[133] Epp. xiii., xxvii., xxxvi., xli.–xliii., l., li., liii., liv. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. v. pp. 21, 22, 44–46, 59, 60, 67–69, 85, 87, 88, 91, 94); Will. Cant. (_ib._ vol. i.), p. 24; E. Grim (_ib._ vol. ii.), p. 384; Anon. I. (_ib._ vol. iv.), pp. 38, 39; Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 39, 40; _Thomas Saga_ (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 179–181; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 181. [134] Ep. xxviii. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. v. pp. 46, 47). [135] Epp. xxxv., lxvii. (_ib._ pp. 56, 57, 130, 131). Thomas himself fully expected to meet the fate of Anselm; throughout the winter his friends had been endeavouring to secure him a refuge in France;[136] and early in the summer of 1164, having been refused an interview with the king,[137] he made two attempts to escape secretly from Romney. The first time he was repelled by a contrary wind; the second time the sailors put back ostensibly for the same reason, but really because they had recognized their passenger and dreaded the royal wrath;[138] and a servant who went on the following night to shut the gates of the deserted palace at Canterbury found the primate, worn out with fatigue and disappointment, sitting alone in the darkness like a beggar upon his own door-step.[139] Despairing of escape, he made another effort to see the king at Woodstock. Henry dreaded nothing so much as the archbishop’s flight, for he felt that it would probably be followed by a Papal interdict on his dominions,[140] and would certainly give an immense advantage against him to Louis of France, who was at that very moment threatening war in Auvergne.[141] He therefore received Thomas courteously, though with somewhat less than the usual honours,[142] and made no allusion to the past except by a playful question “whether the archbishop did not think the realm was wide enough to contain them both?” Thomas saw, however, that the old cordiality was gone; his enemies saw it too, and, as his biographer says, “they came about him like bees.”[143] Foremost among them was John the king’s marshal, who had a suit in the archbishop’s court concerning the manor of Pageham.[144] It was provided by one of Henry’s new rules of legal procedure that if a suitor saw no chance of obtaining justice in the court of his own lord he might, by taking an oath to that effect and bringing two witnesses to do the same, transfer the suit to a higher court.[145] John by this method removed his case from the court of the archbishop to that of the king; and thither Thomas was cited to answer his claim on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. When that day came the primate was too ill to move; he sent essoiners to excuse his absence in legal form, and also a written protest against the removal of the suit, on the ground that it had been obtained by perjury--John having taken the oath not upon the Gospel, but upon an old song-book which he had surreptitiously brought into