Meanwhile the legally-minded Philip, while spending money freely on John’s followers and abating nothing of his diplomatic and military efforts, brought to bear the weapons of law. The revival of legal studies in the twelfth century had given rise in western Europe to a body of professional lawyers, skilled in the Roman and the canon law, and quick to turn their learning to the advantage of the princes whom they served. Philip had a number of such advisers at his court, and they doubtless contributed to the more lawyerlike methods of doing things which make their appearance in his reign; but it was feudal custom, and not Roman law, that he used against John. In law John was Philip’s vassal,--indeed, he had just confessed as much in the treaty of 1200,--and as such was held to attend Philip’s feudal court and subject himself to its decision in disputes with other vassals. It might be urged that the king of England was too great a man to submit to such jurisdiction, and that the duke of Normandy had been in the habit of satisfying his feudal obligations by a formal ceremony at the Norman frontier; still the technical law was on the side of the king of France, and a suzerain had at last come who was able to translate theory into fact. In the course of a series of adventures in Poitou John carried off the fiancée of one of his barons of the house of Lusignan, who appealed to his superior lord, the king of France. All this was in due form, but Philip was no lion of justice eager to redress injuries for justice’ sake. He waited nearly two years, John’s visit to Paris falling in the interval, and then, when he was ready to execute sentence, promptly summoned John before the feudal court of peers. John neither came nor appeared through a representative, and the court in April, 1202, declared him deprived of all his lands for having refused to obey his lord’s commands or render the services due from him as vassal. The capture of Arthur temporarily checked Philip; the boy’s murder by John in the course of 1203 simply recoiled on the murderer. Whether this crime led to a second condemnation by the court of peers, as was alleged by the French at the time of the abortive invasion of England in 1216, is a question which has been sharply discussed among scholars. What has now become the orthodox view holds that there was no second condemnation, but a clever case has recently been made by Powicke, who, minimizing the importance of the accepted argument from the silence of immediate contemporaries, argues, on the basis of the _Annals of Margam_, that there probably was a second condemnation in 1204. After all, the question is of subordinate importance, for Philip’s effective action was based on the trial of 1202, and by 1204 John’s fate was already sealed.