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 Brabançons, 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