The Flagellants were denounced as heretics by Clement VI.; the Archbishop of York proceeded against the northern heretics, and in 1366 the Archbishop of Canterbury forbade John Ball's preaching. But there were more insidious, because more measured, enemies of the Church than a handful of fanatics. The English were long convinced that the Avignon popes were playing the game of the French adversary, and Clement VI.'s efforts for peace never had a fair hearing. Since the beginning of the war, the king laid his hand on the alien priories, and, though in his scrupulous regard for clerical rights he had allowed the monks to remain in possession, he diverted the stream of tribute from the French mother houses to his own treasury. Bolder measures against papal provisions were taken in the years which immediately followed the pestilence. Finding remonstrances futile, the parliament of 1351, which passed the statute of labourers, enacted also the first statute of provisors. It recited that the anti-papal statute of Carlisle of 1307 was still law, and that the king had sworn to observe it. It claimed for all electing bodies and patrons the right to elect or to present freely to the benefices in their gift. It declared invalid all appointments brought about by way of papal provision. Provisors who had accepted appointments from Avignon were to be arrested. If convicted, they were to be detained in prison, until they had made their peace with the king, and found surely not to accept provisions in the future, and also not to seek their reinstatement by any process in the Roman curia. Two years later this measure was supplemented by the first statute of præmunire, which enacted that those who brought matters cognisable in the king's courts before foreign courts should be liable to forfeiture and outlawry. Though the papal court is not specially mentioned, it is clear that this measure was aimed against it.

General measures proving insufficient, more specific legislation soon followed. In 1365 a fresh statute of præmunire was drawn up on the initiative of the crown, enacting that all who obtained citations, offices, or benefices from the Roman court should incur the penalties prescribed by the act of 1353. The prelates dissociated themselves from so stringent a law, but did not actively oppose it. When in 1366, Edward requested the guidance of the estates as to how he was to deal with the demand of Urban V. for the arrears of King John's tribute, withheld altogether for more than thirty years, the prelates joined the lay estates in answering that neither John nor any one else could put the realm into subjection without their consent. Even the ancient offering of Peter's pence ceased to be paid for the rest of Edward's reign. If these laws had been strictly carried out, the papal authority in England would have been gravely circumscribed. But medieval laws were too often the mere enunciations of an ideal. The statutes of provisors and præmunire were as little executed as were the statutes of labourers, or as some elaborate sumptuary legislation passed by the parliament of 1363. The catalogue of acts of papal interference in English ecclesiastical and temporal affairs is as long after the passing of these laws as before. Litigants still carried their suits to Avignon: provisions were still issued nominating to English benefices, and Edward himself set the example of disregarding his own laws by asking for the appointment of his ministers to bishoprics by way of papal provision. Papal ascendency was too firmly rooted in the fourteenth century to be eradicated by any enactment. To the average clergyman or theologian of the day the pope was still the "universal ordinary," the one divinely appointed source of ecclesiastical authority, the shepherd to whom the Lord had given the commission to feed His sheep. This theory could only be overcome by revolution; and the parliaments and ministers of Edward III. were in no wise of a revolutionary temper.

The anti-papal laws of the fourteenth century were the acts of the secular not of the ecclesiastical power. They were not simply anti-papal, they were also anti-clerical in their tendency, since to the men of the age an attack on the pope was an attack on the Church. No doubt the English bishop at Edward's court sympathised with his master's dislike of foreign ecclesiastical interference, and the English priest was glad to be relieved from payments to the curia. But the clergyman, whose soul grew indignant against the curialists, still believed that the pope was the divinely appointed autocrat of the Church universal. Being a man, a pope might be a bad pope; but the faithful Christian, though he might lament and protest, could not but obey in the last resort. The papacy was so essentially interwoven with the whole Church of the Middle Ages, that few figments have less historical basis than the notion that there was an anti-papal Anglican Church in the days of the Edwards. However, before another generation had passed away, ecclesiastical protests began.

Monasticism no less than the papacy was of the very essence of the Church of the Middle Ages. Yet the monastic ideal had no longer the force that it had in previous generations, and even the latest embodiments of the religious life had declined from their original popularity. Pope John XXII. himself, in his warfare against William of Ockham and the Spiritual Franciscans who had supported Louis of Bavaria, denied in good round terms the Franciscan doctrine of "evangelical poverty". Ockham was now dead, and with him perished the last of the great cosmopolitan schoolmen, of whose birth indeed England might boast, but who early forsook Oxford for Paris. Conspicuous among the younger academical generation was Richard Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh, whose bitter attacks on the fundamental principles underlying the mendicant theory of the regular life are indicative of the changing temper of the age. A distinguished Oxford scholar, a learned and pungent writer, a popular preacher, a reputed saint, and a good friend of the pope, Fitzralph made himself, about 1357, the champion of the secular clergy against the friars by writing a treatise to prove that absolute poverty was neither practised nor commended by the apostles.[1] The indignant mendicants procured the archbishop's citation to Avignon, and it was a striking proof of the ineffectiveness of recent legislation that Edward III. allowed him to plead his cause before the curia. By 1358 the friars gained the day, but their efforts to get Fitzralph's opinions condemned were frustrated by his death in 1360. Fitzralph had the sympathy not only of the seculars, but of the "possessioners," or property-holding monks.

[1] See his De Pauperie Salvatoris, lib. i.-iv., printed by R.L. Poole, as appendix to Wycliffe, De Dominio Divino.

The period of experiments in economic and anti-clerical legislation was also marked by other important new laws, such as the ordinance of the staple of 1354, providing that wool, leather, and other commodities were only to be sold at certain staple towns, a measure soon to be modified by the law of 1362, which settled the staple at Calais; the ordinance of 1357 for the government of Ireland, to which later reference will be made; the statute making English the language of the law courts in 1362, and a drastic act against purveyance in 1365. The statute of treasons of 1352, which laid down seven several offences as alone henceforth to be regarded as treason, also demands attention. Its classification is rude and unsystematic. While the slaying of the king's ministers or judges, and the counterfeiting of the great seal or the king's coin, are joined with the compassing the death of the king or his wife or heir, adherence to the king's enemies, the violation of the queen or the king's eldest daughter, as definite acts of treason, its omission to brand other notable indications of disloyally as traitorous, inspired the judges of later generations to elaborate the doctrine of constructive treason in order to extend in practice the scope of the act. It was, however, an advance for nobles and commons to have set any limitations whatever to the wide power claimed by the courts of defining treason.

Partial respite from war did not diminish the martial ardour of the king and his nobles. The period of the Black Death was precisely the time when Edward completed a plan which he had begun by the erection of his Round Table at Windsor in 1344. By 1348 he instituted a chapel at Windsor, dedicated to St. George, served by a secular chapter, and closely connected with a foundation for the support of poor knights. Within a year this foundation also included the famous Order of the Garter, the type and model of all later orders of chivalry. On St. George's day the king celebrated the new institution by special solemnities. The most famous of his companions-at-arms were associated with him as founders and first knights. Clad in russet coats sprinkled with blue garters, a blue garter on the right leg, and a mantle of blue ornamented with little shields bearing the arms of St. George, the Knights of the Garter heard mass sung by the Archbishop of Canterbury in St. George's chapel, and then feasted solemnly in their common hall. Ten years later the glorification of the king's birthplace was completed by the erection of new quarters for the king, more sumptuous and splendid than were elsewhere to be seen. The fame of the Knights of the Garter excited the emulation of King John of France, who set up a Round Table which grew in 1351 into the knightly Order of the Star.

The rival brethren of the Garter and the Star found plenty of opportunities of demonstrating their prowess. Though between 1347 and 1355 there was, so far as forms went, an almost continuous armistice for the space of eight years, its effect was not so much to stop fighting as to limit its scale. In reality the years of nominal truce were a period of harassing warfare in Brittany, the Calais march, Gascony, and the narrow seas, which even the ravages of the Black Death did not stop.

In Brittany affairs were in a wretched condition. The nominal duke, John, was a child brought up in England under the guardianship of Edward III. Edward was not in a position to spend either men or money upon Brittany. As an easy way of discharging his obligations to his ward, he handed over the duchy to Sir Thomas Dagworth, the governor, who maintained the war from local resources and had a free hand as regards his choice of agents and measures. In return for power to appropriate to his own purposes the revenues of the duchy, Dagworth undertook the custody of the fortresses, the payment of the troops, the expenses of the administration, and the conduct of the war. In short, Brittany was leased out to him as a speculation, like a farm left derelict of husbandmen after the Black Death. Dagworth sublet to the highest bidders the lordships, fortresses, and towns of Brittany. He established at various centres of his influence a military adventurer, whose chief business was to make war support war and, moreover, bring in a good profit. The consequences were disastrous. Dagworth's captains were for the most part Englishmen, men of character, energy, and resources, but utterly without scruples and with no other ambition than to raise a good revenue and maintain themselves in authority. The most famous of them were members of gentle but obscure houses, whose poverty debarred them from the ordinary avenues to fame and fortune, and whose vigour and ability made good use of their exceptional positions. Two Cheshire kinsmen, Hugh Calveley and Robert Knowles, thus won, each for himself, a place in history. Some of the adventurers were of obscurer origin, some were foreigners, German, French, or Netherlandish, and some few Breton gentlemen of Montfort's faction. Of these Crockart, the German, and Raoul de Caours, the Breton, were the most famous.

The results of the system bore heavily on the Breton peasantry. Each lord of a castle levied systematic blackmail on the neighbouring parishes. These payments, called ransoms, were exacted as a condition of protection. The governor, though severely maltreating those who neglected to pay their ransom, did little to save his dependants from the ravages of the partisans of Charles of Blois. Despite such misdeeds, the war of partisans was brightened by many feats of heroism. The friends of Charles of Blois disregarded the truce and waged war as well as they could. Among them was already conspicuous the son of a nobleman of the neighbourhood of Dinan, the ugly, able, restless Bertrand du Guesclin, whose enterprise and valour won for him a great local reputation. In 1350 Dagworth was slain. The history of the following years is not to be found in the acts of his successor, Sir Walter Bentley, but in the private deeds of daring of the heroes of both sides. Conspicuous among these is the famous Battle of the Thirty, well known from the detailed narrative of Froissart, and the stirring verses of a contemporary French poem. This fight was fought on March 27, 1351, between thirty Breton gentlemen of the Blois faction, drawn from the garrison of Josselin, and a less noble but even more strenuous band of thirty English and other adventurers of the Montfort party, from the garrison of Ploermel, seven miles to the east. Beaumanoir, the commandant at Josselin, had been moved to indignation at the cruel treatment of peasants who had refused to pay ransom by Robert Bembro, the commander of Ploermel. He challenged the tyrant to combat, and thirty heroes of each party fought out their quarrel at a spot marked by the half-way oak, equidistant from the two garrisons. After a long struggle, in which Bembro was slain, victory fell to the men from Josselin. Among the vanquished were Knowles, Calveley, and Crockart. This fight had absolutely no influence on the fortune of the war.