Abstract
RECENT WORKS on Stephen and his reign have added great depth and nuance to our understanding of England’s history from 1135 to 1154.¹ They give us a better sense of Stephen’s abilities and the difficulties he faced, the degree to which his government remained functioning, and the role of the magnates in the civil war that engulfed his reign. Unfortunately, the scholars responsible have also sanitized the reign, unduly minimizing the amount of violence and disorder in their efforts to prove that Stephen was not such a bad king, that magnates were not mindless feudal anarchists, and that the reign