The King’s journey to meet Alexander of Scotland furnished an opportunity for a royal progress through some of the castles which lay between London and York. “The King with his tutors,” says the Barnwell annalist, “perambulated his realm, to know whether those whom his father had made custodians of fortresses in England were minded to give up those fortresses quietly to himself as their lord.”[704] From York he went by way of Pontefract to Nottingham, thence to Leicester, and thence to Northampton. When he reached Rockingham, however, on 25th or 26th June,[705] the castle gates were shut against him.[706] William of Aumale had only ten days before been chosen as one of the King’s sureties for the treaty with Scotland.[707] He had clearly left the court since then; but he was not in Rockingham castle, though he was evidently known to be not far away, for two messengers who were immediately despatched to him with another royal command for the surrender of Rockingham and Sauvey were ordered to be back at the hour of prime next morning.[708] They seem to have returned with a request from Aumale for a safe-conduct to the court. Meanwhile a military force under Falkes, which had accompanied or followed the King from Northampton to Rockingham, invested the castle,[709] with the ready assistance of the people of the shire, who seem to have found Aumale a very overbearing and troublesome neighbour. On Sunday, 28th, the garrison “seeing that they were in a strait and had not power to resist, ignominiously went out and left free entrance to the King.”[710] A safe-conduct until prime on that Sunday morning had been issued to Aumale the day before;[711] he had used it, and had made formal surrender of both Rockingham and Sauvey into the King’s hand.[712] Next day a notice was issued in the King’s name, stating that Count William had resigned the custody of these two castles “of his own free will.” The King, on his side, quit-claimed to the count the ferm received by him from the manors and other royal demesnes, and the issues of the Forests, attached to the castles, from the time when the castles were given him in custody to the day on which he resigned them, and also undertook to obtain from the Legate permission for the count to postpone the fulfilment of “his vow.”[713]