The Good Parliament

So empty had become the treasury in 1376, in consequence of the costly wars and the corruption at court, that the king's privy council decided to summon parliament. This body had grown steadily in power during the reign of Edward III, largely through practice and experience, and had established effectively its right to control the grant of money to the king. The representatives of the towns and counties were becoming accustomed to their position, and were taking a more active part in parliamentary proceedings, ready, should occasion offer, to make an attempt to check the abuses of the government, and to assume some of those powers that the baronage had hitherto exclusively exercised.

In 1376 the opportunity came. Summoned for the purpose of levying taxes, the seventy-four knights of the shire and the two hundred citizens and burgesses, in an angry mood, determined, before they granted a penny of supplies, to get rid of the men who had mismanaged affairs and robbed the treasury. Supported by the Black Prince, who, a helpless invalid, resented the tyrannical attitude of his younger brother John of Gaunt, they took a new and unexpected stand. They declared that the king would have had enough money had the realm been wisely governed, and that as long as evil men were in office, no grant of theirs could bring prosperity to the kingdom. To make their protest more effective, they elected a head, Peter de la Mare, a knight of the shire of Hereford, to act as their speaker, and through him they demanded that Lord Latimer and Richard Lyons, as traitors to the king, be deprived of their offices. John of Gaunt, anxious to appease the people, whose friend he always claimed to be, and fearing the power of the Black Prince, yielded to the demand of the Commons. Lord Latimer, being a peer, was disgraced by the king, and his goods were confiscated ; but Richard Lyons, being a commoner, was impeached by the House of Commons and tried formally by the House of Lords. He was sentenced to fine and imprisonment, and was forbidden ever to bold office again.

These were bold acts, and it is hardly surprising that the knights and burgesses were unable to maintain their position. The death of the Black Prince during the sitting of parliament greatly discouraged their leaders and left them more or less at the mercy of John of Gaunt. The latter, who had yielded to their demands only to strengthen his own position, now came out in his true colors, and led a reaction against the work of the Good Parliament. He brought back Lord Latimer; suffered Alice Perrers, the king's mistress, whom the Good Parliament had banished, to return; disgraced and drove from court Archbishop Wykeham, who had led the cause of the Commons in the king's council; and threw Peter de la Mare into prison. A packed parliament of 1377 confirmed these acts.

The last decade of Edward III's reign was a period of national disgrace. The naval supremacy won at Sluy's was gone; the military prestige gained at Crecy and Poitiers had been likewise forfeited. The war had increased taxation and intensified the popular discontent. The trade of the kingdom had declined, owing to the loss of power at sea, and French and Spanish sea-rovers and pirates preyed on English commerce.

At home popular disapproval of conditions in church and state was everywhere becoming manifest.

State and Church: Religious Degeneration

The church as well as the state had lost both in importance and influence. The lives of the popes at Avignon had gained for them little respect in England ; while their continued residence in a French city made them appear to the English as allies of England's enemy, the king of France.

For three-quarters of a century parliament had been disputing the right of the pope to interfere in English affairs. In 1299 it had denied the pope's claim to Scotland as a fief of Rome.' In 1307 it had forbidden the heads of religious houses to send any money to Rome, and had protested against the way higher ecclesiastical officials abroad were forcing money from the monasteries and religious houses in England. Toward the middle of the century its policy became more definite. The popes had been accustomed to fill English church offices, that is, to appoint bishops, abbots, and other clergy at pleasure. This was called the right of provision. In 1351 parliament passed the first Statute of Provisors, attacking this privilege and imposing severe penalties upon all who received benefices at the hands of the pope. In like manner, the right of appeal to the pope had been forbidden in 1353 by the first Statute of Pr munire and both of these decrees had been confirmed in 1363. The king, however, rarely enforced these statutes, and they had to be repeated again and again. These acts were the acts of parliament, and not of the clergy; that is, they were the acts of the state, and not of the church. The clergy accepted the decrees of the church councils and the decretals of the pope as absolutely binding upon their own courts, and recognized no special canon law of their own. Parliament, in passing these laws, was in reality making war not only on the pope, but also on the clergy in England, who carried out the papal orders. The struggle thus begun was to be continued under Richard II.

At the very time when parliament was limiting the authority of the pope in England, the people were becoming thoroughly dissatisfied with the way in which the English clergy were performing their religious duties. The higher clergy, bishops and abbots, had become worldly and avaricious, shunning their spiritual obligations, and engaging in matters of administration, finance, and diplomacy. The monasteries and prelates had absorbed great wealth, and instead of being centres of life and light to the people, had become objects of hatred. The lesser clergy, the parish priests, were wretchedly poor, uneducated, and inefficient, often unwilling and unable to perform their parish duties. Many parishes were vacant because of the Black Death. The wealth of the church was badly distributed. Foreign churchmen, absentee bishops, and the monasteries received the bulk of the revenues, while the parishes received little or nothing.

Religious practice had become a superstition, and religious life a matter of form rather than of faith and works. The pardoner, hawking his wares and selling pardons for sin, was a familiar figure in the land, and priests and friars traded in the forms of religion and used the confessional as a source of profit. William Langland, the author of The Vision of Piers Plowman, himself perhaps a villein who had risen to the rank of the lesser clergy, reserves all his indignation for the parish priests and the friars. To this poet of the people they seemed to be wolves among their own sheep.