The earlier clauses do little more than specifically confirm the privileges and possessions that he had inherited from his father or had already wrung from the eager rivals for the Crown. This was by no means needless so far as the Empress was concerned, for his desertion of her cause since her previous charter involved, as an act of treason, his forfeiture at her hands. These are followed by a new grant, namely, "totam terram quæ fuit Eudonis Dapiferi in Normannia et Dapiferatum ipsius," with a conditional proposal that Geoffrey should also, in exchange for the grants he had already received, obtain that portion of the Dapifer's fief which lay in England. The large estate which this successful minister had accumulated in the service of the Conqueror and his sons had escheated to the Crown at his death, and is entered accordingly in the Pipe-Roll of 31 Hen. I. This has an important bearing on the noteworthy admission in the charter that Geoffrey is to receive the Dapifer's fief not as a gift, but as his right ("rectum suum"). This expression is referred to by Mr. Eyton in his MSS., as placing beyond doubt the received statement that Geoffrey was maternally a grandson of the Dapifer, whose daughter and heiress Margaret had married his father William. But this statement is taken from Dugdale, who derived it solely from the _Historia Fundationis_ of St. John's Abbey, Colchester, a notoriously inaccurate and untrustworthy document printed in the _Monasticon_. The fact that this fief escheated to the Crown, instead of passing to the Mandevilles with the Dapifer's alleged daughter, is directly opposed to a story which has no foundation of its own.[557] The next clause to be noticed is that which refers to Bishop's Stortford. It implies a peculiar antipathy to this castle on the part of Earl Geoffrey, an antipathy explained by the fact of its position, lying as it did on the main road from London to (Saffron) Walden, and thus cutting communications between his two strongholds. We have a curious allusion to this episcopal castle a few years before (1137), when Abbot Anselm of St. Edmund's, who claimed to have been elected to the see, seized and held it.[558] The next additional grant made in this charter is that of "C libratas terræ de terris eschaetis et servicium X militum" to the earl's son Ernulf. This is followed by what is certainly the most striking clause in the whole charter, that which binds the Empress and her husband "to make no peace and come to no terms with the burgesses (_sic_) of London, without the permission and assent of the said Earl Geoffrey, because they are his mortal foes." Comment on the character of such a pledge on the part of one who claimed the crown, or on the light it throws on Geoffrey's doings, is surely needless.