were all daughters, two of them already married. He bought his peace with the king by making John heir to all his lands, Henry in return promising that John should marry William’s youngest daughter, or, if the needful dispensation could not be obtained,[24] he would bestow her on another husband “with the utmost honour”; while a yearly sum of one hundred pounds was to be paid by the Crown to each of her sisters, as compensation for the loss of their shares of the family heritage. If William should yet have another son, that son and John were to divide the lands of the earldom of Gloucester between them.[25] [Sidenote: 1176–1178] Where John himself had been from his birth until near the completion of his fifth year, there is nothing to show. He seems to have been with his father at the time of the marriage-treaty with Maurienne, and throughout the subsequent revolt; “John alone, who was a little boy, remained with his father,” says Gervase of Canterbury, when speaking of the defection of Henry’s elder sons in 1173.[26] He was apparently in England when the arrangement with Earl William of Gloucester was made, September 28, 1176; and he was certainly with the king at Nottingham at Christmas in that year,[27] and also at Oxford in May 1177, when Henry bestowed on him the titular sovereignty of the English dominions in Ireland, and made the Norman-Welsh barons to whom he had granted fiefs in that country do homage for those fiefs to John as well as to himself.[28] A slight indication of the boy’s increasing importance may be found in two entries on this year’s Pipe Roll; the expenditure accounted for by the fermor of Peterborough abbey includes a corrody for “the king’s son John,” and fifty-two pounds spent in buying two palfreys “for the use of the same John.”[29] In August the king returned to Normandy; John followed him, travelling under the care of his half-brother Geoffrey, the bishop-elect of Lincoln;[30] at Mid-Lent, March 19, 1178, he was present with his father and eldest brother at the consecration of the abbey church of Bec;[31] and at Christmas 1178 Henry and John were together at Winchester.[32] During the next four years no mention occurs of John, save that at some time between Michaelmas 1178 and Michaelmas 1179 twenty shillings were spent on horses for him “in England and Normandy” by one William Franceis, who seems to have been a groom appointed by the king to attend him.[33] [Sidenote: 1182–1184]