The Lure of Stephen's England: Tenserie, Flemings and a Crisis of Circumstance

To the memory of Pierre Bonnassie A FEW YEARS after the ‘sedition between King Stephen and Duke Henry for acquiring the kingdom’, as he called it, a monk of Abingdon recalled that a constable of Wallingford, having promised to protect the monks in return for a payment by Abbot Ingulf (1130–58), had reneged and plundered the monastic vill of Culham. When the Abbot humbly sought restitution, he was rebuffed, and it was only when the constable was mortally wounded and needed release from ecclesiastical anathema that his brother promised to return the plunder – and in the end that promise, too, was compromised. This sort of ‘protection-money’ had its own name – tenseria – during the reign of Stephen. Although this term itself is lacking in the Abingdon account, John Horace Round rightly cited this case in his brief study of ‘Tenserie’ published more than a century ago. For indeed, when allusions to coercive payments and intimidation are added to the comparatively few mentions of tenseria as such, the implications of a form of violence with its own vocabulary are considerably enlarged. They open two perspectives of research: that of the nature and origin of tenseria , and that of the nature of violence in a society often described as suffering from ‘anarchy’. The first and smaller of these perspectives is what chiefly concerns me in these pages, but I wish to say at once that nothing in what follows is meant to argue that anarchy prevailed under King Stephen.