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Her landing was made on the 22d of September, 1139, on the coast of Sussex. Here she threw herself into Arundel Castle, and quickly afterwards made her way to Bristol Castle, then held by her illegitimate brother, Robert, Earl of Gloucester.

And now the state of affairs we had described began. The nobles of the north and west of England renounced their allegiance to Stephen and swore allegiance to Maud. London and the east remained faithful to the king. A stream of men-at-arms, hired by both factions, poured from the neighboring coast of Normandy into the disputed realm. Each side had promised them, for their pay, the lands and wealth of the other. Like vultures to the feast they came, with little heed to the rights of the rival claimants and the wrongs of the people, with much heed to their own private needs and ambitions.

In England such anarchy ruled as that land of much intestine war has rarely witnessed. The Norman nobles prepared in haste for the civil war, and in doing so made the English their prey. To raise the necessary funds, many of them sold their domains, townships, and villages, with the inhabitants thereof and all their goods. Others of them made forays on the lands of those of the opposite faction, and seized cattle, horses, sheep, and men alike carrying off the English in chains, that they might force them by torture to yield what wealth they possessed.

Terror ruled supreme. The realm was in a panic of dread. So great was the alarm, that the inhabitants of city and town alike took to flight if they saw a distant group of horsemen approaching. Three or four armed men were enough to empty a town of its inhabitants. It was in Bristol, where Maud and her foreign troops lay, that the most extreme terror prevailed. All day long men were being brought into the city bound and gagged. The citizens had no immunity. Soldiers mingled among them in disguise, their arms concealed, their talk in the English tongue, strolling through markets and streets, listening to the popular chat, and then suddenly seizing any one who seemed to be in easy circumstances. These they would drag to their head-quarters and hold to ransom.

The air was filled with tales of the frightful barbarities practised by the Norman nobles on the unhappy English captives in the depths of their gloomy castles. “They carried off,” says the Saxon chronicle, “all who they thought possessed any property, men and women, by day and by night; and whilst they kept them imprisoned, they inflicted on them tortures, such as no martyr ever underwent, in order to obtain gold and silver from them.” We must be excused from quoting the details of these tortures.

“They killed many thousands of people by hunger,” continues the chronicle. “They imposed tribute after tribute upon the towns and villages, calling this in their tongue tenserie. When the citizens had nothing more to give them, they plundered and burnt the town. You might have travelled a whole day without finding a single soul in the towns, or a cultivated field. The poor died of hunger, and those who had been formerly well-off begged their bread from door to door. Whoever had it in his power to leave England did so. Never was a country delivered up to so many miseries and misfortunes; even in the invasions of the pagans it suffered less than now. Neither the cemeteries nor the churches were spared; they seized all they could, and then set fire to the church. To till the ground was useless. It was openly reported that Christ and his saints were sleeping.”

One cannot but think that this frightful picture is somewhat overdrawn; yet nothing could indicate better the condition of a Middle-Age country under a weak king, and torn by the adherents of rival claimants to the throne.

Let us leave this tale of torture and horror and turn to that of war. In the conflict between Stephen and Maud the king took the first step. He led his army against Bristol. It proved too strong for him, and his soldiers, in revenge, burnt the environs, after robbing them of all they could yield. Then, leaving Bristol, he turned against the castles on the Welsh borders, nearly all of whose lords had declared for Maud.