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Page 407
placed a plaster over a festering sore without cleaning it, Langton made a strong effort at the council called to meet at London on August 25 to provide a basis for a more stable, more permanent relationship between the king and his barons.
He invited a number of the most influential lords to come to him so that he might better understand and perhaps help solve their differences with the king. Every man invited came, and came promptly. There was nothing secret in the meetings. Openly avowed king's men were invited as well as those who complained against John. Naturally, the most eager were men like Ian and Geoffrey, who could neither bear the king's ways nor bear to violate their oaths of fealty to him.
Three main results came out of the meetings. The first was a clear statement of how the barons wanted a king to act. The second was to give the archbishop a most accurate and rather unpleasant picture of the king he felt it his duty to guide. Among the points made in the statement, the first mentioned and the unanimous support given to the desire for assurances against imprisonment and injustice did not trouble Langton much. Every king, even the Holy Father, was accused of those faults because the guilty cried that they were put upon unfairly even more loudly than the innocent.
What surprised Langton was the prominence given to protection of daughters and widows and the passion with which the incorporation of separate mention of women, as distinct from other heirs, was urged. Generally, females were not worth mentioning in a state document, yet John's men devoted two separate, special articles to them and grew pale or red with passion in pressing their point when the archbishop questioned the need. That special protection for women should be mentioned and defined even before the question of service overseas and scutage, which had been the overt causes of a near rebellion, had an unpleasant significance.
The third result was one unknown to the participants in the archbishop's conferences. John promptly dispatched an

 
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