View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, Vol. 3

by Henry Hallam

[] Hody, p. 386; Atterbury, p. 222.

[t] Hody, p. 391.

[] Gilbert's Hist. of Exchequer, p. 47.

[x] Rot. Parl. vol. i. p. 189; Atterbury, p. 229.

[y] The lower house of convocation, in 1547, terrified at the progress of reformation, petitioned that, "according to the tenor of the king's writ, and the ancient customs of the realm, they might have room and place and be associated with the commons in the nether house of this present parliament, as members of the commonwealth and the king's most humble subjects." Burnet's Hist. of Reformation, vol. ii.; Appendix, No. 17.

This assertion that the clergy had ever been associated as one body with the commons is not borne out by anything that appears on our records, and is contradicted by many passages. But it is said that the clergy were actually so united with the commons in the Irish parliament till the Reformation. Gilbert's Hist. of the Exchequer, p. 57.

[z] Hody, p. 392.

[a] The præmunientes clause in a bishop's writ of summons was so far regarded down to the Reformation, that proctors were elected, and their names returned upon the writ; though the clergy never attended from the beginning of the fifteenth century, and gave their money only in convocation. Since the Reformation the clause has been preserved for form merely in the writ. Wilkins, Dissertatio, ubi supra.

[] Hody, p. 396. 403, &c. In 1314 the clergy protest even against the recital of the king's writ to the archbishop directing him to summon the clergy of his province in his letters mandatory, declaring that the English clergy had not been accustomed, nor ought by right, to be convoked by the king's authority. Atterbury, p. 230.

[c] Hody, p. 425. Atterbury, p. 42, 233. The latter seems to think that the clergy of both provinces never actually met in a national council or house of parliament, under the præmunientes writ, after the reign of Edward II., though the proctors were duly returned. But Hody does not go quite so far, and Atterbury had a particular motive to enhance the influence of the convocation of Canterbury.