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 praemunire 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.