Access Today Stephen: The Reign Of Anarchy (Penguin Monarchs) Brought To You By Carl Watkins Made Available In Paperback

as time in which 'Christ and his saints slept', Stephen's troubled rule plunged England into Civil War, Without clear rules of succession in the Norman monarchy, conflict between members of William the Conqueror's family was inevitable, But there was another problem, too: Stephen himself,

Stephen styled himself a political panacea, promising strength without oppression, Yet as external threats and internal resistance to his rule accumulated, it was a promise he was unable to keep.
Unable to transcend his flawed claim to the throne, and to make the transition from nobleman to king, Stephen's royal voice never quite rang true.


The resulting violence that spread throughout England was not, or not only, the work of bloodthirsty men on the make.
As Watkins shows in this resonant new portrait, it arose because great men struggled to navigate a new and turbulent kind of politics that arose when the king was in eclipse.
./
Interesting read. New very little about the king before this so was happy to learn more about him in this short history of his life.
.stars

An excellent concise exposition of Stephens rule, He may have been a pleasant, personable man, but he made an ineffective king and this is laid out clearly.
Empress Matilda is also given a fair treatment in her side of this story which was good to see, Enjoyable and informative. Good basic account, and a quick read, I will definitely read more of this series, This is another volume in the increasingly laudable Penguin Monarchs series, There is something inherently mysterious, nay even wrong about King Stephen even the name jars and sounds wrong King S t e p h e n Was there a King Stephen Was he even king The answer is of course yes and yes but you would be forgiven for thinking not after reading this excellent volume by Carl Watkins.
The mystery is compounded in part because it is the reign or rather non reign of this king that Ellis Peters chose to set the Cadfael novels and mysterious murders, not to say violence were a muffled and blurred feature of the reign.
The reign of Stephen also saw two Matilda's one being his clever and capable wife a sort of dual metaphor for the duality of the reign which saw both claim the throne.

Watkins begins with a prologue in old fashioned storyteller mode telling the tale off the white ship, this in part reminds us of an empire on both sides of the channel,
Carl Watkins has a thesis in part it is that Stephen could not get used to being king and act in a consistently kingly way he could not adopt a consistent persona and therefore was a witness to his own fakery my words, not Watkins's.
He also seemed to lack a ruthless streak, being hidebound by chivalric codes during the reign of "anarchy" a label that Watkins questions both Stephen and Matilda manage to capture each other at various points only to release said prisoner or see them escape into the night.
Once again this seems careless and mysterious adding to the mix, Stephen was careful to build up and enhance castles for defensive reasons only to end up trading said castles for the return of prisoners.
He tried to avoid sieges of castles ironically ones he himself had strengthened but the set piece battles and skirmishes were often ones that put his liberty directly in peril.

Watkins tells all this in an engaging tone, He is in complete command of his material, Indeed, this is one of the best of this series that I have read,
Would be queen Matilda perhaps deserves a bit more attention coming across as something of a cipher but Stephen remains rightly the focus both enigmatic and ever so slightly comical as he fights personal demons and potential national anarchy.
He was fortunate to have a structure of government made strong and familiar by King Henryand leant on this heavily.
Whilst acknowledging recent work by other scholars on Stephen Watkins rightly points out that "anarchy" was not necessarily the right word government of a sort continued and some areas were unaffected.
This is a difficult story to tell encompassing the empire across the channel as well as a large cast of characters and regional areas.

That Watkins makes you want to read more on Stephen is to his credit and the book as ever comes with scholarly notes and a decent bibliography all beautifully encased in the now familiar white binding with a striking colour picture in profile of Stephen.

More than just an introduction Watkins writes with style and élan and I may seek out other work by him as well it might also send me back To Cadfael.
Recommended for those who like their kings to be complex and occasionally human with flaws to boot, One of the things that has come to distinguish the Penguin Monarchs series for me is the more idiosyncratic nature of its choices for biographers.
While the Yale series generally selects for their authors the foremost experts on their respective subjects, the editors of the Penguin series often go for distinguished scholars who are not generally known for their work on the monarch about whom they are writing.
While few choices were as far afield as was Tom Holland, who is best known for his books on ancient history, such eminent and excellent medievalists as Richard Abels and John Gillingham were not the most obvious ones to write about the monarchs that they covered for the series.


For the rest of my review, click on the link:

sitelink bestbritishbios. com Carl Watkins succinctly tells the story of the tumultuousyears of King Stephen's reign, usually relegated to approximately two lines in school history books in various unintentionally comical ways.
For example: "King Stephen spent his reign chasing his wife Empress Matilda around the country but he never caught her.
"!

The Cadfael chronicles raised my interest in the period and Watkins outlines the chief protagonists, Dealing with two Matildas is very confusing and some authors manage this by designating Henry I's designated heir, Empress Matilda, as Maud for some reason or simply ignoring the fact of Stephen's wife.
. . the eponymous Queen Matilda! In Watkins interpretation she seems worthy of more recognition than history has given her,

Empress Matilda appears almost as a byline in the story as it was the changing loyalties of the various barons and Bishops who kept the family squabble going.
Then there is the sad story of Stephen's eldest son Eustace, who was to inherit but who was rejected by his father just when his inheritance should have seemed secure.
Eustace died an angry and rejected heir, predeceasing his father and effectively disappeared from the history books while the name itself fell out of usage too.
. I always wondered where CS Lewis got the name from but Lewis' Eustace of course overcomes his resentment and selfish ways.


Watkins ascribes Stephen's failure to consolidate his reign in part to the fact that Norman castles were pretty much impregnable by the weapons available at the time and so things went on from seige to seige with no overall victory.
He also suggests that Stephen was basically a chivalrous knight who, having become king failed to step up to the required level of tyranny, instead continuing to treat his former peers with equal respect.
From the Cwe would think this a good thing but in Cit was a disaster, A man out of time perhaps, The subject here is Stephen of Blois, nephew of Henry I and grandson of the Conqueror, and the Anarchy, a kind of succession crisis and miniature civil war in both England and Normandy arising from the loss of Henry's son and heir William in the sinking of the White Ship inand centrally involving Stephen, the "unstoppable force," and Henry I's daughter Matilda, the Holy Roman Empress and the "immovable object" Watkins seems to love prepackaged phrases and thoughtsmore on this below.
Throughout Stephen's reign fromto, the AngloSaxon Chronicle proposes, Christ and his saints simply slept: this is a riotous period of earthly and, it seemed at the time, cosmic misrule involving not only a dispute about the throne but many other lordly quarrels and feuds and periodic bloody massacres as well, with towns put to the torch and townspeople to the sword.
It's a complicated story of moving pieces and conflicting aims whose telling can get fussy and fiddly, not least because it also teems with Henrys and Roberts and Matildas to keep straight, and here its author faces the further unavoidable problem of needing to compress a lot into very little space.
Watkins makes a reasonably coherent narrative out of this tangle to some extent, though not without some strange and distortive artefacts of simplification, as he moves in and out of different time scales, dovetailing together chroniclers' records and gently editorializing throughout.
But what emerges here isn't really a portrait of a monarch, understandably with all the Anarchy and that, but an attempt at a sort of breakneck chronicle and explanation of volatile and changing political circumstances.
And there just isn't time for Stephen or Matilda themselves to properly emerge along the way,

A word about style: though I'm grateful to Watkins for teaching me the impressive if mostly uselesscent gem that is the word porphyrogeniture inheritance due to being born "in the purple," i.
e. after the coronation of your monarch parent rather than before, when they may have been just a lowly duke, the main gift of the prose here is its persistent reminder of why you should avoid clichés and herdwordings.
Just overpages is a small space within which to find the following turning up on the page, to name only an illustrative few apologies for the pettiness of this recorded sampling: "trials and tribulations," "his luck ran out," "history had repeated itself," "here lies the rub," "armed to the teeth," "the heart of the matter," "possession must have appeared to be ninetenths of the law," "a chip off the old block," "in a tight spot," "twisting and turning," "touched a nerve," "an eye for an eye," "blunted the edge of," "sugaring the bitter pill," "shake things up," "a thorn in Stephen's flesh," "the tide turned quickly," "snatched defeat from the jaws of victory" especially egregiousa clichéd variation on a cliché, "Stephen's star was rising," "came to blows," "put his finger on," "irons from the fire," "take by storm," "came to blows” again a few pages later, "kept at bay," "poster boy," "the shape of things to come," "throws into sharp relief," "roll of the dice," "in the fullness of time," "drag their feet," "trade blows," "boiled down to," "nearer the mark," "swords beaten into ploughshares," "exceptions who proved a rule," "the way of

all flesh," etc.
etc. The televisionpresenterlevel diction and style is presumably aiming at a kind of appealingly chummy informality, but it merely annoys and distracts.
And would have been easy as pie to avoid, Like the plague. A specialist in religious culture in the central and later Middle Ages, Carl Watkins is Reader in History at the University of Cambridge.
.