Two days later--on Wednesday, May 15--king and legate met again, “with the great men of the realm,” in the house of the Knights Templars at Ewell, near Dover. There, by a charter attested by himself, the archbishop of Dublin, the chief justiciars of England and Ireland, seven earls (of whom the Marshal was one), and three barons, the king “granted and freely surrendered to God and His holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and to the Holy Mother Church of Rome, and to Pope Innocent and his Catholic successors,” the whole realm of England and “the whole realm of Ireland,” with all rights thereunto appertaining, to receive them back and hold them thenceforth as a feudatary of God and the Roman Church. He swore fealty to the Pope for both realms in Pandulf’s presence, promised to perform liege homage to the Pope in person if he should ever have an opportunity of so doing, and pledged all his successors to a like engagement, besides undertaking to furnish the Roman see with a yearly sum of one thousand marks--seven hundred for England and three hundred for Ireland.[800] One English chronicler says that John, in performing this homage, acted “according to what had been decreed at Rome.”[801] Another, not less generally accurate and well informed, says that John “added it of his own accord” to the agreement already completed.[802] On the whole, it is probable that this latter account of the matter is the correct one, at least thus far, that the scheme originated not at Rome, but in England. Not much weight can indeed be attached to the king’s own assertion, made in the charter of homage itself, that the act was a voluntary one, which he had done by way of penance and humiliation for his offences, “not urged by force nor compelled by fear, but of our own good free will and by the common counsel of our barons”;[803] nor is the accuracy of this version of the transaction proved by the fact that Innocent accepted it without remark in his reply to John’s letters on the subject,[804] and that no extant document emanating from the court of Rome contains the slightest indication that the Pope had ever demanded or suggested any proceeding of the kind. There is, however, no perceptible reason why Innocent should have required of John a penance of so extraordinary a character, nor why, if he did require it, either he or his royal penitent should make a secret of his having done so. On the other hand, John had a very cogent reason for “adding something of his own” to the agreement between himself and Innocent. If he was to give up all for which he had been fighting--and fighting successfully--against the Pope and the Church for the last six years, he must make quite sure of gaining such an advantage as would be worth the sacrifice. Mere release from excommunication and interdict was certainly, in his eyes, not worth any sacrifice at all. To change the Pope from an enemy into a political friend was worth it, but--from