The letters patent setting forth this agreement were issued on the joint motion of the Justiciar and the Bishop of Winchester; Pandulf was evidently absent from the court. There can be no doubt that Aumale’s vow here referred to was a vow of Crusade, enjoined by Pandulf as the condition of the count’s release from excommunication at the close of the preceding year; and we may see in it a reason for the extreme generosity with which the count was treated. A government whose head was a papal Legate might make a military demonstration, but could hardly use real force against a man who wore the Cross. There is, moreover, some probability that the Council, or some member of it, may have entertained a project of letting Count William commute his vow for an undertaking which might well be deemed a penance quite as severe as a crusade--the seneschalship of Poitou and Gascony. A report to that effect certainly reached the Earl of Salisbury at some date between December, 1219, and the end of June, 1220.[714] The report may have been false; but it is quite possible that the project may have really existed, and by no means clear that it deserved the scorn heaped upon it by the King’s uncle. The appointment of William de Fors as governor of Aquitaine would be an excellent expedient for getting him peaceably out of England; and though troublesome there, he was not without qualifications for the vacant post over sea. As the son of a Poitevin father he would be quicker to understand the character of the people, and perhaps more acceptable to some of them, than a man of pure English blood; at the same time, his stake in the country was too small[715] to involve him in personal rivalry with the Aquitanian barons; while as a great English noble he would be readily welcomed by the towns. In the weeks between the coronation and the treaty with Scotland the thoughts of Hubert de Burgh, “roaming over seas and mountains” in search of a governor for Aquitaine and at the same time haunted by the problem of the English castles, may well have turned--or may have been turned by Pandulf or Peter--to a possibility of ending the weary search and winning the resignation of Aumale’s English wardenships at one stroke; and the agreement with Aumale on S. Peter’s day may have been made on the basis of some previous negotiations whose completion the march on Rockingham was intended merely to precipitate. In the face of Longsword’s protest, however, the project of sending Aumale to Poitou, if ever seriously entertained, must have been abandoned; and we may see in its abandonment the reason why Aumale did not receive the licence which he desired for a further postponement of his crusade. Pandulf seems to have offered him instead the option of redeeming his vow altogether, doubtless in the usual way, by a payment of money; but Aumale neither paid nor went.[716]