Reign Of King Stephen, The: 1135-1154

Rating:
Summary: A well written portrait on King Stephen's reign
Review: Crouch's book on the reign of King Stephen should please the historian as well as those who love medieval history. It is well written, loaded with footnotes for further research, and provides an extensive bibliography.

Rating:
Summary: A Complex tale adequately told
Review: The reign of King Stephen was a complicated affair, with his control of his throne often highly problematic. Crouch tells the story well, painting a picture of a rather simple, and often only partially effective central government. Though very much an advocate for Stephen, Crouch also points out clearly some of his glaring weaknesses, and give a fairly balanced account of this period between two much more commanding figures. It is amazing how weak his claim to the throne was, and how to a very large extent he was able to frustrate the better claims of Matilda. The critical thing was that really the great lords were the central aspect of government, not any hereditary monarchy.

The book is not without its problems. Crouch is not that well able to handle coherently the very large cast of characters he deals with, and this is not aided by a tendency often to refer to the same individual by different titles or by partial names--some of which are inherently ambiguous since several characters have the same abreviated name. At times the work resembles those Russian novels where you can go for many pages thinking that there are two separate people when in fact they are the same individual. Second, Crouch is overly concerned to claim that Stephen's reign was not a period of anarchy, but of civil war. This is rather tiresome, especially as Crouch's account makes it quite clear that the great barons were very much a law unto themselves, could be arbitrarily destructive of civil order, were to a very large extent above the4 law, and that indeed the fighting largely ended when they were unwilling to participate enthusiastically. (It does not help that he starts by claiming that England had only two civil wars -- if what was going on in Stephen's reign was just a civl war rather than a breakdown of government, then what in the world does Crouch think the Wars of the Roses were all about? Finally, Crouch leaves largely unexplored the great mystery of the reign. That is why Stephen abandoned the claims of his younger son after his elder one died, when he had so vigorously tried to engineer the succession of his elder son. That abandonment led to the smooth transition to Henry II, but it is not well accounted for, since Crouch basically pictures Stephen as being in control at the critical time.

But these carping aside, over all the book paints a fascinating picture of conditions in the early middle ages, showing again to what extent the proper management of the great barons was the sine qua non of successful rule in England in the middle ages -- one whose mismanagement would lead repeatly to the problems of the weaker medieval kings.