In the reign of Henry III. (A.D. 1216-A.D. 1272), Roman influence in England was greatly sustained by the introduction of the Preaching Orders of Franciscan and Dominican Friars, who, being many of them foreigners, and all of them independent of any episcopal control, and subject to Papal jurisdiction only, were very energetic in their endeavours to maintain and extend the authority of the popedom.
by the habit of appeals;
By this time, too, appeals to Rome against the decisions of English courts had come to be a great bar to national independence. Such appeals had been altogether unrecognized in England until the days of Stephen, and the practice was again forbidden in Henry II.'s reign by the Constitutions of Clarendon (A.D. 1164); but, after Becket's death, the prohibition was once more repealed. It is easy to see how seriously this system of appeals must have delayed and interfered with the regular course of justice in this country, and how capable it was of being made a political engine in the hands of the Pope, or of those who held with him. The exemption of most of the monasteries from the supervision of the Bishops was also a serious evil, interfering as it did with the Divinely-appointed functions of the episcopacy, and opening the door to disorders which the distant and usurped authority of the Popes had not power to remedy.
by large money payments.
In the fourteenth century another means was resorted to of increasing the power of the Popes at expense of the monarch and people of England, by the payment of annates, or first-fruits, on the appointment of each Bishop; and so heavy did this burden become, that between A.D. 1486 and A.D. 1531, 160,000 pounds (or about 45,000 pounds a year of our money) was paid to Rome under the head of annates.
All these evils borne under protest.
It is not to be supposed that these encroachments of a foreign power were accepted without a murmur or remonstrance on the part of the people of England; on the contrary, there was a constant undercurrent of discontent, which found occasional expression in some official or popular protest. Such, on the one hand, was the statute of praemunire, passed in the reign of Richard II. (A.D. 1389), to prohibit Papal interference with Church patronage and decisions in ecclesiastical causes; and, on the other, the irregular proceedings of Wickliffe and the Lollards, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which, though they eventually degenerated into seditious agitation, had their rise in a feeling of opposition to Romish abuses and usurpations. This feeling was increased by the fearful state of profligacy into which Rome, and indeed all Italy, was plunged during the fifteenth century, which effectually destroyed the character formerly enjoyed by the Roman Church, whilst it could not but affect the spiritual health of the other Churches over which Rome exercised so wide an influence. Wiser and calmer men than Wickliffe saw the need of some reformation, though they questioned, and, as the event showed, rightly, the wisdom and the justice of the steps he took towards his object. Wickliffe's teaching in the fourteenth century had, in fact, little or nothing to do with the real Reformation of two hundred years later, except that some of his dangerous theories on political matters took deeper root than did his religious peculiarities, and bore fruit in much of the unprincipled licence which was an unhappy, though by no means an essential, feature of the Reformation era.
English longings for reformation.
England, in common with the other nations of Europe, was willing to hope for great benefit from the councils of the Church held in the fifteenth century; and, at each of them, we find English Clergy making grave and urgent protests against the abuses which they saw around them, and pleading for a return to purer and better ways. Thus, at the Council of Pisa, A.D. 1400, one of the English Bishops who attended it presented a memorial which complained of the evils resulting from the want of episcopal control over the monasteries, from the practice of appeals to Rome, and from the ease with which dispensations for non-residence and pluralities were obtained[3]. Again, at the Council of Constance (A.D. 1415) a sermon was preached by Dr. Abendon, an Oxford professor, which painted in very strong language the worldliness and covetousness of the non-resident Bishops and Clergy; and these protests were followed up by an official appeal to the Pope for a reformation, on the part of the Kings of France and England, A.D. 1425, as well as by official instructions given to the English deputation despatched to the Council of Basle (A.D. 1431), to use their influence for the same end.