great council at Gloucester.[848] Two days later the process, begun two years before, of filling up the vacant bishoprics and abbacies which had been accumulating during Thomas’s exile was completed in another council at Woodstock.[849] Thence, too, was issued an edict for the better securing of order throughout the realm, and particularly around the person of the king; all his opponents in the late war were forbidden, on pain of arrest as traitors, to come to the court without special summons, and, under any circumstances, to come before sunrise or stay over night; and all wearing of arms, knife, bow and arrows, was forbidden on the English side of the Severn. These prohibitions however were only temporary;[850] and they were, with one exception, the only measure of general severity taken by Henry in consequence of the rebellion. That exception was a great forest-visitation, begun by Henry in person during the summer of 1175 and not completed by his ministers, it seems, till Michaelmas 1177, and from which scarcely a man throughout the kingdom, baron or villein, layman or priest, was altogether exempt. In vain did Richard de Lucy, as loyal to the people as to the king, shew Henry his own royal writ authorizing the justiciars to throw open the forests and give up the royal fish-ponds to public use during the war, and protest against the injustice of punishing the people at large for a trespass to which he had himself invited them in the king’s name and in accordance, as he had understood it, with the king’s expressed will. The license had probably been used to a far wider extent than Henry had intended; the general excitement had perhaps vented itself in some such outburst of wanton destructiveness as had occurred after the death of Henry I.; at any rate, the Norman and the Angevin blood in Henry II. was all alike stirred into wrath at sight of damage done to vert and venison; the transgressors were placed, in technical phrase, “at the king’s mercy,” and their fines constituted an important item in the Pipe Roll of 1176.[851] [842] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 83, 84. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 399. [843] _Gesta Hen._ as above, p. 84. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 250. R. Diceto as above, pp. 399–401. [844] On the Canterbury troubles and Richard’s election see Gerv. Cant. as above, pp. 239–242, 243–245, 247. [845] _Ib._ p. 249. R. Diceto as above, p. 391. _Gesta Hen._ as above, p. 74. [846] _Gesta Hen._ as above, p. 91. Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 256. R. Diceto as above, p. 399. [847] _Gesta Hen._ as above. [848] _Ib._ p. 92. [849] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 93. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 78, 79. [850] _Gesta Hen._ as above. “Sed hæc præcepta parvo tempore custodita sunt.”