aries was all he had to trust to for restoring his authority.

The barons, after obtaining the Great Charter, seem to have been lulled
into a fatal security, and to have taken no rational measures, in case
of the introduction of a foreign force, for reassembling their armies.
The king was, from the first, master of the field; and immediately laid
siege to the castle of Rochester, which was obstinately defended by
William de Albiney, at the head of a hundred and forty knights with
their retainers, but was at last, reduced by famine. John, irritated
with the resistance, intended to have hanged the governor and all the
garrison; but on the representation of William de Mauleon, who suggested
to him the danger of reprisals, he was content to sacrifice, in this
barbarous manner, the inferior prisoners only. The captivity of William
de Albiney, the best officer among the confederated barons, was
an irreparable loss to their cause; and no regular opposition was
thenceforth made to the progress of the royal arms. The ravenous and
barbarous mercenaries, incited by a cruel and enraged prince were let
loose against the estates, tenants, manors, houses, parks of the barons,
and spread devastation over the face of the kingdom. Nothing was to
be seen but the flames of villages, and castles reduced to ashes, the
consternation and misery of the inhabitants, tortures exercised by the
soldiery to make them reveal their concealed treasures, and reprisals no
less barbarous, committed by the barons and their partisans on the royal
demesnes, and on the estates of such as still adhered to the crown.
The king, marching through the whole extent of England, from Dover to
Berwick, laid the provinces waste on each side of him; and considered
every estate, which was not his immediate property, as entirely hostile,
and the object of military execution. The nobility of the north in
particular, who had shown greatest violence in the recovery of their
liberties, and who, acting in a separate body, had expressed their
discontent even at the concessions made by the Great Charter, as they
could expect no mercy, fled before him with their wives and families,
and purchased the friendship of Alexander, the young king of Scots, by
doing homage to him.

The barons, reduced to this desperate extremity, and menaced with
the total loss of their liberties, their properties, and their lives,
employed a remedy no less desperate; and making applications to the
court