their retainers who formed the garrison before its walls.  The blow was effectual; the royal castles were surrendered by the barons, and the land was once more at peace.  Freed from foreign soldiery, the country was freed also from the presence of the foreign legate.  Langton wrested a promise from Rome that so long as he lived no future legate should be sent to England, and with Pandulf’s resignation in 1221 the direct interference of the Papacy in the government of the realm came to an end.  But even these services of the Primate were small compared with his services to English freedom.  Throughout his life the Charter was the first object of his care.  The omission of the articles which restricted the royal power over taxation in the Charter which was published at Henry’s accession in 1216 was doubtless due to the Archbishop’s absence and disgrace at Rome.  The suppression of disorder seems to have revived the older spirit of resistance among the royal ministers; for when Langton demanded a fresh confirmation of the Charter in Parliament at London William Brewer, one of the King’s councillors, protested that it had been extorted by force and was without legal validity.  “If you loved the King, William,” the Primate burst out in anger, “you would not throw a stumbling-block in the way of the peace of the realm.”  The young king was cowed by the Archbishop’s wrath, and promised observance of the Charter.  But it may have been their consciousness of such a temper among the royal councillors that made Langton and the baronage demand two years later a fresh promulgation of the Charter as the price of a subsidy, and Henry’s assent established the principle, so fruitful of constitutional results, that redress of wrongs precedes a grant to the Crown.

[Sidenote:  State of the Church]

These repeated sanctions of the Charter and the government of the realm year after year in accordance with its provisions were gradually bringing the new freedom home to the mass of Englishmen.  But the sense of liberty was at this time quickened and intensified by a religious movement which stirred English society to its depths.  Never had the priesthood wielded such boundless power over Christendom as in the days of Innocent the Third and his immediate successors.  But its religious hold on the people was loosening day by day.  The old reverence for the Papacy was fading away before the universal resentment at its political ambition, its lavish use of interdict and excommunication for purely secular ends, its degradation of the most sacred sentences into means of financial extortion.  In Italy the struggle that was opening between Rome and Frederick the Second disclosed a spirit of scepticism which among the Epicurean poets of Florence denied the immortality of the soul and attacked the very foundations of the faith itself.  In Southern Gaul, Languedoc and Provence had embraced the heresy of the Albigenses and thrown off all allegiance to the Papacy.  Even in England, though there