Some years before the king had acquired the treasures of the bishop of Salisbury, and, despatching a large sum of money to Louis, king of the French, had married his son Eustace to Constance, Louis’ sister, planning by a match with so great a prince to strengthen his son’s chance of succession against the count of Anjou and his sons; and Constance was in London with the queen, her mother-in-law. When the queen would have gone elsewhere with her daughter-in-law, the aforesaid Geoffrey, then master of the Tower, prevented her, and seizing her daughter-in-law out of her hands, in spite of her stout resistance, kept her, permitting the queen to depart with ignominy. Afterwards at the king’s demand he reluctantly resigned his noble booty to her father-in-law, who for the time dissembled his just indignation. Now this wrong seemed to have been at length forgotten, when the barons assembled at the royal summons at St. Albans, and among them appeared this bandit; whereupon, forthwith seizing the opportunity, the king gave vent to his righteous anger and putting Geoffrey in bonds, extorted from him the Tower of London with the two other fortresses which he held. Stripped of his defences, but released, his incapacity to rest, his mighty spirit, his almost incomparable resource, and his extraordinary genius for evil, led him to gather together an impious crew, at whose head he burst into the monastery of Ramsey; without fear, he drove out the monks, and turned the famous and holy place into a den of thieves, and the sanctuary of God into the home of the devil, ravaging the country round with constant sallies and expeditions. Success increased his confidence, and going further afield, he harassed and menaced king Stephen with the boldest assaults. During this wild outburst it seemed as if God was asleep and took no thought for human affairs, or even his own, that is, the church; and pious men cried out of their trouble, “Arise, why sleepest thou, O Lord?” But, as the apostle says, after God endured with much patience vessels of wrath fit for destruction, “he arose,” as the prophet says, “as from sleep, and smote his enemies in their hinder parts,” that is, in the latter years of those whose earlier career seemed prosperous. In a word, shortly before the destruction of that impious wretch, as is proved by the true testimony of many, the walls of the church into which he had burst, and of the adjacent cloister, sweated with real blood, by which, as afterwards appeared, was signified both the enormity of his crime and the now imminent judgment upon the enormity. But since the evil men, given over to a reprobate mind, were in no wise frightened by a portent so horrible, their abandoned leader, while storming a castle of his enemies among the serried ranks of his followers, was struck on the head by the arrow of a common footman; and from that wound the reckless fighter, though at first he made light of it, died after a few days,