The eight months which followed the Council of Clarendon were spent in a vain attempt to solve an insoluble problem.  Messengers from king and archbishop hastened again and again to the Pope, with no result.  Henry set his face like a flint. “Verba sunt,” he said to a mediating bishop; “you may talk to me all the days that we both shall live, but there shall be no peace till the archbishop wins the Pope’s consent to the customs.”  Fresh cases arose of clerks accused of theft and murder, but as the personal quarrel between Henry and Thomas increased in bitterness, questions of reform fell into the background.  “I will humble thee,” the king declared, “and will restore thee to the place from whence I took thee.”  Thomas, on his part, knew how to awaken all Henry’s secret fears.  All Europe was concerned in the dispute of king and archbishop.  The Pope at Sens, the French king, the “eldest son of the Church,” the princes of the House of Blois, as steadfast in their orthodoxy as in their hatred of the Angevin, the Emperor, ready to use any quarrel for his own purposes, were all eagerly watching every turn of the strife.  In August Henry was startled by the news that Thomas himself had fled to seek the protection of the Pope at Sens.  He was, however, recognized by sailors, and carried back to English shores.  Henry immediately dealt his counter-blow.  The archbishop was summoned in September to London to answer in a case which John, the marshal, an officer of the Exchequer, had withdrawn from the Archbishop’s to the King’s Court.  Thomas pleaded illness, and protested that the marshal had been guilty of perjury.  The king retorted by calling a council for the trial of the archbishop on a charge of contempt of the royal summons.  With the insolence of power and the bitter anger of outraged confidence, Henry heaped humiliations on his enemy.  The Primate had a right, by ancient custom, to be summoned first among the great lords called to the king’s council; he was now merely served with an ordinary notice from the sheriff of Kent to attend his trial.  When he arrived at Northampton there was no lodging left free for himself and his attendants.  The king had gone out hunting amid the marshes and streams, and only the next morning met the Primate roughly after mass, and refused him the kiss of peace.

In the council which opened in Northampton Castle on Wednesday, 7th October, we see the Curia Regis in the developed form which it had taken under Henry and his justiciar, De Lucy, carrying out an exact legal system, and observing the forms of a very elaborate procedure.  The king and his inner council of the great lords, the prelates, and the officers of the household, withdrew to an upper chamber of the castle; the whole company of sheriffs and lesser barons waited in the great hall below till they were specially summoned to the king’s presence, crowding round the fire that burned in the centre of the hall under the opening in the roof through which the smoke escaped,