The baronage were so well content with the practical independence which they enjoyed during the civil war, that they had no desire to see it end. They changed from side to side with the most indecent shamelessness, only taking care that at each change they got a full price for their treachery. Geoffrey de Mandeville, the wicked Earl of Essex, was perhaps the worst of them; he sold each party in turn, and finally fought for his own hand, taking no heed of king or queen, and only seeking to plunder his neighbours and annex their lands. He had many imitators; the last pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which finally comes to an end in Stephen's reign, are filled with a picture of the hopeless misery of the land. Every shire, it laments, was full of castles, and every castle was filled with devils and evil men. The lords took any weaker neighbours who were thought to have money, and put them in dungeons, and tortured them with unutterable devices. "The ancient martyrs were not so ill treated, for they hanged men by the thumbs, or by the head, and smoked them with foul smoke; they put knotted strings about their heads, and twisted them till they bit into the brain. They put them in dungeons with adders and toads, or shut them into close boxes filled with sharp stones, and pressed them there till their bones were broken. Many thousands they killed with hunger and torment, and that lasted the nineteen winters while Stephen was king. In those days, if three or four men came riding towards a township, all the township fled hastily before them, believing them to be robbers." [Sidenote: =Treaty of Wallingford.--Death of Stephen.=] So fared England for many years, till in 1153 a peace was patched up at Wallingford. Matilda had quitted England long before, and her party was now led by her young son, Henry of Anjou, who had come over in 1152 to take her place. Stephen was now old and broken by constant campaigning; he had lately lost his son Eustace, whom he had destined to succeed him; and when it was proposed to him that he should hold the crown for his own life, but make Count Henry his heir, he closed with the offer. Less than a year later he died, leaving England in the worst plight that ever she knew since the days of Aethelred the Ill-counselled. For the king's mandate no longer ran over the land, and every baron was ruling for himself. Northumberland and Cumberland were in the hands of the Scots, the Welsh were harrying the border counties, and Yorkshire had been ravaged in 1153 by the last Viking raid recorded in English history. It was time that a strong man should pick up the broken sceptre of William the Conqueror. FOOTNOTES: [9] A narrow tippet of white wool, fastened by four black cross-headed pins, such as we see in the shield of arms of the see of Canterbury. [10] William had made Ralf Bishop of Durham in reward for his evil doing--a typical instance of his cynical disregard for public and private morality.