“The Anarchy, then, when King Stephen and Empress Matilda battled for supremacy. The old men who tell the tale place it in ‘days gone by’, or ‘the Dark Ages’. They will all tell you that this was ‘when God and his angels slept’; that phrase has become as much part of the language of this tale as Once upon a time. But it might be the first century, or the fifth, or the fifteenth for all they know. They speak only of a King and a Queen fighting over England’s crown; and some say that the battle was between King Arthur and his sorceress sister Morgan le Fay.”
