is own partisans were terrified
as if a thunderbolt had fallen." Stephen invested the castle of Arundel.
But in the most romantic spirit of chivalry he permitted the Empress to
pass out, and to set forward to join her brother at Bristol, under a
safe-conduct. In 1140 the whole kingdom appears to have been subjected
to the horrors of a partisan warfare. The barons in their castles were
making a show of "defending their neighborhoods, but, more properly to
speak, were laying them waste." The legate and the bishops were
excommunicating the plunderers of churches, but the plunderers laughed
at their anathemas. Freebooters came over from Flanders, not to practise
the industrial arts as in the time of Henry I, but to take their part in
the general pillage. There was frightful scarcity in the country, and
the ordinary interchange of man with man was unsettled by the debasement
of the coin. "All things," says Malmesbury, "became venial in England;
and churches and abbeys were no longer secretly but even publicly
exposed to sale." All things become venial, under a government too weak
to repress plunder or to punish corruption. The strong aim to be rich by
rapine, and the cunning by fraud, when the confusion of a kingdom is
grown so great that, as is recorded of this period, "the neighbor could
put no faith in his nearest neighbor, nor the friend in his friend, nor
the brother in his own brother." The demoralization of anarchy is even
more terrible than its bloodshed.

The marches and sieges, the revolts and treacheries, of this evil time
are occasionally varied by incidents which illustrate the state of
society. Robert Fitz-Herbert, with a detachment of the Earl of
Gloucester's soldiers, surprised the castle of Devizes, which the King
had taken from the Bishop of Salisbury. Robert Fitz-Herbert varies the
atrocities of his fellow-barons, by rubbing his prisoners with honey,
and exposing them naked to the sun. But Robert, having obtained Devizes,
refused to admit the Earl of Gloucester to any advantage of its
possession, and commenced the subjection of the neighborhood on his own
account. Another crafty baron, John Fitz-Gilbert, held the castle of
Marlborough; and Robert Fitz-Herbert, having an anxious desire to be
lord of that castle also, endeavoring to cajole Fitz-Gilbert into the
admission of his followers, went there as a guest, but was detained as a
prisoner. Upon this the Earl of Gloucester came in force for revenge
against