In the council which opened in Northampton Castle on Wednesday, 7th October, we see the Curia Regis in the developed form which it had taken under Henry and his justiciar, De Lucy, carrying out an exact legal system, and observing the forms of a very elaborate procedure. The king and his inner council of the great lords, the prelates, and the officers of the household, withdrew to an upper chamber of the castle; the whole company of sheriffs and lesser barons waited in the great hall below till they were specially summoned to the king's presence, crowding round the fire that burned in the centre of the hall under the opening in the roof through which the smoke escaped, or lounging in the straw and rushes that covered the floor. For seven days the trial dragged on, as lawyers and bishops and barons anxiously groped their way through baffling legal problems which had grown out of legislation new and old. Even the king himself, fiery, imperious, dictatorial, clung with a kind of superstition to the forms of legal process. The archbishop asked leave to appeal to the Pope. "You shall first answer in my court for the injury done to John the marshal," said Henry. The next day, Thursday, this matter was decided. Bishops and barons alike, lacking somewhat of the king's daring, shrank at first from the responsibility of pronouncing judgment. "We are laymen," said the barons; "you are his fellow-priests and fellow-bishops, and it is for you to declare sentence." "Nay," answered the bishops, "this is not an ecclesiastical but a secular judgment, and we sit here not as bishops but as barons; if you heed our orders you should also take heed of his." The dispute was a critical one, leading as it did directly to questions about the jurisdiction of the Curia Regis over ecclesiastical persons, and the obligation asserted in the Constitutions of Clarendon, that bishops should sit with barons in the King's Court till it came to a question of blood. The king was seized with one of his fierce fits of anger, and the discussion "immediately ended." The unwilling Bishop of Winchester was sent to pronounce sentence of fine for neglect of the king's summons. Matters then moved quickly. A demand was made for £300 which Thomas had received from Eye and Berkhampstead when he was chancellor; and in spite of his defence that it had been spent in building the palace in London and repairing the castles, judgment went against him. The next day a further demand was made for money spent in the war of Toulouse, and this, too, Thomas agreed to pay, though it was now hard to find sureties. Then the king dealt his last blow. Thomas was required to account for the sums he had received as chancellor from vacant sees and abbeys. "By God's eyes," the king swore, when the Primate and the bishops threw themselves in despair at his feet, he would have the accounts in full. He would only grant a day's delay for Thomas to take counsel with his friends.