During this hasty journey to Durham and back events ever memorable in English history had taken place. On the 4th of August the justiciar Geoffrey Fitz Peter held a great assembly at St. Albans, at which attended not only the great barons of the realm but the representatives of the people of the townships of all the royal estates. The object of the gathering was to determine the sum due to the bishops as an indemnity for their losses. There no doubt the commons and the barons had full opportunity of discussing their grievances, and the justiciar undertook, in the name of his master, that the laws of Henry I. should be put in force. Not that they knew much about the laws of Henry I., but that the prevailing abuses were regarded as arising from the strong governmental system consolidated by Henry II., and they recurred to the state of things which preceded that reign, just as under Henry I. men had recurred to the reign and laws of Edward the Confessor. On the 25th of the same month the archbishop, at a council at St. Paul’s, actually produced the charter issued by Henry I. at his coronation, and proposed that it should be presented to the king as the embodiment of the institutions which he had promised to maintain. Upon this foundation Magna Carta was soon to be drawn up. Almost directly after this, in October, the justiciar died; and John, who had hailed the death of Hubert Walter as a relief from an unwelcome adviser, spoke of Geoffrey with a cruel mockery as gone to join his old fellow-minister in hell. Both had acted as restraints on his desire to rule despotically, and the last public act of Geoffrey Fitz Peter had been to engage him to an undertaking which he had resolved not to keep. [Sidenote: John goes to France, 1214. ] But matters did not proceed very rapidly. It is more than a year before we hear much more of the baronial demands. The new legate showed himself desirous to gratify the king; and although the Northern barons still refused to go on foreign service, he managed to prevent an open struggle. The king went to Poictou in February, 1214, and did not return until the next October. In the meanwhile the damages of the bishops were ascertained and the interdict taken off on the 29th of June. The war on the Continent occupied men’s minds a good deal. Philip won the battle of Bouvines over the forces of Flanders, Germany and England, on the 27th of July; and John did nothing in Poictou to make the North Country barons regret their determination not to follow him. The great confederacy against Philip which Richard had planned, and which John had been laboring to bring to bear on his adversary, was defeated, and Philip stood forth for the moment as the mightiest king in Europe. [Sidenote: The party of the barons. ]