The bishops had now received from Rome a communication which made their position, or at least that of the Primate, an exceedingly anxious and painful one. In consequence, it seems, of John’s letter of May 29 Innocent had issued a commission to the bishop of Winchester, the abbot of Reading and Pandulf, whereby he declared excommunicate all “disturbers of the king and kingdom of England, with their accomplices and abettors,” laid their lands under interdict, and ordered the archbishop and his episcopal brethren, on pain of suspension from their office, to cause this excommunication to be published throughout the realm every Sunday and holiday till the offenders should have made satisfaction to the king and returned to their obedience.[1079] Ill-fitted as the barons had proved to be for the great work in which Langton had sought to enlist them, the cause of England’s freedom was yet too closely bound up with theirs for him to be willing to launch at them such a sentence as this, and he had sympathized too keenly with his country’s misery under a former interdict not to recoil from the prospect of another. The barons, on the other hand, had been heedless of interdict and excommunication so long as their material interests coincided with those of the king against the Church; but the matter would wear a different aspect in their eyes now that the situation was reversed and their one hope was in the aid of the Church against the king. The Pope’s mandate was shown to them and the bishops in conference at Oxford; after three days’ deliberation {Aug. 16–18} the bishops agreed to delay the publication of the sentence till they had seen the king again and made one more effort to bring him to a colloquy in London or at Staines. It was rumoured that he had gone to the coast with the intention of quitting England altogether; and the bishops are said to have followed him to Portsmouth, and there found that he was actually on shipboard. He came ashore again {Aug. 23–24?}, however, to speak with them; but he absolutely refused to hold any more personal conferences with the barons. The bishops returned to meet the barons at Staines on August 26, accompanied by envoys from the king, who were charged with a protest, to be delivered in his name in the hearing of the whole assembly, that “it was not his fault if the peace was not carried out according to the agreement.” After long deliberation the papal sentence was proclaimed, but with a tacit understanding that it was to be, for the present at least, a dead letter, on the ground that as no names were mentioned in it, the phrase “disturbers of the king and kingdom” need not be applied to any person or group of persons in particular, but might be interpreted by every man as he pleased. The more violent partizans immediately applied it to the king himself, since in their eyes he was the chief troubler of the land, and therefore also his own worst enemy.[1080]