When this great council at London was broken up King Stephen made repair unto Dover to meet and confer with his ancient ally and friend the Earl of Flanders. The king was well attended, and among the best lords of England that went with him was our neighbour Sir Alain de Bohun. We, the monks of Reading, or such of us as had gone to the great city, journeyed back to our abbey, in a great fall of autumnal rain; and when, at the end of three days, we in uncomfortable case did reach the abbey, we found that the swollen river had swept away good part of the mill which we had built on the Kennet, at a short space from our house, and had otherwise done us much mischief. Also was there seen a great falling star, and there were heard in the heavens, on one very dark and gusty night, some dolorous sounds, as of men wailing and lamenting. In a few days more some sad but uncertain rumours did begin to reach our house; but it was not until one stormy night in the early part of November, when Sir Alain de Bohun on his way homeward stopped at our gates, that we knew of a certainty that which had befallen. Ah, well-a-day, King Stephen was dead! He who for well nigh nineteen years had not known one day's perfect peace was now, inasmuch as the world and mortal man could affect him, at peace for ever! And may God have mercy on his soul in the world to come! After the politic conferences with the Earl of Flanders, and the departure of the said earl for his own dominions, the king was all of a sudden seized with the great pain of the Iliac passion, and with an old disease which had more than once brought him to the brink of the grave; and so, after short but acute suffering, he laid him down to die, and did die in the house of the monks of Canterbury, on the five and twentieth day of the kalends of October. _Sic mors rapit omne genus._ And our true-hearted lord of Caversham, who was true unto death, and who had tenderly nursed the dying king, conveyed the body to Feversham, and placed it in the same grave with his beloved wife Maud, and his son Stephen, in the goodly abbey which he and his queen had built and endowed in that Kentish township; and having in this guise done the last duty to his liege lord and king, and being by death liberated from the oaths of fealty and allegiance, which he had never broken by word or deed, Sir Alain, caring for none of the honours and advancements which other lords were ready to struggle for at the coming in of a new king, came quietly home, only hoping and praying that his country would be happy under Henry Plantagenet.