Here Stephen failed. He was utterly unfit to govern. While he thought
only of profligate enjoyment, the barons fortified their castles and
became petty kings in their several domains. The great prelates followed
their example. Then, for the first time, did Stephen awake from his
dream of pleasure and attempt to play the king. He seized Roger, Bishop
of Salisbury, and threw him into prison to force him to surrender his
fortresses. This precipitated the trouble that brooded over England. The
king lost the support of the clergy by his violence to their leader,
alienated many of the nobles by his hasty action, and gave Maud the
opportunity for which she had waited. She lost no time in offering
herself to the English as a claimant to the crown.

Her landing was made on the 22d of September, 1139, on the coast of
Sussex. Here she threw herself into Arundel Castle, and quickly
afterwards made her way to Bristol Castle, then held by her
illegitimate brother, Robert, Earl of Gloucester.

And now the state of affairs we had described began. The nobles of the
north and west of England renounced their allegiance to Stephen and
swore allegiance to Maud. London and the east remained faithful to the
king. A stream of men-at-arms, hired by both factions, poured from the
neighboring coast of Normandy into the disputed realm. Each side had
promised them, for their pay, the lands and wealth of the other. Like
vultures to the feast they came, with little heed to the rights of the
rival claimants and the wrongs of the people, with much heed to their
own private needs and ambitions.

In England such anarchy ruled as that land of much intestine war has
rarely witnessed. The Norman nobles prepared in haste for the civil war,
and in doing so made the English their prey. To raise the necessary