[1035] Stubbs, Const. Hist., iii, 632, 633; Busch, England unter den Tudors, i, 81; Green, ch. vi, § 3, pp. 267, 268, 287, 288.
[1036] Cp. Gardiner, Student's History, p. 330.
[1037] The clergy and the Parliament seem to have applauded the project of an invasion of France instantly and without reservation (Sharon Turner, History of England during the Middle Ages, ii, 383). And already in the minority of Henry VI "the Parliament was fast dying down into a mere representation of the baronage and the great landowners" (Green, ch. vi, p. 265). "Never before and never again for more than two hundred years were the Commons so strong as they were under Henry IV" (Stubbs, iii, 73).
[1038] Pearson, English History in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 250, 251. Among the minor forms of oppression were local vetoes on the grinding of the people's own corn by themselves in their handmills. Thus "the tenants of St. Albans extorted a licence to use querns at the time of Tyler's rebellion" (Morgan, England under the Normans, 1858, p. 161).
[1039] As to the failure of these laws see Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 1893, p. 196 sq.
[1040] Id. p. 200.
[1041] Lewis's Life of Wiclif, ed. 1820, pp. 224, 225; Lechler's John Wycliffe and his English Precursors, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 371-76; Prof. Montagu Burrows, Wiclif's Place in History, p. 19.
[1042] Green, Short History, ch. v, § 4; Gardiner, Introduction, pp. 94-98; Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 272.
[1043] Cp. Sharon Turner, England during the Middle Ages, ii, 263; iii, 108; Milman, Latin Christianity, viii, 213, 215.
[1044] Green, ch. v, § 5, p. 255; Stubbs, iii, 609-10. He further refused the petition from the Commons in 1391, demanding that no "neif or villein" should be allowed to have his children educated. Cp. de Montmorency, State Intervention in English Education, 1902, p. 27.