Edward wrathfully laid the usurpations of the new primate before parliament, and forced Peckham to withdraw all the canons dealing with secular matters, and particularly those which concerned the Great Charter.  The king set up the counter-claims of the State against the pretensions of the Church, and the estates passed the statute of Mortmain of 1279 as the layman’s answer to the canons of Reading.  Like most of Edward’s laws the statute of Mortmain was based on earlier precedents.  The wealth of the Church had long inspired statesmen with alarm, and a true follower of St. Francis like Peckham was specially convinced of the need of reducing the clergy to apostolic poverty.  By the new law all grants of land to ecclesiastical corporations were expressly prohibited, under the penalty of the land being forfeited to its supreme lord.  The statute was not a mere political weapon of the moment.  It had a wider importance as a step in the development of Edward’s anti-feudal policy, and may be regarded as a counterpart of the inquest into franchises, and as a means of protecting the State as well as of disciplining the Church.  A corporation never died, and never paid reliefs or wardships.  Its property never escheated for want of heirs, and, as scutages were passing out of fashion, ecclesiastics were less valuable to the king in times of war than lay lords.  The recent exigencies of the Welsh war had emphasised the need of strengthening the military defences of the crown, and the new statute secured this by preventing the further devolution of lands into the dead hand of the Church.  But all medieval laws were rather enunciations of an ideal than measures which practical statesmen aimed at carrying out in detail.  The statute of Mortmain hardly stayed the creation of fresh monasteries and colleges, or the further endowment of old ones.  All that was necessary for the pious founder was to obtain a royal dispensation from the operation of the statute.  There was little need to fear that the new law would stand in the way of the power of the ecclesiastical estate.

A more distinct challenge to the Church was provoked by a further aggression of Peckham in 1281.  In that year the primate summoned a council at Lambeth, wherein he sought to withdraw from the cognisance of the civil courts all suits concerning patronage and the disposition of the personal effects of ecclesiastics.  To extend the jurisdiction of the forum ecclesiasticum was the surest way of exciting the hostility of the common lawyers and the king.  Once more Edward annulled the proceedings of a council, and once more the submission of Peckham saved the land from a conflict which might have assumed the proportions of Becket’s struggle against Henry II.  Four years later Edward pressed his advantage still further by the royal ordinance of 1285, called Circumspecte agatis, which, though accepting the supremacy of the Church courts within their own sphere, narrowly defined the limits