of Chester’s shires, to his own Palatine county and to the Welsh border) of the shires thus taken from them, their dispossession was a reasonable precaution. Bishop Peter’s deprivation of his sheriffdom and wardenships may have been likewise dictated by prudence or suspicion; but suspicion, if it existed, was veiled beneath an appearance of courtesy; it was not till a week after the letters had been issued for the displacement of the other sheriffs and castellans that he was called upon to hand over Hampshire and its castles to a brother bishop, Richard of Salisbury. Fifteen of the other twenty-five redistributed castles were committed to prelates {1223}. Bristol was transferred to its diocesan bishop, Jocelyn of Bath, from Bishop Pandulf of Norwich; the other fourteen had been in the charge of laymen. Jocelyn of Bath was also entrusted with one of these castles, Sherborne; eleven were committed to the bishops (in one case the archbishop) of the dioceses in which they respectively stood; the other two--Windsor and Odiham--to Archbishop Stephen.[951] These appointments, all made on 30th December, 1223, were evidently not meant to be of long duration; their object was to give the King and his advisers time for considering more fully how best to dispose of the castles, of which the greater number would meanwhile be in the keeping of guardians whose neutral position afforded the deprived castellans no ground for jealousy or suspicion. The arrangement seems however to have worked so well that very little modification of it was found necessary for several years. Its author was probably the Archbishop of Canterbury. Throughout the proceedings at Northampton he seems to have acted as spokesman on the King’s side; as head of the commission charged with the execution of the papal mandate on which those proceedings were based, he was most likely entrusted by Henry with the conduct of them. Falkes says that immediately after the surrender “the Archbishop, distributing the castles by word of mouth, deprived all the barons alike of their possessions.” The letters patent issued next day were no doubt drawn up according to this verbal distribution; but, as we have seen, the actual results were far less sweeping than the words of Falkes imply. A charge of unfair dealing which is brought by Falkes and by another writer of the time against the King and his advisers on this occasion has met with a more ready acceptance than, perhaps, it deserved. “While,” says Falkes, “the Earl of Chester and his friends made a real bodily restitution of their castles, the Justiciar and his party held theirs as before.”[952] “When the castles were surrendered,” says Ralf of Coggeshall, “the King gave back to Hubert his wardenships, the other castellans being deprived of theirs.”[953] The evidence of the Rolls on this point is unfortunately very meagre and incomplete; they contain scarcely any information about the royal castles during the next eight years and more.