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The book benefits from the author making clear from the start that he wants to debunk the idea of 'Anarchy' - you feel like you've taken a side and want to find out how persuasive the author's going to be. The author also has a rare combination of skills - a sense of humour and articulate writing. The latter makes the former all the funnier.
On the down side I found it harder and harder to remember which Earl was which and which Robert, William, etc was which, so it would benefit greatly from a much fuller set of 'Dramatis Personae' lists than just the one showing Stephen of Blois's connections. In particular it was hard to remember who were the bastard children of Henry I. Sometimes some sentences are overlong, requiring the reader to have a very firm grasp of every person mentioned before they can be understood well.
Maybe the book was never intended for a wide audience (the back of it states it's "a must for specialist and amateur medievalists alike") but I think it comes close enough to a wide audience style that after a few tweaks it could be stacked next to the Antonia Frazer-like books.
One point that does come out was that the great magnates were fed up after 10 years of inconclusive war and imposed ,indirectly, a peace.
All in all a useful foundation for the study of this reign.
The book is not without its problems. Crouch is not that well able to handle coherently the very large cast of characters he deals with, and this is not aided by a tendency often to refer to the same individual by different titles or by partial names--some of which are inherently ambiguous since several characters have the same abreviated name. At times the work resembles those Russian novels where you can go for many pages thinking that there are two separate people when in fact they are the same individual. Second, Crouch is overly concerned to claim that Stephen's reign was not a period of anarchy, but of civil war. This is rather tiresome, especially as Crouch's account makes it quite clear that the great barons were very much a law unto themselves, could be arbitrarily destructive of civil order, were to a very large extent above the4 law, and that indeed the fighting largely ended when they were unwilling to participate enthusiastically. (It does not help that he starts by claiming that England had only two civil wars -- if what was going on in Stephen's reign was just a civl war rather than a breakdown of government, then what in the world does Crouch think the Wars of the Roses were all about? Finally, Crouch leaves largely unexplored the great mystery of the reign. That is why Stephen abandoned the claims of his younger son after his elder one died, when he had so vigorously tried to engineer the succession of his elder son. That abandonment led to the smooth transition to Henry II, but it is not well accounted for, since Crouch basically pictures Stephen as being in control at the critical time.
But these carping aside, over all the book paints a fascinating picture of conditions in the early middle ages, showing again to what extent the proper management of the great barons was the sine qua non of successful rule in England in the middle ages -- one whose mismanagement would lead repeatly to the problems of the weaker medieval kings.
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