The next step which they took in so doing was weightier than, probably, they themselves had any idea of. At first glance the charter seems to have little or no bearing upon the immediate subject of dispute between them and the king; it contains no mention whatever of either scutage or military service beyond sea. But it does contain a series of clauses regulating the relations between the tenants-in-chief and the Crown; and thus it furnished them with a substantial ground for insisting that all violations of its provisions on the part of the Crown must be redressed before any further burdens could be binding upon them. It was even possible for them to argue that any demands on the king’s part other than those expressly sanctioned in the charter were an encroachment on their privileges as therein defined. For the greater purpose which Langton had in view, the value of the charter lay in its opening of the way to wider reforms by the incidental clauses which bound the tenants-in-chief to extend to their sub-tenants the same benefits which they themselves received from the king, and in the comprehensive sentence which declared the abolition of “all evil customs whereby the realm was unjustly oppressed.”[968] The more thoughtful among the confederate barons may perhaps by this time have begun to see that, even from a selfish point of view, they had nothing to lose, and might have something to gain, by identifying their cause with that of the nation as a whole. Many of the grievances which touched the lower classes touched the higher also, though not always in the same way. Moreover, although the people were as yet powerless to initiate any corporate action in their own behalf, their support had saved more than one earlier sovereign in a struggle against the barons; it might prove no less useful to the barons in a struggle against the king. But whatever the barons may have thought about these matters, the king was statesman enough to see as clearly as the primate how weighty and far-reaching might be the consequences involved in the demand for a renewal of the charter. He therefore postponed its discussion till after Christmas.[969] [Sidenote: 1214]