_Circa id tempus_, or nigh upon the time that Sir Alain sent this response unto Matilda, Sir Ingelric of Huntercombe, having composed his feud with that family and kindred, espoused the rich widow of that Sir Jocelyn who had burned his wife, the mother of the little Alice, in his house, and who had been by him slain in the Falbury of Reading, almost at our gates. The ladie of Sir Jocelyn had acquired an ill-fame during her widowhood, for she was greedy of other people's goods and avaricious of her own, faithless unto her friends, merciless to her foes, and to her vassals and serfs haughty and cruel. It was as much from the darkness of her deeds as from her foreign and dark complexion, that she had gotten all through the country the name of The Dark Ladie. But she was rich, passing rich, and aspiring, and allied with some of our greatest men, and Sir Ingelric had given up his whole soul to ambition and gold. This unseemly matrimony was mainly brought about by the countess, and there were others of the like sort, which all terminated in misery and woe, and in visible manifestations of God's wrath and vengeance. The Dark Ladie, who had done much mischief in the land in her widowed condition, became still more terrible as the wife of Sir Ingelric, and that lost knight became all the worse for his union with her. They crammed their castle at Speen with a most ungodly garrison, and with prisoners they kept and tortured for ransom. King Stephen being a close prisoner in the castle of Bristowe, and the Earl of Gloucester being well guarded in Rochester Castle, each of the contending parties was, in a manner, without a head, for Stephen's brother, the bishop-legate, was, after all, but a priest, and the woman Matilda was nothing without her half-brother. A negociation was therefore set on foot for a mutual release of prisoners. This was several times interrupted, and at each interruption the party of King Stephen threatened to send the Earl of Gloucester out of the land unto Boulogne, there to be buried in a castle-prison deep under the ground, and the party of Matilda threatened to send King Stephen over to Ireland and consign him to the wild Irishry; but at last, on the first of the kalends of November, it was agreed between them that the great Earl of Gloucester should be exchanged for King Stephen; and the earl and the king being both liberated, each betook himself to the head-quarters of his friends and partisans. Both factions now stood much as they did previously to the battle of Lincoln; but fearfully had the people of England suffered in the interim. And yet, after all these sufferings, neither faction did turn its thoughts _ad regnum tranquillandum_; but both did prepare for more battles and sieges, sending forth their bands of foreigners and leaving the cruel castle-holders to seize, torture, plunder and kill. While the land was thus weeping tears of blood, the king and his brother, the bishop, made repair unto London, where the