ABSTRACT
Earl Robert of Gloucester seems to have understood the general mood of frustration infecting the English aristocracy in 1140, and it would be surprising had he not, for he had reacted savagely against the same malaise. It gave him some limited room for manoeuvre in his efforts to extend himself outside the Severn valley, where the king had so effectively contained him and his supporters. That the empress's cause was now stalemated in the southern March must have become clear to him soon enough, and there was no doubting that Stephen had both the energy and the means to keep him and his supporters penned into the southwest and the March. There had been no major surge of magnates into the Empress Mathilda's camp since the previous autumn. Many regional barons even on the fringes of his area of domination, in Devon, Wiltshire and Herefordshire, were keeping stubbornly neutral. In the summer of 1140 - when a lull fell on what had already been an energetic campaigning season - it was open to Earl Robert (after nearly a year in England) either to negotiate, or to gamble on a military adventure and hope for the same luck that had brought him and the empress safely from Normandy to Bristol.
