If we may believe a report which was current a few years later, this demand had been first suggested to the barons, more than a year before, by Archbishop Stephen of Canterbury. On August 25, 1213; he had gathered the bishops, abbots and other ecclesiastical dignitaries, with some of the lay magnates, around him in S. Paul’s cathedral that they might receive his instructions concerning a partial relaxation of the interdict, which he was empowered to grant, pending the arrival of the legate. It was said[930] that he had afterwards called aside the lay members of the assembly to a secret meeting in which he laid before them a yet weightier matter. “Ye have heard”--thus he was reported to have addressed them--“how, when I absolved the king at Winchester, I made him swear to put down bad laws and enforce throughout his realm the good laws of Edward. Now, there has been found also a certain charter of King Henry I. by which, if ye will, ye may recall to their former estate the liberties which ye have so long lost”:--and he caused the document in question--the coronation-charter of Henry I.--to be read aloud before them. “And when this charter had been read through and interpreted to the barons, they rejoiced with very great joy, and all swore in the archbishop’s presence that when they saw a fitting time they would fight for those liberties, if it were needful, even unto death; the archbishop, too, promised them his most faithful help to the utmost of his power. And, a confederacy being thus made between them, the conference was dissolved.”[931] This story is given by Roger of Wendover only as a rumour; but whether the rumour were literally true or not, it was at any rate founded upon a fact: the fact that the movement which was to result in the Great Charter owed its true impulse to the patriotism, as it owed its success to the statesmanship, not of any of the barons, but of Stephen Langton. [Sidenote: 1214]