In Richard’s island realm there was never a moment’s question as to who should succeed him on its throne. In English eyes one successor alone was possible, no matter how undesirable he might be. The circumstances of the case, however--the unexpectedness of the vacancy, the heir’s absence from England, his past relations with the government and the people there, and the existence of a rival claimant--presented an opportunity for endeavouring to make a bargain with him such as it was not often possible to make with a new sovereign. Accordingly the English barons as a body, on hearing of Richard’s death, assumed an attitude of independence. All of them set to work to fortify and revictual their castles; some of them even began to attack and plunder their neighbours, as if they deemed that there was to be again “no king in the land”; and all the efforts of the justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, failed to restore order, till he was joined at the end of April by Archbishop Hubert and William the Marshal. The archbishop excommunicated the evildoers,[262] and he and the Marshal conjointly tendered to all the men of the kingdom, “citizens and burghers, earls, barons, and free tenants,” an oath of liege homage and fealty to John. The lesser freemen apparently took it without hesitation, but many of the barons held back. These reluctant ones--chief among whom were the earls of Clare, Huntingdon, Chester, Ferrars and Warwick, Roger de Lacy and William de Mowbray--were summoned by the primate, the Marshal and the justiciar to a meeting at Northampton. There they took the oath, but only in return for a promise given by the three ministers that if they did so, John “should render to each of them his rights.”[263] None of these “rights” are specified; but the expression used by the historian who records the claim distinctly implies that it was in each case the claim of an individual to some particular thing to which he considered himself personally entitled, something, it would seem, which he had been unable to obtain from the late king, and which he was therefore anxious to secure beforehand from the new one. In several cases the grievance seems to have been that of an heir who had not yet received investiture of a dignity to which he had become entitled by inheritance some time before.[264] With this grievance the Marshal and the justiciar could not fail to sympathize; for although they had for some years past enjoyed the estates attached to the earldoms of Striguil (or Pembroke) and Essex respectively, neither of them had yet been invested as earl. Justly, therefore, was the promise which they had made in John’s name redeemed first of all to them when he girded them with the earl’s sword and belt on his coronation day.[265]