These four letters obviously form a group whose members are so inseparably inter-related that they must stand or fall together. The chief member of this group is not the one which the Exchequer scribe has placed at its head (the one printed in _Foedera_), but that which he has placed second, and which is addressed to Peter des Roches, Hubert de Burgh, and William Brewer conjointly. It is these three men whom the Pope charges to give the young King free disposition of his realm; the addressees of the other three letters are merely bidden to perform the special duties which will fall to them severally as a consequence of this primary command, which the Pope in each case expressly tells them he is giving to Peter, Hubert, and William. We have seen that the fourth letter is textually identical with one which, according to Bishops Peter and Hugh, was written on 13th April, 1223, by Honorius to the vice-chancellor. This identity extends to the salutation (except of course as to the writer’s name); in the Red Book version, as in that of the two bishops, the letter is addressed “Cycestrensi electo, vice-cancellario.” Now, the only man who was at the same time “elect of Chichester and vice-chancellor” was Ralf de Neville (who was elected to Chichester early in 1223); and before the first year of Pope Gregory began, Ralf had ceased to be either the one or the other--he had become Bishop of Chichester and Chancellor. Thus the compiler of the portion of the Red Book in which these letters occur has luckily betrayed his own error. Probably he had, in the first draft of his notes, copied these letters from their originals in the Exchequer without putting the Pope’s name or initial at their head, and when he came to re-copy his notes into the Red Book he--writing at a time when Henry’s first coming of age was no longer a matter of practical importance and may well have been almost forgotten, knowing that Henry had been set free from the trammels of minority while still under age, and in the first year of Gregory IX, and failing to notice the chronological indication conveyed in the address _Cycestrensi electo vice-cancellario_--ascribed the letters to Gregory, and (as he doubtless imagined) corrected the year accordingly. The words which I have italicized are indeed not the only ones which shew that he was mistaken in so doing. The whole contents of all four letters fit in perfectly with the circumstances of 1223; but a considerable portion of those contents is quite inappropriate to the circumstances of 1227. At this latter date the controversy about the castles was a thing of the past.