1137·This year the king Stephen went across the sea to Normandy, and was received there because they imagined that he would be just like the uncle was, and because he still had his treasury; but he distributed and scattered it stupidly. King Henry had gathered gold and silver and no good was done for his soul thereby. When the king Stephen came to England he held his council at Oxford, and there he seized the bishop Roger of Salisbury and his nephews, Alexander bishop of Lincoln and the chancellor Roger ⁜ , and put all in prison until they gave up their castles. Then when the traitors realised that Stephen was a mild man, gentle and good, and imposed no penalty, they committed every enormity. They had done him homage and sworn oaths, but they held to no pledge. They were all forsworn and their pledges lost because every powerful man made his castles and held them against him, and filled the land full of castles. They greatly oppressed the wretched men of the land with castle-work; then when the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. Then both by night and by day they seized those men whom they imagined had any wealth, common men and women, and put them in prison to get their gold and silver, and tortured them with unspeakable tortures, for no martyrs were ever tortured as they were. They hung them up by the feet and smoked them with foul smoke. They hung them by the thumbs, or by the head, and hung mail-coats on their feet. They put knotted strings round their heads and twisted till it went to the brains. They put them in dungeons where there were adders and snakes and toads, and destroyed them thus. Some they put into a ‘crucet-hus’, that is, into a chest that was short and narrow and shallow, and put sharp stones in there and crushed the man in there, so that he had all the limbs broken. In many of the castles was a ‘lof and grin’, that were chains such that two or three men had enough to do to carry one. It was made thus: it is fastened to a beam, and a sharp iron put around the man's throat and his neck so that he could not move in any direction, neither sit nor lie nor sleep, but carry all that iron. Many thousands they destroyed with hunger. I do not know nor can I tell all the horrors nor all the tortures that they did to wretched men in this land. And it lasted the 19 years while Stephen was king, and it always grew worse and worse. They laid a tax upon the villages time and again, and called it tenserie. Then when the wretched men had no more to give, they robbed and burned all the villages, so that you could well go a whole day’s journey and never find anyone occupying a village or land tilled. Then corn was dear, and flesh and cheese and butter, because there was none in the land. Wretched men starved with hunger; some who were once powerful men went on alms; some fled out of the land. Never before was there more wretchedness in the land, nor ever did heathen men worse than they did. Too many times they spared neither church nor churchyard, but took everything of value that was in it, and afterwards burned the church and everything together. They did not spare the land of bishops nor of abbots nor of priests, but robbed monks and clerks; and every man overpowered the other. If two or three men came riding to a village, all the villagers fled because of them, imagining that they were robbers. The bishops and the clergy always cursed them but that was nothing to them, because they were all accursed and forsworn and lost. Wherever men tilled, the earth bore no corn because the land was all done for with such deeds; and they said openly that Christ and His saints slept. Such things, and more than we know how to tell, we suffered 19 years for our sins.