returned here, to assist his partisans, whom the King was then besieging
at Wallingford upon the Thames. Here, for two days, divided only by the
river, the two armies lay encamped opposite to one another--on the eve,
as it seemed to all men, of another desperate fight, when the EARL OF
ARUNDEL took heart and said 'that it was not reasonable to prolong the
unspeakable miseries of two kingdoms to minister to the ambition of two
princes.'

Many other noblemen repeating and supporting this when it was once
uttered, Stephen and young Plantagenet went down, each to his own bank of
the river, and held a conversation across it, in which they arranged a
truce; very much to the dissatisfaction of Eustace, who swaggered away
with some followers, and laid violent hands on the Abbey of St. Edmund's-
Bury, where he presently died mad. The truce led to a solemn council at
Winchester, in which it was agreed that Stephen should retain the crown,
on condition of his declaring Henry his successor; that WILLIAM, another
son of the King's, should inherit his father's rightful possessions; and
that all the Crown lands which Stephen had given away should be recalled,
and all the Castles he had permitted to be built demolished. Thus
terminated the bitter war, which had now lasted fifteen years, and had
again laid England waste. In the next year STEPHEN died, after a
troubled reign of nineteen years.

Although King Stephen was, for the time in which he lived, a humane and
moderate man, with many excellent qualities; and although nothing worse
is known of him than his usurpation of the Crown, which he probably
excused to himself by the consideration that King Henry the First was a
usurper too--which was no excuse at all; the people of England suffered
more in these dread nineteen years, than at any former period even of
their suffering history. In the division of the nobility between the two
rival claimants of the Crown, and in the growth of what is called the
Feudal System (which made the peasants the born vassals and mere slaves
of the Barons), every Noble had his strong Castle, where he reigned the
cruel king of all the neighbouring people. Accordingly, he perpetrated
whatever cruelties he chose. And never were worse cruelties committed
upon earth than in wretched England in those nineteen years.

The writers who were living then describe them fearfully. They say that
the castles were filled with devils rather than with men; that th