men to give their corn and other goods for the use of the king or his servants, their horses and carts for the carriage of burdens in his service, their wood for the construction of his buildings, whether the owners were willing or not, and seemingly without payment.[961] Free men were arrested, imprisoned, ejected from their lands, even exiled or outlawed, without legal warrant or fair trial.[962] Individuals were forbidden to enter or quit the realm at the mere will of the king.[963] Some barons whom he specially favoured, or wanted to propitiate, received licences to impose arbitrary taxes on their sub-tenants, without regard to the limits of feudal custom,[964] just as the king himself imposed taxes on his subjects according to his will and pleasure. In a word, the entire system of government and administration set up under the Norman kings and developed under Henry and Richard had been converted by the ingenuity of John into a most subtle and effective engine of royal extortion, oppression and tyranny over all classes of the nation, from earl to villein. The only class which was as yet capable of making any corporate opposition or protest was the baronage; and hitherto the discontent of the barons had shown itself only in the resistance of some of their number to the king’s demands on certain special occasions and in reference to certain special points which affected them personally as tenants-in-chief. But there was now one man in England who looked at the questions at issue between them and the king from a higher standpoint than theirs, and in whose eyes those questions were only small parts of a much wider and deeper question, on the solution of which he had set his mind from the very hour of his landing in the realm. One chronicler relates that John’s first impulse on hearing of Archbishop Stephen’s arrival in England had been to withdraw himself to some remote place and put off their meeting as long as possible, and that he had only been induced to abandon this intention by the remonstrances of some of the barons.[965] Whether this particular story be true or not, it seems plain that John’s conduct throughout his quarrel with the Church was to a great extent dictated by personal dislike to the archbishop. This feeling must have been mainly instinctive; for the two men had never seen each other till they met at Winchester on July 20, 1213. The instinct, however, was a true one: it was Stephen Langton who was to give the first impulse to the work which was destined--though not till long after he had passed away--to make the rule of such a king as John impossible in England for evermore.