In passing thus rapidly over these years we are but following the example of our historians, who share in the exhaustion of the combatants, recording little but an occasional affray, and a complaint of general misery. Neither side had strength to keep down its friends, much less to encounter its enemies. The price of the support given to both was the same--absolute license to build castles, to practice private war, to hang their private enemies, to plunder their neighbors, to coin their money, to exercise their petty tyrannies as they pleased. England was dismembered. North of the Tees ruled the king of Scots, David the lawgiver and the church builder, under whose rule Cumberland, Westmoreland and Northumberland were safe; the bishopric of Durham, too, under his wing, had peace. The West of England, as we have seen, was under the earl of Gloucester, who in his sister’s name founded earldoms, and endeavored to concentrate in the hands of his supporters such vestiges of the administrative organization as still subsisted. But the great earls of the house of Beaumont, Roger of Leicester and Waleran of Meulan, who dominated the midland shires, chose to act as independent sovereigns and made terms both in England and Normandy as if they had been kings. [Sidenote: Departure of Matilda. ] In all the misery, and exhaustion, and balance of evils, however, time was working. The first generation of actors was leaving the stage, and a new one--if not better, still freed from the burden of odium, duplicity, and dishonesty which had marked the first--came into play. And the balance of change veered now to Stephen’s side. The year 1145 cut off Geoffrey de Mandeville in the midst of his sins, the year 1143 had seen the death of Miles of Hereford, the empress’s most faithful servant. In 1147 the great earl Robert of Gloucester passed away, and it is no small sign of the absolute deadness of the country at the time, that both his death and the departure of the empress, which must have almost coincided with it, are not even noticed in the best of the contemporary historians. [Sidenote: The second Crusade. ]