by a promise to abolish the tax of Danegeld.

[Sidenote: Battle of the Standard]

The king's first two years were years of success and prosperity. Two
risings of barons in the east and west were easily put down, and in 1137
Stephen passed into Normandy and secured the Duchy against an attack from
Anjou. But already the elements of trouble were gathering round him.
Stephen was a mere soldier, with few kingly qualities save that of a
soldier's bravery; and the realm soon began to slip from his grasp. He
turned against himself the jealous dread of foreigners to which he owed
his accession by surrounding himself with hired knights from Flanders; he
drained the treasury by creating new earls endowed with pensions from it,
and recruited his means by base coinage. His consciousness of the
gathering storm only drove Stephen to bind his friends to him by
suffering them to fortify castles and to renew the feudal tyranny which
Henry had struck down. But the long reign of the dead king had left the
Crown so strong that even yet Stephen could hold his own. A plot which
Robert of Gloucester had been weaving from the outset of his reign came
indeed to a head in 1138, and the Earl's revolt stripped Stephen of Caen
and half Normandy. But when his partizans in England rose in the south
and the west and the King of Scots, whose friendship Stephen had bought
in the opening of his reign by the cession of Carlisle, poured over the
northern border, the nation stood firmly by the king. Stephen himself
marched on the western rebels and soon left them few strongholds save
Bristol. His people fought for him in the north. The pillage and
cruelties of the wild tribes of Galloway and the Highlands roused the
spirit of the Yorkshiremen. Baron and freeman gathered at York round
Archbishop Thurstan and marched to the field of Northallerton to await
the foe. The sacred banners of St. Cuthbert of Durham, St. Peter of York,
St. John of Beverley, and St. Wilfrid of Ripon hung from a pole fixed in
a four-wheeled car which stood in the centre of the host. The first onset
of David's host was a terrible one. "I who wear no armour," shouted the
chief of the Galwegians, "will go as far this day as any one with
breastplate of mail"; his men charged with wild shouts of "Albin, Albin,"
and were followed by the Norman knighthood of the Lowlands. But their
repulse was complete; the fierce hordes dashed in vain against the close
English ranks around the Standard, a