little band, all on foot, stood firm against charge after charge of the horsemen; and the life and soul of their resistance was the king himself, who ‘stood like a lion,’ cutting down every man who came within reach of his sword, or, when that was broken, of a battle-axe which a citizen of Lincoln gave him in its stead. When only four (or three) of his companions were left, he still fought on, with ‘the fury of a wild boar’ and the courage of a hero, till the axe too broke in his hands, probably from the force of a blow which had laid Randulf of Chester in the mire at his feet (cf. John of Hexham, p. 308, with Hen. Hunt. l. viii. c. 18, Ord. Vit. v. 128, and Robert of Torigni, an. 1141). At last he fell, struck on the head by a stone; but even then he shook off a knight who sought to capture him, and would surrender to no one but Earl Robert. He was sent to Matilda at Gloucester, and thence to prison at Bristol. A church council summoned by the legate, 7–10 April, declared him deposed by the manifest judgment of God, and acknowledged Matilda as sovereign in his stead. Stephen himself, as if in despair, had already sanctioned the transfer of the primate's allegiance to his rival.
Matilda's harsh government, however, soon turned the tide against her. In November she released Stephen in exchange for Robert, who had been captured by Stephen's partisans; and on 7 Dec. another legatine council reversed the proceedings of the April one, acknowledged the justice of a plaint which Stephen laid before it against the vassals who had betrayed and imprisoned him, and declared him lawful sovereign of England. On Christmas day, in Canterbury Cathedral, Archbishop Theobald again set the crown on the head of the restored king (Gerv. Cant. i. 123; cf. Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville, pp. 137–8). It seems to have been during the same winter that Stephen joined with the abbot and convent of Westminster and the legate in a request to the pope for the canonisation of Edward the Confessor (Rymer, i. 18; for date see Clare, Osbert de). In the spring of 1142 he was for many weeks sick at Northampton; either before or after this he went into Yorkshire to break up a tournament which the earls of York and Richmond had arranged between them, and which he apparently suspected to be a pretext for an armed gathering with a more serious purpose. This was a danger which he had brought upon himself, for he was the first king who allowed tournaments in England. Shortly before midsummer he profited by Earl Robert's departure for Anjou to swoop down upon Wareham, so suddenly that its garrison, taken at unawares, surrendered at once. Thence he moved northward and eastward to break one by one the links of a chain of forts—Cirencester, Bampton, Ratcot—which the empress had been constructing to protect the line of communication between her brother's territories in the west and her own headquarters at Oxford. On 27 Sept. he reached Oxford itself, forded the river at the head of his men in the teeth of a volley of arrows from Matilda's troops, took the city by storm, and drove Matilda into the castle. There he blockaded her till near Christmas, when she escaped, and the castle surrendered. Robert meanwhile had come back and recovered Wareham; Stephen attacked it again, but in vain. On 1 July 1143 he was routed in a battle near Wilton, and nothing but headlong flight saved him from being made prisoner a second time. After Michaelmas (Liber de Antiq. Legibus, p. 197) he held a court at St. Albans; there he arrested the worst of all the troublers of the land, Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex [q. v.], and forced him to purchase his release by the surrender of all his castles. Geoffrey resumed his lawless ways as soon as he was free; a vain effort to reduce him to order, another fruitless siege of Lincoln Castle, and a more successful campaign in the west against Earl Robert, occupied the king during 1144. In 1145 his successes against Hugh Bigod in Norfolk and Turgis of Avranches in Essex, following on the death of Mandeville, which had occurred in the preceding August, brought eastern England for a while under subjection to Stephen, who moreover besieged and took a castle which Earl Robert had just built at Farringdon. Deserters from the Angevin ranks now began to join the king, among them Randulf of Chester, who in 1146 helped him to regain Bedford and to build a fortress at Crowmarsh to hold Wallingford in check. Negotiations were begun between the empress and the king, but they came to nothing. Earl Randulf now asked Stephen for his help against the Welsh, who were making raids into Cheshire. The barons persuaded Stephen to let them answer in his name that he would grant the request only if Randulf would surrender Lincoln and some other royal castles, which he still held without licence. Randulf refused; whereupon, as the English chronicler says, ‘the king took him in Hampton’ (i.e. Northampton) ‘through wicked rede, and did him in prison; and soon after, he let him out again through worse rede, with the precaution that he swore to give up all his castles; and some gave he up and some gave he not up.’ Among those
