Grave difficulties still beset the government, and in January, 1377, John of Gaunt had to face another parliament.  Every precaution was taken to pack the commons with his partisans.  Of the knights of the shire of the Good Parliament only eight were members of its successor,[1] while in the place of the imprisoned De la Mare, Sir Thomas Hungerford, steward of the Duke of Lancaster, was chosen Speaker, on this occasion by that very name.  A packed committee of lords was assigned to advise the commons.  In these circumstances it was not difficult to procure the reversal of the acts against Alice Perrers and Latimer, and the grant of a poll tax of a groat a head.  The only measure of conciliation was a general pardon, a pretext for which was found in the jubilee of the king’s accession.  From this William of Wykeham was expressly excepted.

    [1] Return of Members of Parliament, pt. i., 193-97; Chron. 
    Angliae, p. 112, understates the case.

The convocation of Canterbury proved less accommodating than the parliament.  Under the able leadership of Bishop Courtenay, it took up the cause of the Bishop of Winchester, refused to join in a grant of money until he had taken his place in convocation, and, triumphing at last over the time-serving of Sudbury and the hesitation of Wykeham himself, persuaded the bishop to join their deliberations.  Lancaster met the opposition of convocation by calling to his aid the Oxford doctor whom the clergy had already begun to look upon as the enemy of the privileges of their order.  Wycliffe was not as yet under suspicion of direct dogmatic heresy.  He had not yet clothed himself in the armour of his Balliol predecessor, Fitzralph, to wage war against the mendicant orders.  But he had already formulated his theory that dominion was founded on grace, had declared that the pope had no right to excommunicate any one, or if he had that any simple priest could absolve the culprit from his sentence, and he had shown a hatred so bitter of clerical worldliness and clerical property that he was looked upon as the special enemy of the great land-holding prelates and of the “possessioner” monks, whose lands, he maintained, could be resumed by the representatives of the donors at their will.  The strenuous advocate for reducing the clergy to apostolic poverty was not likely to find favour among the prelates.  Wycliffe’s only clerical supporters at this stage were the mendicant friars, from whose characteristic opinions as regards “evangelical poverty” he never at any time swerved.[1] He was, however, eloquent and zealous, and he had a following.  Fear either of Wycliffe or of his mendicant allies forced the bishops to take decisive action.  Even Sudbury awoke, “as from deep sleep".[2] The duke’s dangerous supporter was summoned to answer before the bishops at St. Paul’s.