Letter from England
Inside the Anarchy
Archaeologists explore the landscape of England’s first civil war
By KATE RAVILIOUS
Friday, June 08, 2018
The ruins of England’s Wallingford Castle still stand near what was once a strategic crossing of the River Thames.
Some 20 miles downriver of Oxford and an arrow shot from the eastern bank of the Thames rise the limestone ruins of Wallingford Castle, a massive fortress built following the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Led by the newly crowned William the Conqueror, the Normans—descended from Norsemen who had settled in northern France in the tenth century—built castles in large numbers throughout England to control lands they had seized from the Anglo-Saxons. Along with Oxford and Windsor Castles, Wallingford was one of the most significant of these early Norman fortresses. And, in less than a century, the castle became the epicenter of one of the most momentous conflicts in English history. When William’s son King Henry I died in 1135, his rightful heir was his daughter, Empress Matilda. But her cousin, Stephen of Blois, also a grandchild of William the Conqueror, snatched the throne from under her nose. Matilda then launched an all-out campaign to win back the crown, plunging the country into a civil war that lasted almost 20 years.
https://www.archaeology.org/issues/306-1807/letter-from/6678-letter-from-england
