Hello and welcome to the History of England Episode 32, when God and His saints slept.

King Stephen was the last king covered by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which ends in 1154.

I don't know why exactly it ends, but in some ways it's various authors and contributors

must have felt that something had finally changed, that the Anglo-Saxon people had irretrievably

changed into something else. Maybe Henry and the Anarchy had made a difference in binding

the English and the Normans into one entity, since by the end of Stephen's reign, 1066

would have been beyond living memory for most.

And there's also a sense that Stephen's successor Henry II was the start of a nudity,

and he himself was a direct descendant of the line of Cherdich. And finally there was

now so much marriage between Norman and English, that even the Chronicle has noted that

it was almost impossible to tell the difference.

I feel quite emotional. One of the wonderful things about studying the Dark Ages as an

amateur historian is that the lack of sources means you get to know a few of those sources

really very well. And actually you feel that you've got to know the character of the authors.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had many contributors, and their style has changed from the Leconic

or in places frankly lazy, to the expansive and even garalous during the Conqueror's reign.

There are many famous lines in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle think, for example, of the famous

793 entry about the arrival of the Norseman in North Ember in the burning of Lindos Farn.

But we have to wait until very close to the end to get to one of the most evocative

of all the entries. The Chronicle gives us a good long blast about the evils of Stephen's

reign and ends with the following passage. Wherever the land was tilled, the earth

bore no corn, for the land was all ruined with such deeds, and they said openly that

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