proctors, however, refused to ratify the election in John’s name; so Innocent at once wrote to request a formal ratification of it from John himself.[514] These things were done in the week following John’s return from La Rochelle to England, which took place on December 12.[515] His recent experiences had shown him that the recovery of his lost territories was by no means impossible, but that it could not, under existing political and social conditions, be achieved by means of the only forces which the military organization of his own realm could supply. Those forces must be supplemented, if not superseded, in any attempt at the reconquest of the Norman and Angevin dominions, by the employment of mercenaries on a large scale, and by an elaborate system of diplomacy, the gradual knitting together of a complicated scheme of foreign alliances. For both these purposes the first need was money; and the difficulties with which the king had to contend in his efforts to raise money were as much greater in John’s case than in that of any of his predecessors, as his need was greater than theirs had ever been. [Sidenote: 1194–1207] The financial difficulties of the Crown had been accumulating ever since Richard’s captivity. At John’s accession the arrears of taxes were enormous. At Michaelmas 1201 arrears of all the three “scutages of Normandy” imposed under Richard--in 1194, 1195 and 1196--were due from almost every shire; hidage “for the king’s ransom” was still owing from Dorset and Somerset, and there were many arrears even of the “scutage of Wales,” which dated from 1190.[516] Some of these debts ran on as late as 1207, and some much later still. The king’s claim to these unpaid taxes, as well as to all other debts owed to his predecessor, was, of course, never withdrawn. A grotesque instance of the way in which the principle of inheritance might sometimes work in such matters occurs in the treasury roll of 1201, where two men in Devon are set down as owing a fine “because they had been with Count John”[517]--that is, because they had supported, in his rebellion against Richard in 1193, the very man for whom, as king, the fine was now claimed. The Crown had, however, no direct means of enforcing payment of either fines or taxes, at any rate in the case of the barons. Its one remedy was to seize the lands or castles of an obstinate and wilful defaulter; and this remedy was fraught with danger to the crown itself. Neither law nor custom defined the circumstances or fixed the limits of time within which a defaulter was not, and beyond which he was, liable to be treated as obstinate and wilful; in every case where the king exercised his right of seizure on this ground, therefore, the defaulter and his friends could always find a plea for denouncing its exercise as arbitrary and unjust. It seems probable that at the close of Richard’s reign his ministers may have thus seized the castles or lands of