Civil conflict demolishes notions of identity and community in particularly violent and destructive ways. The project of writing civil war challenges the traditions and conventions of historiography and exceeds normal representational modes and idioms. England's twelfth-century civil war, during the reign of King Stephen (1135–54), is presented by contemporary texts as a calamity beyond the reach of conventional chronicle writing or received rhetoric. The Peterborough recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle exclaims that:

While the term ‘the Anarchy’, traditionally used to describe this period of civil conflict, is now challenged by some historians, there is no doubt that the contemporary medieval texts see the reign of Stephen as a time of extreme collapse, chaos and violence that goes beyond the norms of medieval warfare and martial engagement.