There, on the appointed morning, the two parties pitched their tents at a little distance from each other on the long reach of level grass-land which stretched along the river-bank. The barons came “with a multitude of most illustrious knights, all thoroughly well armed.”[1030] “It is useless,” says another chronicler, “to enumerate those who were present on the side of the barons, for they comprised well-nigh all the nobility of England.” With the king were the archbishops of Canterbury and Dublin, seven bishops, Pandulf--who had been sent back to England as the Pope’s representative instead of Nicolas--the Master of the English Templars, the earls of Pembroke, Salisbury, Warren and Arundel, and about a dozen barons of lesser degree, including Hubert de Burgh.[1031] It was to these chosen few, and above all to the first of them, that John really capitulated. His declaration that he granted the Great Charter by their counsel may well have been true of them all; his most devoted adherents could, if they had any political sagacity, advise him nothing else for his own interest. The terms of capitulation, however, imply more than this. Nominally, the treaty--for it was nothing less[1032]--was based upon a set of forty-nine articles “which the barons demanded and the lord king granted.”[1033] But those articles are obviously not the composition of “the barons” mustered under Robert Fitz-Walter. Every step of the proceedings of these insurgents up to that moment, every step of their proceedings afterwards, as well as everything that is known of the character of their leaders, goes to show that they were no more capable of rising to the lofty conception embodied in the Charter--the conception of a contract between king and people which should secure equal rights to every class and every individual in the nation--than they were capable of formulating it in the minute detail and the carefully chosen phraseology of the Charter or even of the Articles. The true history of the treaty of Runnimead is told in one brief sentence by Ralph of Coggeshall: “By the intervention of the archbishop of Canterbury, with several of his fellow-bishops and some barons, a sort of peace was made.”[1034] In other words, the terms were drawn up by Stephen Langton with the concurrence of the other bishops who were at hand, and of the few lay barons, on either side, who were statesmen enough to look at the crisis from a higher standpoint than that of personal interest; they were adopted--for the moment--by the mass of the insurgents as being a weapon, far more effective than any that they could have forged for themselves, for bringing the struggle with the king (so at least they hoped) to an easy and a speedy end; and they were accepted--also for the moment--by John, as his readiest and surest way of escape from a position of extreme difficulty and peril. Thus before nightfall the Great Charter was sealed; and in return John received anew the homage