I was in Stamford in the year of the Great Charter of King John. Half the knights and barons of all England with a goodly following of men-at-arms and yeomanry had been assembled under the banner of our stout Marshal, Fitz Walter, and had seized by force and arms full many royal castles. Now, at the end of a truce which to no avail had been secured by the Archbishop, we were ready to march towards London to bring to terms our most crafty and tyrannic lord and king. For years he had dealt in plots and scheming to overreach the great and strong among the baronry, and from the weaker seized their lands and goods at will and oft threw their persons into durance to further his gross ends of gain or vengeance. Now some hundreds of the barons of the North, with a dozen or more of us from the West counties and the Welsh Marches, and a sprinkling of churchmen, who no less than ourselves had suffered from the King’s o’erreaching, were gathered in Bermondsey Hall to agree, if we might, upon a scroll of the grievances that the King must remedy when our further assaults should have forced him to sue for peace. Geoffrey, Lord of Carleton and Teramore, leader of a hundred lances and half a thousand bowmen, rose from his seat amid a clamor of disputing voices and saluted the Marshal and the assembled company. “I propose, my lords and gentlemen,” he said in that high, sweet voice of his which yet is far-heard and commanding, “the name of Sir Cedric De La Roche, Knight of Grimsby and bold defender of our Western Marches, for the fifth and final member of this group. He is a brave man and true; and hath, as we often say in the West, a head as well as an arm. He is both soldier and scholar, forsooth, and knoweth more of the Latin tongue than any layman among us. You have named Sir Richard of Mountjoy to serve you in this matter because, three months agone, he took the Castle of Tournoy which the King’s men were strongly holding with greater forces than his own and from whence they might have sorely threatened us. But most of you know not that ’twas Cedric De La Roche who gained entrance to the castle in disguise, and full well deceived the garrison, then at midnight overpowered, gagged and bound the sentinel at a little postern gate, threw it open and admitted the Mountjoys. Lacking him and his stratagem we might still be hammering at the walls of Tournoy and our whole campaign be sore delayed.” “For the Latin we have the Abbot of Moberley,” said old Lord Esmond from his seat on one of the benches at the right. “What need have we of another clerk?”