Louis was now anxious to get back to France. According to one account, his father was again urgently calling him home;[94] according to another, he was alarmed by letters from his agents at Rome, telling him that unless he left England the Pope intended to confirm on Maundy Thursday the excommunication which had been pronounced on him by Gualo.[95] When he announced to his English friends in London his intention of leaving the country they were highly displeased, and he had to take a solemn oath that he would return before the expiration of the truce.[96] None of the successive truces made during this winter seem to have been very scrupulously kept by either party. On the morrow of the surrender of Berkhamsted {_1216 21 Dec._} Louis had marched upon S. Alban’s and demanded homage of the abbot, and on its refusal had only been restrained from burning both abbey and town by the intervention of Saer de Quincy, whereby the abbot was persuaded to give him eighty marks for a respite till Candlemas.[97] A month later {_1217 22 Jan._}, at the very time when the King’s Council were endeavouring to arrange a conference of commissioners from both sides for the redress of infractions of the first and second truces and for securing the observance of the truce then existing,[98] Falkes de Bréauté sacked the same unlucky town and wrung from the abbot another heavy fine.[99] Louis’s visit to Lincoln was not an overt act of hostility such as these, but it was distinctly a violation of the spirit of the conditions on which the last truce had been made; and the Royalists may perhaps have considered themselves thereby released from their own obligation to abide by those conditions. However this may be, Louis, seemingly on the point of setting out from London for the coast, received information that the castle of Rye had been “taken by subtlety” by the English.[100]