By the time we had returned unto our abbey, from Oxenford, it was hard upon the feast of the Epiphany, of the year of grace eleven hundred and forty-three. At the first coming of spring the king, who had been to London and the eastern parts to collect a great force, marched through Reading and tarried a few hours at our house, without doing any notable damage thereunto, excepting always that he did _borrow_ from us all the coined money in our mint, which he did intend to repay so soon as the country should be settled. But it grieved us much to learn that he, too, had hired and brought into England great tumultuary companies of Flemings and Bourguignons and other half-baptized, unholy, ungodly men, who had no bowels of compassion for the people of England, no respect for our holy places, but an insatiate appetite for plunder. And these black bands, on marching away to the westward, brake open divers nunneries and burned sundry towns and churches, maugre all that the legate bishop of Winchester, who was with his brother the king, could say or do to prevent them. This sacrilege brought down vengeance and discomfiture upon the king's cause, and did drive away from his banner for that time our good Lord of Caversham. Matilda and her princely boy Henry remained in Bristowe Castle, or about that fair western country by the shores of the broad Severn, or on the banks of the Avon; but some of her partisans had made themselves formidable at Sarum; and to check the incursions of these the king turned the nunnery at Wilton into a castle, driving out the chaste sisterhood and girding their once quiet abode with bulwarks and battlements. But while he was upon this ill-judged work the great Robert, Earl of Gloucester, on the first of the kalends of July, fell suddenly upon his encamped army, and by surprise and superiority of force did gain a great victory over King Stephen. The king with his brother the bishop fled with shame, and the earl's men took the king's people and his plate and money-chest, and other things. Among the men of name that were taken at Wilton was William Martell, the great favourite and sewer to the king, who was sent to Wallingford Castle, that terrible stronghold of Brian Fitzcount, which few men could mention without turning pale. Thus sundry more years passed with variable successes, and every year heaped on each side fresh calamities, to the great ruin of the whole land. And still both parties brought over their hungry bands of adventurers, and still many of our great men, caring neither for one party nor for the other, continued their castle-building and their plundering for their own account, and still the poor and despairing people of England said that Christ and his saints were asleep. Villages and hamlets were fast disappearing, and that our towns were not _all_ sacked and burned in these nineteen years of war, and that the substance of every man was not taken from him, was