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Among the guests was Henry of Scotland, Matilda’s cousin through her uncle King David, who had paid homage in his father’s name to Stephen at York, and who was now seated on the King’s right, a mark of the speed with which the Scottish monarch had submitted to the new rule in England. Three archbishops, five earls and more than twenty-four barons attended the court, as did Matilda’s eldest son Eustace, now the heir to the English throne.
    All of Matilda’s children were now royal, and almost immediately their future marriages became matters of state. Her two-year-old daughter Matilda was betrothed to the thirty-one-year-old Count Waleran of Meulan, the second-greatest landowner in Normandy and, along with his stepfather and cousin, one of the leaders of an important group of magnates. Little Matilda even went through some sort of marriage ceremony. But her parents’ hopes of cementing Waleran’s loyalty suffered a setback when Matilda and her brother Baldwin died in London the following year. The Queen chose to bury her babies at Holy Trinity Aldgate, a house to which she had formed a particular attachment since her marriage and which, as a foundation of Matilda of Scotland, also had a place in the emergent spiritual traditions of English queens. The tinycoffins were interred on either side of the high altar, and records from the priory describe the King and Queen grieving together over their double loss.
    The royal couple sought solace in their faith, and piety seems to have been one of the cornerstones of their relationship. They shared an intellectual interest in developing variants of belief, from the simple, mystical spirituality of hermits and anchorites to the elaborate splendours of high Cluniac ritual. As queen, Matilda was able to both witness and participate in one of the most prolific periods of monastic expansion since the Conquest. During the twelfth century, over a hundred religious houses were founded for women where, in 1066, only nine had existed. The vigour of this renaissance was characterised by an unusual degree of cooperation between the sexes as men and women worked together the better to serve their God, a mood that was reflected in the pious collaborations of Matilda and Stephen.
    The tensions between the worldly and spiritual elements of her new role were brought home to Matilda when she visited a holy hermit, Wulfric, as she travelled from Corfe Castle to Exeter the summer after her coronation. Wulfric was a favourite of King Stephen, who had visited him some years before and heard him prophesy that King Henry would die in Normandy and he, Stephen, would succeed him, but now Matilda found herself being scolded by the holy man for having taken too high-handed a stance in the case of a Somerset noblewoman who had attended her court at Corfe. Chastened, Matilda later chose to patronise her own, female hermit, Hehmd the nun, who was provided with an acre of land to build a cell in the domains of the abbey of Faversham, Kent, founded by Stephen in the hope that it would become a family resting place, as Reading had been for Henry I.
    Matilda’s provision for Helmid shows that she was attentive to a religious movement that represented a revolution in human consciousness, a new concept of meditative, inward-looking spirituality which appears for the first time in texts such as the Ancrene Riwle , a guide for anchoresses produced at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Anchorites were voluntarily walled up to spend their lives in prayer for their communities, many of them remaining in tiny cells (Eve of Wilton’s was just eight feet square) for as long as fifty years. Matilda’s attraction to this extreme, isolated spirituality was shared by Stephen, and together they patronised the Savignac movement, inspired by the wandering saint Vitalis, who had established a community in the wild lands of Savigny in Stephen’s county of Mortain. Matilda founded a Savignac house at Coggleshall in