father of the little Roger Mortimer whom nothing but the uncertain lives of the Prince of Wales and the sickly Richard of Bordeaux separated from the English throne.  Hereditary antagonism accentuated incompatibility of personal interests.  The ancient feuds of the houses of Mortimer and Lancaster still lived on in the hostility of their representatives.  The understanding between the Prince of Wales and the Earl of March seems to have been complete.  They had as their most powerful supporters the outraged dignitaries of the Church, who saw themselves kept out of office and threatened in their temporalities by the dominant faction.  William of Wykeham, who had been the guardian of the Earl of March during his long minority, was the most experienced and wary of the clerical opposition to the lawyers and courtiers of the Lancaster faction.  He had an eager and enthusiastic backer in the young and high-born Bishop of London, William Courtenay, the son of the Earl of Devon, and through his mother, Margaret Bohun, a great-grandson of Edward I. Office and descent combined to make Bishop Courtenay the custodian of the constitutional tradition, which was equally strong among the great baronial houses of ancient descent and such highly placed ecclesiastics as were zealous for the nation as well as for their order.  His support was the more necessary since Simon of Sudbury, who in 1375 succeeded Whittlesea on the throne of St. Augustine, was a weak and time-serving politician.

The storm, which had long been brewing, burst at last in the parliament of April, 1376.  Of the acts of this memorable assembly, famous as the Good Parliament, and of the other concluding troubles of the reign we are fortunate in possessing not only copious official records, but a minute and highly dramatic account from the pen of a St. Alban’s monk, who, alone of the monastic chroniclers of his age, represented the spirit which, in the days of Matthew Paris, made the great Hertfordshire abbey so famous a school of historiography.[1]

    [1] Chron.  Angliae, 1328-88, ed.  E.M.  Thompson (Rolls Ser.). 
    Compare Mr. S. Armitage-Smith’s John of Gaunt for an
    unfavourable estimate of its value.

The Good Parliament showed from the beginning a strong animosity against the courtiers.  The time was not yet come when the commons could take the initiative, or supply leaders from its own ranks, and even among the commons capacity was unequally divided.  Authority and influence were exclusively with the knights of the shire, and the citizens and burgesses were content to allow the country gentry to speak and act in their name.  The knights of the shire demanded that, in accordance with the precedent of 1373, a committee of magnates should be associated with them in determining the policy to be adopted.  The lords spiritual and temporal were as eager as the knights to attack the government, and a committee, of which the leading spirits included the Earl of March and the Bishop