[64] Matth. Paris, ii. 455.
[65] Rymer, Foedera, i. 140.
[66] Rymer, Foedera, i. 75.
[67] But see Guilhiermoz, Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes, lx. (1899), 45-85, whose argument is, however, not convincing.
[68] Roger of Wendover, iii. 170.
[69] Ralph of Coggeshall, 139-141.
[70] L'Histoire de Guillaume la Maréchal, ll. 12737-12741.
CHAPTER XX
CONFLICT WITH THE PAPACY
The loss of the ancient possessions of the Norman dukes and the Angevin counts marks the close of an epoch in the reign of John; but for the history of England and for the personal history of the king the period is more appropriately closed by the death of Archbishop Hubert Walter on July 13, 1205, for the consequences which followed that event lead us directly to the second period of the reign. Already at the accession of John one of the two or three men of controlling influence on the course of events, trained not merely in the school of Henry II, but by the leading part he had played in the reign of Richard, there is no doubt that he had kept a strong hand on the government of the opening years of the new reign, and that his personality had been felt as a decided check by the new king. We may believe also that as one who had been brought up by Glanvill, the great jurist of Henry's time, and who had a large share in carrying the constitutional beginnings of that time a further stage forward, but who was himself a practical statesman rather than a lawyer, he was one of the foremost teachers of that great lesson which England was then learning, the lesson of law, of rights and responsibilities, which was for the world at large a far more important result of the legal reforms of the great Angevin monarch than anything in the field of technical law. It is easy to believe that a later writer records at least a genuine tradition of the feeling of John when he makes him exclaim on hearing of the archbishop's death, "Now—for the first time am I king of England." In truth practically shut up now for the first time to his island kingdom, John was about to be plunged into that series of quarrels and conflicts which fills the remainder of his life.