Stephen, King of England also risen to power under Henry I. Henry of Blois had become a Cluniac monk and followed Stephen to England, where the King made him Abbot of Glastonbury, the richest abbey in England. The King then appointed him Bishop of Winchester, one of the richest bishoprics, allowing him to retain Glastonbury as well. The combined revenues of the two positions made Henry of Winchester the second-richest man in England after the King. Henry of Winchester was keen to reverse what he perceived as encroachment by the Norman kings on the rights of the church. The Norman kings had traditionally exercised
The History of the Norman Conquest of England a wide readership that the "History" was "among the great works of the present century". But in the later years of Freeman's life the book's reputation was injured by a series of attacks levelled on it by the genealogist and local historian J. H. Round. Round brought against Freeman the same kind of aggressively pedantic nit-picking that Freeman himself had been used to bring against other historians. Round was neither interested in nor knowledgeable about Anglo-Saxon history, but had "an instinctive feeling that in England our consecutive political history does, in a sense, begin with the Norman conquest". Part of