These things happened from time to time in the comparatively prosperous reign of Henry I. But with the death of Henry in 1135, there began a state of misery and lawlessness lasting almost to the accession of Henry II. in 1154, beside which the former state of England was spoken of as “most flourishing[59].” Besides the barbarities of the Scots and the Welsh on the northern and western marches[60], there were the civil wars of the factions of King Stephen and the Empress Maud, and the cruelties and predations of the unruly nobles under the walls of a thousand newly-built strongholds. A graphic account of the condition of England remains to us from the pen of an eyewitness, the observant author of the _Gesta Stephani_[61]. Under the year 1143 he writes that there was most dire famine in all England; the people ate the flesh of dogs and horses or the raw garbage of herbs and roots. The people in crowds pined and died, or another part entered on a sorrowful exile with their whole families. One might see houses of great name standing nearly empty, the residents of either sex and of every age being dead. As autumn drew near and the fields whitened for the harvest, there was no one to reap them, for the cultivators were cut off by the pestilent hunger which had come between. To these home troubles was added the presence of a multitude of barbarous adventurers, without bowels of pity and compassion, who had flocked to the country for military service. The occasion was one of those which cause the archdeacon of Huntingdon to break out into his elegiac verse: “Ecce Stygis facies, consimilisque lues[62].” “And in those days,” says another, “there was no king in Israel[63].” The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which comes to an end in this scene of universal gloom, describes how one might go a day’s journey and never find a man sitting in a town, or the land tilled, and how men who once were rich had to go begging their bread, concluding with the words, “And they said openly that Christ and His saints slept.”