The victory of the estates of 1341 was too complete to last.  For a medieval king to hand over the business of government to a nominated ministry was in substance a return to the state of things in 1258 or 1312.  Edward was not the sort of man to endure the thraldom that his father and great-grandfather had both found intolerable.  Even at the moment of sealing the statute, he and his ministers protested that they were not bound to observe laws contrary to the constitution of the realm.  Five months later, on October 1, 1341, the king issued letters, revoking the laws of the previous session.  “We have never,” he impudently declared, “really given our consent to the aforesaid pretended statute.  But inasmuch as our rejecting it would have dissolved parliament in confusion, without any business having been transacted, and so all our affairs would have been ruined, we dissembled, as was our duty, and allowed the pretended statute to be sealed.”  For more than two years he did not venture to face a parliament, but the next gathering of the estates in April, 1343, repealed the offensive acts of 1341.  Parliament was so reluctant to ratify the king’s high-handed action, that he did not venture to ask it for any extraordinary grant of money.  The only other important act of this parliament was a petition from lords and commons, urging the king to check the claims of a French pope, friendly to the “tyrant of France,” to exercise ever-increasing rights of patronage over English benefices.  The anti-clerical tide was still flowing.

Before parliament met in 1343, the French war had been renewed on another pretext.  A new source of trouble arose in a disputed succession to the duchy of Brittany.  The duke John III., the grandson of John II. and Edward I.’s sister Beatrice, died in April, 1341.  He left no legitimate children, and his succession was claimed by his half-brother, John of Montfort, and his niece Joan of Penthievre.  Montfort, the son of Duke Arthur II. by his second wife, had inherited from his mother the Norman county of Montfort l’Amaury, which became her possession as the representative on the spindle side of the line of Simon de Montfort the Albigensian crusader.  Joan was the daughter of Guy, John III.’s brother of the full blood, in whose favour the great county of Penthievre-Treguier, including the whole of the north coast of the duchy from the river of Morlaix to within a few miles of the Rance, had been dissociated from the demesne and reconstituted as an appanage.[1] The heiress of Penthievre thus ruled directly over nearly a sixth of Brittany, and her power was further strengthened by her marriage with Charles of Blois, who, though a younger son, enjoyed great influence as the sister’s son of Philip VI., and also by reason of his simple, saintly, honourable, and martial character.  The house of Penthievre not only stood to Brittany as the house of Lancaster stood to England, as the natural head of the higher nobility;