When one thinks about Stephen’s reign, anarchy and civil war, rather than administration, are the terms that come to mind. Notwithstanding the famous passage in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, of a time when ‘Christ and His saints slept’, and the English people ‘suffered nineteen winters for our sins’, the study of Stephen’s administration, and not just the Anarchy, has had a long and distinguished historiography. There are two main trends in the studies of Stephen’s administration. The first emphasizes the extent of the decline of administrative structures, especially the Exchequer and Chancery. For example, H.W. C.Davis characterized Stephen’s reign as one of terrible devastation and rebellion, using the evidence of the waste figures from the Pipe Rolls early in Henry II’s reign. In the early 1970s, a less catastrophic but still negative picture emerged in the work of H.A.Cronne, R.H.C.Davis, and others. In this first school of thought, the accomplishments of Henry I in administration and centralization loom large. As Warren Hollister has argued, Henry’s reign saw a spectacular increase in government records: the first Pipe Rolls, almost 1500 extant charters, and two collections of laws, Leges Henrici Primi and the Quadripartitus. Henry I’s administrative innovations were a key development in the centralization of royal power and his legacy to future English kings. ‘In the generations following Henry I’s death (after the aberration of Stephen’s reign), royal justice and administration continued to grow despite occasional episodes of regional violence.’ The second trend in the historiography of Stephen’s reign stresses the continued functioning of Henry I’s system, with the caveat that there was a measurable reduction in the efficiency of the system after 1141. The reassessment of Stephen’s reign has been wide-ranging, but within administrative history the focus has been on the functioning of the Exchequer and the role of earls and sheriffs. Kenji Yoshitake argued that the Chancery and the Exchequer functioned smoothly until the battle of Lincoln in 1141.