comes to light. The proportion of unfinished and lost castle sites is also far higher than for other periods. That Stephen’s reign saw a marked thickening in the distribution map of castles is beyond doubt, but this was probably more tightly focussed in contested regions than a genuinely nationwide phenomenon and is likely to have involved scores rather than hundreds of ‘new’ sites. Overall, archaeology highlights individuality in twelfth-century timber castle design, which went far beyond the ‘motte and bailey’ or ‘ringwork’ labels. ‘Enmotted’ towers were a hallmark of the period, as was the re-activation and remodelling of Iron-Age hillforts as castles and the construction of great masonry donjons, which percolated from being a royal to a magnate prerogative during the period.

Waging War: Fields of Conflict and Siege Warfare

This chapter provides an overview of how and with what consequences warfare was waged in the twelfth century, drawing particular attention to the landscape context of conflict. Case studies of the period’s two major pitched battles (Northallerton/the Battle of the Standard, 1138, and Lincoln, 1141) are presented, although the conflict as a whole saw few pitched battles and was instead dominated by siege warfare. The period saw the siege castle cemented as an essential part of the repertoire of Anglo-Norman conflict, mixing psychological and martial functions and favoured by rulers in an era when siege warfare was static and protracted while leaders needed to be mobile. The overall picture is that the conflict saw no radical departure in ways of waging war, and many of its characteristic features — such as the use of mercenaries, the avoidance of pitched battle, devastation of landscapes and the predominance of sieges — were not aberrations but part and parcel of an established pattern of Anglo-Norman warfare.

Introduction

This introductory chapter outlines the historiography of the reign of King Stephen (1135–54), highlighting how study has been dominated by documentary history while archaeological and other material evidence has played a marginal role. It identifies landmark studies of the period, summarises the principal chroniclers that cover Stephen’s reign and discusses charters as another cornerstone of the evidence base. A major debate has centred on whether or not the period should continue to be styled as ‘the Anarchy’, with scholars taking maximalist and minimalist views of the violence and disturbances of the period. The final part of the chapter explains the approach and structure of the volume: after a chronological outline of the civil war (Chapter 2), the book covers conflict landscapes and siege warfare (Chapter 3), castles (Chapter 4), artefacts and material culture (Chapter 5), weaponry and armour (Chapter 6), the church (Chapter 7), settlements and landscape (Chapter 8), and a detailed case study of the fenland campaigns (Chapter 9), while Chapter 10 presents a self-contained concluding essay that reflects on what the material evidence can and cannot us about the conflict and its consequences.

Material Culture: From Arts to Coins

This chapter examines the material culture of the twelfth century and assesses evidence for change as a result of the civil war. The period’s pottery shows a myriad of regionally distinctive patterns although towards the end of the twelfth century we see the growth of markets and commercialisation of the industry in a post-war boom. In the sphere of the arts there is no evidence whatsoever of any hiatus nor of declining standards during Stephen’s reign, and instead the period witnessed achievement and innovation in several different areas. While it is difficult to isolate developments in the 1130s, 40s and 50s from longer-term trends, it does seem clear that sculpture in parish churches shows particularly high levels of experimentation, while grave slabs were a modish means of commemoration and expressing identity for emerging parish elites. Coinage provides our best means of mapping the fluid geopolitics of the civil war on the ground. An ever-expanding dataset is highlighting the existence of a short-lived Angevin proto-state in south-west England during the 1140s, but we should also be cautious in assuming that all ‘rival’ coin issues during the period provide straightforward evidence for opposition to Stephen’s rule.

Historical Outline and the Geography of ‘Anarchy’

This chapter covers two areas: it provides a sketch of English society and landscape in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, and presents a year-by-year chronology of Stephen’s reign. At the point of Stephen’s accession to the throne in 1135, the longer-term impacts of the Norman Conquest on English society and landscape were still being played out. Ethnicity and identity in the period were fluid, and so mid-twelfth-century England was a developing Anglo-Norman state rather that a subjugated dominion. While ‘the Anarchy’ of Stephens reign is frequently styled as a civil war, the conflict was unusually complex and protracted, and involved more than two opposing sides. The period saw persistent asymmetric warfare on the borderlands of Wales, a succession of incursions from Scotland and Angevin invasions from across the English Channel, while a struggle for control of Normandy dominated the wider strategic landscape. The most characteristic feature of conflict during the period was an unprecedented series of internal rebellions, led by disloyal, disenfranchised or marginalised magnates and underlain by regional grievances.

The Twelfth-Century Civil War in Context: Assessment and Reassessment

This final chapter presents a self-contained overview of what the material evidence tells us about the twelfth-century civil war and its consequences. Issues with dating archaeological evidence to the period in question mean that conclusions must be cautious, but it seems clear that the Anarchy is not obviously identifiable in the material record as a distinct ‘event horizon’. Archaeology has much more to offer us in terms of illuminating the conduct and psychology of Anglo-Norman warfare and in showing how lordly identity was being transformed through the period, and how it was expressed through castle-building and ecclesiastical patronage. Consideration of these research themes and others can help extricate studies of the twelfth-civil war from the ‘anarchy or not?’ debate. In conclusion: the mid-twelfth century is best regarded not as an age of anarchy but as an age of transition.

Town, Village and Country

This chapter turns to consider the effects of the conflict on the urban and rural landscape. Despite the almost twenty-year duration of the civil war, its impacts on landscape and townscape had very significant geographical biases. There was a greater effect upon urban rather than rural life, as urban castles, fortified towns and their hinterlands were the foci of sieges and counter-sieges. Behind the image of a slowdown in urban growth, lords were investing in new town plantations, invariably alongside fortifications and often as components within more comprehensive schemes of aggrandisement. Tracing the impact of the Anarchy on the rural landscape archaeology of England is a more difficult proposition, although we have strong evidence for landscape planning and the creation of fortified settlements by newly emboldened lords. Documentary sources catalogue widespread landscape devastation by armies, although on the ground the effects of the war had a strong regional dimension, with some areas, most notably the West Country and Thames Valley, the focus of especially regular and damaging upheaval. Elsewhere, urban and rural populations are likely to have been affected little by the ebb and flow of the conflict, where the political and military fortunes of the social elite did not impinge on everyday life.

Faith and Fortification: The Church

This chapter assesses the consequences of the civil war for religious institutions, communities and structures such as churches, cathedrals, monasteries and bishops’ palaces. The war crimes against churches catalogued by horrified chroniclers and borne out to some extent in the archaeological evidence affected modest numbers of sites in specific geographical zones. Archaeological investigation has revealed very real evidence for the militarisation of ecclesiastical sites, although in many contexts documentary evidence for the apparent transformation of a church into a fortification suggests that the building was garrisoned rather than being converted into something physically resembling a castle. The civil war also had a series of much longer-lasting impacts on the ecclesiastical world in terms of creating the social and tenurial conditions and a spiritual environment where religious patronage became increasingly politicised and where lower-ranked members within the elite had the means and motivation to establish monasteries, which swelled in numbers as never before.

Anarchy on the Fen Edge: Case Study of the Isle of Ely

This chapter provides a detailed case study of the campaigns in and around the Isle of Ely in the twelfth century. The circumstances of a wealthy but isolated region, combined with a rebel heritage, explain the prominent place of the Isle of Ely during the Anarchy, although the region’s experience in the civil war was also unusually severe. Even in the context of a conflict where the ravaging of estates was endemic the fenlands suffered especially high levels of destruction to a fragile agricultural base. Stephen’s response to Geoffrey de Mandeville’s fenland rebellion in 1143–44 also saw the largest-scale programme of royal castle-building recorded in the civil war. The scale and sophistication of individual fortifications, all keyed into local landscapes, are revealed by archaeological evidence, as exemplified by the royal campaign castle at Burwell, Cambridgeshire.