IN A PERIOD with more than its fair share of infamous characters, Geoffrey II de Mandeville, Earl of Essex from 1140, is perhaps the most disreputable of all. In J.H. Round#x0027;s 1892 biography Geoffrey de Mandeville, the earl was ‘the great champion of anarchy,’ the quintessential robber baron whose allegiance shifted as he sold and resold himself to the highest bidder. Authors since have been tempted into portraying him as ‘the poster boy of England's “anarchy.”’ Historians have unsurprisingly focused on Geoffrey's remarkable political career; debate has centred on the extent of his loyalty, his motives and the reasons for his downfall, the evidence hinging on charters whose dating has been vigorously contested. Rather less attention has focused on the realities on the ground of Geoffrey's military involvement in the civil war – most notably, his rebellion and fenland campaign of 1143–44 that ended with his death, and a programme of castle building and aggrandisement that mirrored his meteoric rise – and its impact upon the landscape. Accordingly, this case study considers the conflict landscape of the Isle of Ely and its surrounding district, which was the focus not only of Geoffrey de Mandeville's revolt but also two earlier operations, by King Stephen in 1140 and by Geoffrey and Earl Gilbert of Pembroke in 1142. Three campaigns in four years ensured that the fenland region was one of the most heavily affected in the entire civil war. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's generalised description of Stephen's reign as 19 winters ‘when Christ and his saints slept’ – perhaps the most oft-quoted snippet of primary documentary evidence for the chaos of the civil war – was written by a Peterborough monk and may well draw on local experiences of the conflict rather than capturing the situation in England more generally.

This case study presents a narrative account of the three fenland campaigns of the 1140s against the background of William I's famous struggle in the same area against Hereward the Wake in 1070–71. It reconstructs the main military movements and events as a basis for examining the archaeological evidence for the network of castles that loomed large in and around this unusually complex conflict landscape.

CASTLES WERE FIRMLY CENTRE STAGE in the civil war's military and political landscape – they were invariably the focal points of events in a conflict in which control of castles equated to control over territory. Chroniclers’ accounts have long dominated our understanding of castle construction and use during the period. As symbols of tyranny, disorder and oppression, castles – especially those newly built or strengthened – were a cause of consternation for ecclesiastical writers, who singled them out as the cause rather than just a symptom of the disorder. The question of these so-called ‘adulterine’ (adulterina) castles – usually interpreted as ‘unlicensed’ – has cast a shadow over how we have interpreted the physical remains of twelfth-century castles and deflected from our understanding of the totality of castle-building practices and contexts. While brief overviews of the ‘castles of the Anarchy’ have already been published, this chapter will provide a platform for a more systematic survey of the evidence that can enable us to confront the familiar caricature of the Anarchy-period castle as a simple, warlike and transient feature of the English landscape. Drawing upon an upsurge of archaeological evidence alongside the documentary sources, it starts with an account of the castles of Stephen's reign from the perspective of chroniclers, before exploring and analysing as far as is possible the forms, function distribution, relationships and chronology of these sites, in order to assess the extent to which the landscape was militarised.

Reassessing the ‘Castles of the Anarchy’

Numerous historical and archaeological studies perpetuate the notion that the castles of Stephen's reign were mostly short-term and martial in nature. For Frank Stenton, writing in his classic and influential 1932 study The First Century of English Feudalism, ‘castles of the Anarchy were rarely, if ever, castles of stone’; instead, conditions of feudal anarchy saw the proliferation of temporary and underdeveloped earth and timber fortresses built on defensive sites.

A revisionist view is that the late 1130s and 1140s actually saw greater variation in construction forms and in the social context of castle building than previous decades.

THE EVIDENCE of documents produced and curated by religious institutions has tended to dominate narratives of Stephen's reign; indeed, we have inevitably come to understand ‘the Anarchy’ largely through the prism of ecclesiastical writers. The medieval Church as an institution was a central pillar of society that influenced corporate identity and individual behaviour in different ways, although it was not a monolithic and immovable organisation but instead comprised myriad groups and personnel with varying perceptions of Christianity. This chapter combines analysis of the textual sources with archaeological and other material evidence to assess the consequences of the civil war for ecclesiastical institutions, communities and structures. The following account considers, in turn, churches, monasteries and bishops’ palaces, to explore how the conflict impacted upon patterns of patronage and building, and to consider the place of these sites within the militarisation of the landscape.

Church and Civil War

Any consideration of the impact of ‘the Anarchy’ on the Church throws up some immediate contradictions. From one perspective, this was a period of enormous turbulence and crisis for the Church, with bishops embroiled in the conflict, monastic lands seized and ravaged, and churches burned or fortified. Damage to church buildings and property is attested by the horror-struck reactions of chroniclers both in generic terms and through specific references to named institutions that were attacked or suffered collateral damage. A map of documented instances of church fortification and damage to ecclesiastical property is presented in Figure 7.1. What makes this level of damage especially remarkable is the fact that the Church was instrumental in the western European ‘peace movement’ of the eleventh and twelfth century that sought to suppress the excesses of war, including pillage and violence towards ecclesiastical property. The paradox is that churches were targeted, seemingly as never before, in the very period in which knighthood was emerging as a Christian vocation and the ideals of chivalry were crystallising. From another viewpoint, however, the mid-twelfth century saw a dramatic upsurge in religious patronage, especially through the foundation of houses of the new orders and gifts to established family monasteries. This was well understood at the time: for example, William of Newburgh comments that more monasteries were established in Stephen's reign than over the entire preceding century.

A LONG-STANDING focus for historical debate on King Stephen's reign concerns whether or not the epithet ‘the Anarchy’ is appropriate for the period. The pendulum of opinion has swung between maximalist and minimalist viewpoints with sharply different understandings of the scale, intensity and impact of the conflict and of the degree to which royal government broke down. If nothing else, ‘the Anarchy’ makes a useful distinction from the ‘English Civil War,’ which is universally understood as the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century. Scholars have also assessed the characters and achievements of the main historical figures of the period – primarily King Stephen, his cousin and nemesis the Empress Matilda and the king's younger brother Bishop Henry of Blois. Other debate has centred on the attitudes and agency of the Church and the aristocracy during the conflict, and considered how these institutions were transformed by it. Without doubt, the concept of the ‘Anarchy’ of the twelfth century was in need of deconstruction and critical examination, but it is unclear how much further debate can develop if it remains focused on essentially the same body of documentary source material. Accordingly, this volume has attempted to draw together the full range of archaeological and material evidence – comprising sites, landscapes and artefacts – alongside new spatial presentations and understandings of documentary sources to afford a rather different perspective on the civil war and its era. Both direct and indirect evidence for the nature and impact of the conflict have been considered at different scales, from individual items of portable material culture to buildings, to nationwide patterns of conflict events. What does this reassessment provide?

Using the Archaeology

This body of archaeological and other material evidence – old and new – does not and cannot contribute evenly to all the different areas of debate about Stephen's reign and the so-called ‘Anarchy.’ Archaeologists have sometimes applied the labels ‘the Anarchy’ and ‘Anarchy-period’ rather loosely and often inappropriately. The period has sometimes been used as a convenient chronological peg from which to hang interpretations and around which site chronologies have been based, sometimes without due caution.

MATERIAL CULTURE – the physical evidence of artefacts and architecture – is of course core to archaeological discourse but has played a very marginal role in previous discussion of ‘the Anarchy.’ While the period's coinage has been the subject of several important studies and is the focus of its own specific debates and literature, a great volume of other evidence – including pottery and other artefacts recovered from archaeological excavations, single finds of artefacts (especially through metal-detecting), architectural sculpture, building remains and environmental evidence – has been badly overlooked. This body of information, which is growing all the time as new discoveries come to light, has much potential to illuminate aspects of everyday life, including at a level below the social elite, but making sense of it comes with a set of challenges – not least the ever-present issue of dating materials precisely to the period in question.

It is important to underline from the outset that it is simply not possible to identify ‘the Anarchy’ as a clear event horizon with most of the evidence explored in this chapter. An obvious exception is the coinage, which represents an exceptional category of material as coins are simultaneously historical sources and everyday items of material culture. If we were to reimagine the mid-twelfth century as a hypothetical prehistoric research context, stripped of all our knowledge and preconceptions of the period based on its documents, it is highly unlikely that archaeologists would identify the ‘signature’ of any great rupture in society or crisis in the landscape. Indeed, the same is broadly true of the Norman Conquest, with key categories of evidence such as pottery showing imperceptible change and the archaeology instead pointing towards life carrying on pretty much as before for the vast majority of people, although a clear horizon of coin hoards deposited in the 1060s and 1070s provides one likely indicator of disruption – at least in some regions (see pg. 149). For the most part, changes in the material evidence occurred over much longer timescales, although political and concomitant economic turmoil could act to variously accelerate and amplify or hold back longer-term processes that were already in train.

New information about twelfth-century portable material culture is being revealed especially through metal-detected finds reported through the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

ALTHOUGH THE PRINCIPAL FOCUS of this book is on England in the middle decades of the twelfth century, it is instructive to first provide a sketch of life in town and country between the Norman Conquest and the year of King Stephen's accession in 1135. What was the overall shape of English society, how was the landscape organised and what were the main processes of social, economic and political change then in train? The second part of this chapter provides a year-by-year chronology of Stephen's reign (1135–54) as essential background for the thematic chapters that follow.

Anglo-Norman England before 1135

While the Battle of Hastings in 1066 was a shattering military defeat for the English and cataclysmic for the native aristocracy, the predominant view among archaeologists is that in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest life for the overwhelming majority of the population carried on pretty much as before. That the face on silver pennies changed while the monetary system remained essentially untouched is something of a metaphor for understanding the impact of the Conquest at the grass roots – this was an elite takeover that saw business as usual for the English economy and little or no immediate change to the essential rhythms of everyday life, at least for most.1 Indeed, the key categories of material evidence speak of continuity rather than change: burial practice, pottery and building techniques show little or no sign of any hiatus or radical difference either side of 1066, and archaeologists usually adopt the label ‘Saxo-Norman’ for items of material culture and sculpture that could equally be attributed a pre- or post-Conquest date.

The very small number of Norman-French place names in the English landscape highlight that this was an aristocratic conquest rather than a mass folk movement – most namings, such as Montacute, Somerset (‘pointed hill’) and Belvoir, Leicestershire (‘beautiful view’) marked new Norman capita (estate centres).

Military devastation was localised rather than general, principally affecting the zone of south-east England that was in the path of the advancing Norman army in 1066, and later those regions where rebellions were vigorously stamped out, including northern Yorkshire and the Isle of Ely. Overall, we see little physical evidence of any rupture in society.

AS WELL AS equipping men to fight, the military material culture of the knightly classes expressed the corporate identity of their elite group. Blending functionality with ceremonial and symbolic value, distinctive forms of arms and armour proclaimed membership of the warrior classes and demonstrated an individual's access to the resources and networks necessary to purchase or have manufactured expensive and sometimes bespoke items. The mid-twelfth century is a period when the practice and image of knighthood were evolving in important ways bound up with an emerging culture of chivalry. On the battlefield, the mail shirt, helmet, shield and sword will have marked out the owner as a member of a martial elite who should be treated according to the rules of war, while quite different treatment could be expected for those outside chivalric society. This chapter identifies the key characteristics of arms and armour in the twelfth century and evaluates the evidence for change in the period, exploring how this can be linked to the construction and expression of knightly identity.

Combat and Combatants

Chroniclers marvelled at the aesthetic spectacle of large gatherings of armed men, and while they were doing so to make political points about the ability of their rulers and leaders to raise and lead armies, there is no mistaking the powerful visual impression that massed groups of soldiers left on contemporary minds. While armies were small by later medieval standards, so too was the contemporary population and it is instructive to remember that armies will have constituted exceptional gatherings of people for the period that could equate to the population of a medium-sized city.

Knights formed the backbone of twelfth-century armies, although this term is a catch-all for subtly different types of combatant. The author of the Gesta Stephani differentiates the elite belted knight from the more basic sort of serving knight, specified with the words ‘rustic’ or ‘common/ordinary’ (rustici and gregarii). These forces did not act alone but were combined with lower-ranking infantry – primarily archers and spearmen, whether of the fyrd, paid mercenaries, and occasionally armed peasants. While chroniclers tended to exaggerate the size of military forces, detailed studies of knight service reveal that even major magnates mobilised relatively modest numbers of elite warriors.

THIS APPENDIX provides a brief gazetteer of key sites associated with the ‘Anarchy’ that can be visited. Arranged by region, it includes details on site location and accessibility. Given the sheer number of places involved in a civil war that extended over almost 20 years, this is not a comprehensive list, but is intended to indicate to the reader locations where tangible and broadly dateable remains can be seen, as well as conflict landscapes that are accessible.

Southern and South-West England

Danes Castle, Exeter (SX919933) is a small ringwork siege castle almost certainly built by King Stephen against Rougemont Castle, which lies on the opposite side of Longbrook Valley to the south (although the view is blocked by Exeter Prison). The earthworks were landscaped after the site was excavated in the early 1990s and are fully and freely accessible. The best-preserved siege castle of the civil war is, however, the ringwork and bailey known as ‘The Rings’ at Corfe, Dorset (SY956820), located on a publicly accessible site immediately south of the great castle, with spectacular views of the latter. The site has never been excavated but the earthworks are impressive and show evidence of modification as a platform for gunpowder artillery in the English Civil War.

Winchester, Hampshire contains numerous sites of significance from the period; the foremost is Wolvesey Palace (SU484290), in the south-east corner of the city walls, which preserves extensive remains associated with Bishop Henry of Blois. Farnham Castle, Surrey (SU83724732), preserves excellent evidence of Henry of Blois's castle in the form of the excavated remains of a tower sealed within the motte, itself surrounded by a later shell keep. Both sites are managed heritage attractions with entrance fees.

Nothing remains of Malmesbury Castle, Wiltshire, although the abbey which it adjoined displays some of the finest late Romanesque sculpture in Britain (ST933874). Located approximately 1.5km south of Malmesbury (ST94058578), and probably constructed in order to besiege the town and castle, is the ringwork of Cam's Hill. Although on private property, a public footpath passes to the north of the monument, from which there are good views of the earthworks.