[765] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 106. The writer adds that on the very day of Stephen’s departure (June 15) Geoffrey set fire to everything beyond the Wye; seven or eight Welshmen perished, but no English (_ib._ p. 107)--an indication that the part of Hereford beyond the Wye was then a Welsh quarter. [766] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 106. [767] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 36. [768] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), pp. 108, 109. In _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), pp. 37–39, 41, 42, the story is told at greater length, and the writer seems to defend the bishop and to consider his own hero rather ungrateful. A survey of its environs soon convinced him that he had undertaken a very difficult task. Bristol with its two encircling rivers was a natural stronghold of no common order; and on the one side where nature had left it unprotected, art had supplied the deficiency. The narrow neck of land at the eastern end of the peninsula on which the town stood--the only point whence it could be reached without crossing the water--was in the Conqueror’s last days occupied by a castle which in the Red King’s reign passed into the hands of Robert Fitz-Hamon, famed alike in history and legend as the conqueror of Glamorgan; in those of his son-in-law and successor, Earl Robert of Gloucester,[769] it grew into a mighty fortress, provided with trench and wall, outworks and towers, and all other military contrivances then in use,[770] and surrounded on its exposed eastern side by a moat whose waters joined those of the Avon on the south.[771] Bristol was in fact Robert’s military capital, and under the command of his eldest son it had now become the chief muster-place of all his dispossessed partizans and followers, as well as of a swarm of mercenaries attracted thither from all parts of the country by the advantages of the place and the wealth and renown of its lord.[772] From this stronghold they sallied forth in all directions to do the king all the mischief in their power. They overran his lands and those of his adherents like a pack of hounds; wholesale cattle-lifting was among the least of their misdeeds; every wealthy man whom they could reach was hunted down or decoyed into their den, and there tortured with every refinement of ingenious cruelty till he had given up his uttermost farthing.[773] One Philip Gay, a kinsman of Earl Robert, specially distinguished himself in the contrivance of new methods of torture.[774] In his hands, and those of men like him, Bristol acquired the title of “the stepmother of all England.”[775] If Bristol could be reduced to submission, Stephen’s work would be more than half done. He held a council of war with his barons to deliberate on the best method of beginning the siege. Those who were in earnest about the matter urged the construction of a mole to dam up the narrow