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,
