ABSTRACT
As the king was left to ponder his mistakes in Bristol Castle in February 1141, the country might look towards the prospect of a new monarch and (hopefully) a recovered peace. It was everyone's perception that, by 1141, England had ceased to be a peaceful land. We know that to call the state that it had fallen into 'anarchy' is to make an unnecessary judgement on medieval society: its members desired order, law and moral behaviour. So if we discard the idea of anarchy, what sort of England are we describing in 1141? Even in civil war, there was order of a sort, so much is clear, and if it did not depend on the king it depended on the lords of the land. What makes Stephen's reign different from the reigns that preceded and followed it, is that the perception of who it was that was responsible for public order shifted to the regional magnates away from the king - on whose ultimate responsibility everyone would once have agreed, even if they did not agree on the way he carried it out. The territorial magnates' position of power in society had been generally recognised in previous reigns, but only in that it was understood that they (and the ecclesiastical magnates) were the appropriate people for the king to associate with himself in power. Magnates should help and advise the king, not be little kings in their own regions. So, if we abandon the idea of an 'anarchic' England, we are nonetheless left with the idea of England as a land where the balance of secular power had moved away from the king and towards his magnates.
