During eight months out of the fourteen which elapsed between the archbishop’s return and that of the king, the administration of government was in the hands of Peter des Roches, and he ruled the country with a rod of iron.[932] But Peter’s vice-regal tyranny was only the final outcome of a state of things which had been growing worse from year to year for more than a quarter of a century. England in the sixteenth year of King John was suffering under an accumulation of grievances consisting, as Ralph of Coggeshall truly says, of all “the evil customs which the king’s father and brother had raised up for the oppression of the Church and realm, together with the abuses which the king himself had added thereto.”[933] No doubt these last formed the worst part of the evil, and it was the addition of them that gave such an increase of bitterness to all the rest. The obligation laid upon all men to attend the Forest courts, when summoned, whether subject to their jurisdiction or not, had been a hardship ever since it was imposed by Henry II. in 1184; the working of the Forest laws had been a source of suffering from a period much earlier still; but the area of the hardship and the suffering was rendered more extensive by the new afforestations made by John.[934] The inconvenience caused by the old practice of making common pleas “follow the king”--that is, of holding trials of civil causes only before the justices who accompanied the king, wheresoever he might be--had been felt in Henry’s time, and Henry had tried to remedy it by setting up a permanent bench of justices in a fixed place to deal with such causes. But the right retained by the sovereign of calling up suits from this tribunal to his own presence was exercised by John to a degree which his restless and erratic movements--almost more restless and erratic than those of his father--seem to have rendered extremely vexatious to litigants.[935] The precise limits of the king’s rights over his tenants-in-chief as to military service, scutage, control over their castles, and such-like matters, had been more or less in dispute throughout the two preceding reigns; but the bitterness of such disputes was intensified by John’s personal dealings with his barons, his subtle contrivances for stealing from them their rights over their own tenants and their own lands, his interference with their domestic life by his continual demands for hostages, and, above all, in many cases, by a desecration of their homes which blood alone could expiate.