Henry I of England had crossed the Channel many times. He was the youngest son of William the Conqueror, the third of his line to wear the English crown, and at fifty-two years old he had done what every Norman king before him had failed to do: he had held the realm together for two decades without rebellion, secured Normandy for the crown, and produced a legitimate male heir to inherit both. William Adelin was seventeen. He had already been recognized as heir by the great men of England and Normandy. He had already been married to the daughter of the Count of Anjou to bind the southern frontier. He had already been called, in court Latin, the hope of England.

On the evening of 25 November 1120, Henry’s court gathered at the port of Barfleur on the Norman coast to sail home. Henry himself sailed on a separate vessel, leaving earlier in the day. William Adelin was offered passage on a ship called the Blanche-Nef, the White Ship, said to be the finest and fastest vessel in the king’s service. He boarded with most of the court’s younger generation: nephews and nieces of the king, the heir to Chester, the daughter of the king’s sister, the captain’s own son, and roughly three hundred others. Casks of wine were brought aboard. The night was cold and the mood was high.

The White Ship left harbor late, well after dark, with the crew and many of the passengers drunk. The captain had been challenged to overtake the king’s vessel, which was already at sea. He pushed for speed. Within minutes of clearing the harbor mouth, the ship struck a submerged rock known to local sailors as the Quilleboeuf. The hull split. Water came in fast.

A small boat was launched and William Adelin was placed in it. He would have lived. But he heard his half-sister, the Countess of Perche, calling out from the deck of the foundering ship, and he ordered the boat to turn back for her. As it neared the wreck, men in the water rushed it and capsized it. William Adelin drowned, along with very nearly everyone else aboard. The contemporary chroniclers record only one survivor: a butcher from Rouen who clung to a spar through the night and was pulled from the water at dawn.

Henry was told the next day. The chroniclers say he did not laugh again. That is doubtless an exaggeration, but the political reality was not. The king had one legitimate son, and now he had none. He had a daughter, Matilda, but she was already married to the Holy Roman Emperor and living in Germany. He had bastards in number, the chief of them Robert of Gloucester, but a Norman crown did not pass to bastards. He would marry again within months, hoping for another son. None came.

The succession of England, settled for a generation, was now an open question. Henry had fifteen years left to live, and he would spend them trying to close it.

By 1126 Henry I had made his choice. His daughter Matilda, widowed by the death of the Emperor and recalled to her father’s court, would inherit the throne of England and the duchy of Normandy. She was the only legitimate child of the king left living, she was a proven political figure who had ruled territories in Germany on her husband’s behalf, and she was, by Henry’s reckoning, the lawful heir. The Normans had never had a queen regnant. Henry intended to give them one.

The trouble was that the great lords of the realm had to agree. To bind them, Henry summoned them on three separate occasions to swear oaths of fealty to Matilda as his heir. At the Christmas court of 1126. Again in 1131. Again as late as 1133. Each time, the assembled barons, bishops, and earls placed their hands on relics of saints and swore before God that they would receive Matilda as their lady and lawful queen upon the king’s death. Among those who swore was the king’s nephew, Stephen of Blois, Count of Mortain and Boulogne, son of Henry’s sister Adela.

Stephen swore three times.

Henry I died on 1 December 1135 at his hunting lodge near Lyons-la-Foret in Normandy, reportedly from a surfeit of lampreys eaten against his physician’s advice. Matilda was in Anjou with her second husband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, and pregnant with her second son. The funeral arrangements would take weeks. The crossing from Anjou to England was a matter of days for anyone who moved fast.

Stephen moved fast.

He crossed from Boulogne to the Kentish coast within days of receiving word, rode straight to London where his family had cultivated influence among the city’s leading citizens, and presented himself as the alternative to a foreign-raised empress and her Angevin husband. London acclaimed him. The royal treasury at Winchester opened to him: his younger brother, Henry of Blois, was Bishop of Winchester and held its keys. The Archbishop of Canterbury, William de Corbeil, accepted Stephen’s account that on his deathbed Henry I had absolved the lords of their oath to Matilda. There was no second witness to this. There did not need to be.

On 22 December 1135, three weeks after Henry’s death, Stephen of Blois was crowned and anointed King of England at Westminster Abbey. The Pope confirmed the coronation the following spring. The lords who had sworn on relics fell into line, most of them, because the alternative was civil war and the new king was already on the throne.

Three oaths, sworn on relics, by every great man in England. Broken in three weeks. The Angevin party did not forget, and they did not forgive. They began, quietly, to count their friends.

Matilda landed in England in September 1139, accompanied by her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, the ablest commander on either side of the war that was about to begin. They came with a small force, expecting to gather the lords who had sworn the original oaths. Some came. Many did not. Stephen had been king for nearly four years by then, and possession of the crown counted for a great deal even among men whose consciences had once been troubled.

The war that followed was not a single campaign with a clear front. It was a country slowly coming apart at its seams. The Empress held a string of strongholds across the southwest, anchored on Gloucester and Bristol, with Robert as her military commander and David I of Scotland, her maternal uncle, holding her northern flank. Stephen held London, the east, and the loyalty of the Norman barons whose lands lay closer to the king’s writ. Between the two zones, much of England fell into the hands of local lords who answered to neither side and built unlicensed castles from which they extracted what they could.

The chroniclers called this period the time when, in the famous phrase of the Peterborough continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Christ and his saints slept. They meant that justice had failed, that no king’s writ ran in much of the country, and that ordinary people paid the cost. They were not exaggerating. The phrase has endured because it was earned.

The war turned on two moments. The first was the Battle of Lincoln, on 2 February 1141. Stephen, besieging the castle, was caught in the field by a relief force under Robert of Gloucester. He fought on foot, the chroniclers say, with extraordinary personal courage, until his sword broke and a Welsh knight brought him down with a stone to the helm. Stephen was taken prisoner and held at Bristol. For the first time in the war, the throne was unguarded. Matilda rode to Winchester to be acclaimed, then to London to be crowned.

It did not happen. The people of London, the city that had made Stephen king, rose against her before the coronation could take place. The chroniclers blame her manner: imperious, the demands for new taxes too steep, the refusal to grant the petitions of the citizens. The political reality may have been simpler. London had backed Stephen, London had benefited from Stephen, London had no reason to want an Angevin queen and her Scottish allies in their streets. Matilda fled from Westminster with the coronation regalia still unworn. She would never come closer to the crown.

The second moment came the following winter at Oxford. Stephen had been exchanged for Robert of Gloucester, who had been captured at the Rout of Winchester in September 1141, and the war ground on. By December 1142, Matilda was besieged at Oxford Castle with her household and a small garrison. Stephen had surrounded the town. The Thames was frozen. Provisions were running out. There was no relief coming.

The story is too perfect to be invented and too vivid to be entirely literal, but the chroniclers all tell it: the Empress and four knights, in white cloaks, walking across the Thames at night under cover of a snowstorm, past Stephen’s pickets, to safety at Wallingford. It is the image that survives of her from the war. She had not won. She would not win. But she had not been taken, and she had not let the war end on Stephen’s terms.

What followed was eleven more years of stalemate. Robert of Gloucester died in 1147 and the Angevin military effort died with him. Matilda returned to Normandy. The war continued in name, conducted by her son Henry FitzEmpress, who was now grown and who had inherited his father’s title to Anjou and his mother’s claim to England. Stephen still held the crown, but his own son and heir, Eustace, was deeply unpopular and visibly unsuited to rule. The barons on both sides were exhausted. The country was exhausted.

Henry FitzEmpress was nineteen. He had a different idea about how the war should end.

Henry FitzEmpress landed in England in January 1153. He moved through the country with a discipline his mother had never managed, taking the loyalty of the southwest, threatening the midlands, and forcing Stephen to gather his last reserves. The two armies met at Wallingford in the summer of 1153, on opposite banks of the Thames. The battle was expected. It did not happen.

The barons on both sides, men who had fought each other for fourteen years and had nothing left to gain from another field, refused to commit. Negotiations opened instead. The death of Stephen’s son Eustace in August, of an illness the chroniclers do not name precisely, removed the last obstacle. With Eustace gone, Stephen had no heir whose succession was worth fighting for. With Eustace gone, the door opened.

The Treaty of Wallingford, agreed in November 1153 and formally promulgated at Winchester the following month, settled the war on terms neither side would have accepted four years earlier. Stephen would keep the crown for his lifetime. Henry FitzEmpress would be recognized as his adopted son and heir. The Empress’s claim, the cause that Robert of Gloucester had died fighting for and that Matilda had pursued for two decades, was honored through her son rather than in her own person. The unlicensed castles built during the anarchy would be torn down. The royal demesne would be restored. England would have a single king again.

Stephen lived less than a year after the treaty. He died on 25 October 1154 at Dover, and Henry FitzEmpress was crowned at Westminster on 19 December of the same year as Henry II, the first king of the House of Plantagenet. The dynasty he founded would rule England for the next three hundred and thirty years.

What the Anarchy meant in retrospect depended on which side a chronicler stood. To Stephen’s partisans, it was the long defense of a legitimate king against a foreign-backed claimant, ended only when that claimant’s son was willing to wait his turn rather than burn the country down to take it sooner. To Matilda’s, it was nineteen years of paying in blood for a single broken oath, vindicated in the end only because Henry FitzEmpress made the broken oath cost more to honor than to set right.

Both readings are true. Neither is the whole truth. What is certainly true is that England remembered. The chroniclers wrote, and the lawyers cited, and the next time a king tried to set aside the rules of succession by force of personality alone, the precedent of the Anarchy was waiting for him.

This October, in a field in Iredell County, the two armies meet again.