There was, indeed, an undercurrent of disturbance running beneath the surface of English politics; but the disturbance, so far as can be seen, was not, as yet, of a party character, though it contained elements which might easily combine so as to form a serious danger to the government. The traces left by the war on the habits and dispositions of the classes which had been engaged in it were far from being wiped out even yet. The passion for tourneying which had seized upon Englishmen after the close of their struggle with the invader still required constant repression.[834] Moreover, the years of confusion had brought back to England another continental practice which had never been recognized as legal there since Stephen’s time, the practice of private war; and so deeply had this evil custom taken root that it seems to have been tolerated by the King’s guardians without protest, except when it brought a belligerent into direct collision with the authority of the Crown. We have seen how one magnate who was actually a member of the Council, Earl William of Salisbury, had to be prevented by Falkes, acting under a royal order, from forcibly ousting a rival custodian from Lincoln castle. He avenged himself on Falkes by stirring up against him some of the chief men of Devon and Cornwall, one of them being the sheriff of these two counties, Robert de Courtenay. These men banded themselves together in March, 1221, for a combined plundering raid on Falkes’s lands in Devonshire, “but,” wrote Falkes to the Justiciar, “that day they received letters from the Earl of Salisbury bidding them not move, on account of a truce made between him and me till the quindene of Easter; to which truce--so he told them--he had consented in order that he might make use of the interval in Lincolnshire.”[835] Robert de Courtenay, nevertheless, not only forcibly prevented the shipping of corn from Falkes’s manor of Exminster to revictual Falkes’s castle of Plympton, but seized the corn, and flogged and imprisoned one of Falkes’s boatmen, alleging that he had orders from the King to let no corn go out of the harbour of Exminster. Falkes asked the Justiciar to put a stop to this flagrant violation by a sheriff of the rights of private property; but the tone of his letter shews that he regarded, and expected Hubert to regard, his struggle with Longsword as quite another matter, one in which each of the belligerents was free to act as he thought good, without reference to the government.[836] Another illustration of the same evil occurs fifteen months later {1222}. The castle of Dinas Powys, in Glamorgan, was in the hands of the Earl Marshal, but belonged of right to Gilbert Earl of Gloucester. The Marshal surrendered it to the King in Gilbert’s presence in London, that it might be delivered to a representative of the King, who in his turn should restore it to its owner. Gilbert, instead of waiting for the completion of this quite ordinary procedure, gathered his followers