[701] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), pp. 18–29. Hen. Hunt. as above. Eng. Chron. a. 1135. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. pp. 96, 97. [702] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 5 (Arnold, p. 260). Yet already there were signs that those who had thought to find in Henry’s nephew such another king as Henry himself[703] were doomed to disappointment. It was no good omen for the fulfilment of the pledges embodied in his charters when Stephen broke the one which appealed most strongly to popular feeling--the promise to mitigate the severe forest laws--by holding a forest assize at Brampton after his triumph over Baldwin of Redvers in 1136.[704] Neither was it satisfactory that the accession of a king specially bound by the circumstances of his election to rule as a national sovereign proved to be the signal for a great influx of foreigners--not as in Henry’s time, honest industrious settlers who fled from their own unquiet homes to share “the good peace that he made in this land” and to become an useful element in the growing prosperity of the nation; but as in the Red King’s time, a rapacious and violent race of mercenary adventurers, chiefly from Britanny and Flanders; men to whom nothing was sacred, and who flocked to Stephen as they had flocked to Rufus, attracted by the report of his prodigality and the hope, only too well founded, of growing rich upon the spoils of England.[705] However much Henry may have provoked his subjects by his preference for ministers of continental birth, he had at least never insulted them by taking for his chief counsellor and confidant a mere foreign soldier of fortune like that William of Ypres who acted as the leader of Stephen’s Flemish mercenaries and whose influence over him excited the wrath of both the English and the Norman barons.[706] The peace of the country was probably all the better kept during the year 1137 because its preservation was left wholly to Bishop Roger and his nephews, while Stephen, accompanied by his Flemish friend, was well out of the way in Normandy, where he spent the year in concerting an alliance with his brother,[707] obtaining the French king’s sanction to his tenure of the duchy, for which his eldest son did homage in his stead,[708] and vainly endeavouring to secure it from the combined dangers of internal treason and Angevin intermeddling. No disturbance occurred in England during his absence; a Scottish invasion, threatened soon after Easter, was averted by Archbishop Thurstan of York, who persuaded the Scot king to accept a truce till Advent,[709] when Stephen was expected to return. He was no sooner back than David sent to demand for his son the earldom of Northumberland,[710] which had been, it was said, half promised to him a year before;[711] on the refusal of his demand,[712] early in January he led an army into England. An unsuccessful siege of the border fortress of Carham or Wark was followed by such a harrying of