only in this December council that “the papal letters which declared him (Henry) of age were acted upon” (Powicke, _Eng. Hist. Rev._, vol. xxiii. p. 221), _i.e._, that the King began to attest his own letters, and, probably, the great seal began to follow the King instead of being kept at the Exchequer (_ib._, p. 224). Falkes, however, seems to imply that the papal command “ut castra, ballia, et caetera quae sunt regis a cunctis tenentibus redderentur” was known in England before the affair of Lacy and Musard took place. On the other hand he tells us that certain Apostolic letters “in quibus continebatur quod esset domino regi restitutio rerum suarum facienda” were “exhibited”--seemingly for the first time--at Christmas. To me all this seems to indicate that the letter to Peter, Hubert, and William and the letter to the prelates, had both reached the English court before the end of October; that the first was published then as the annalist says, but was not carried into immediate effect; that the second was published, as Roger implies, early in December, but that a number of barons--Falkes among them--not being present at its publication, had no _official_ knowledge of it till it was “exhibited” to them at Christmas. While the barons in general seem to have regarded Hubert as the instigator of the papal order for a compulsory surrender of castles, etc., Falkes, hostile though he is to the Justiciar, neither asserts nor hints at any thing of the kind. He says indeed nothing whatever as to any suspicions which he or others may have had concerning the origin of that order. Yet I cannot but think that he had a suspicion, and possibly not altogether an unlikely one. Both on personal and political grounds Falkes is bitter enough against Hubert; to him, Hubert is a personal enemy and also an enemy of the peace and prosperity of King and kingdom; but he is neither the sole nor the chief enemy. Throughout his “Complaint,” even in reference to matters in which Hubert appears as the principal or the sole actor, Falkes speaks of “the Justiciar and his accomplices”; and the foremost of these “accomplices,” according to Falkes’s version of history, is the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is Stephen, not Hubert, who is the arch-enemy in the eyes of Falkes--the relentless persecutor of Falkes himself, the persistent sower of discord and plotter of mischief in the realm; one passage relating to him in the _Querimonia_ reads almost like a paraphrase of the accusation said by the Dunstable annalist to have been flung, in a moment of fury, by Hubert at Peter des Roches (above, p. 207). The animus displayed by Falkes against Stephen is in fact so violent that we instinctively feel his narrative is not to be trusted _in details_ where the Archbishop is concerned. Yet there is no intrinsic impossibility in its account of the formal surrender of the castles, in which Stephen is distinctly made to play the most prominent part (above, p. 210).