[Sidenote:  Progress of Parliament]

But with the difficulties of the Crown the weight of the two Houses made itself more and more sensibly felt.  The almost incessant warfare which had gone on since the accession of Edward the Third consolidated and developed the power which they had gained from the dissensions of his father’s reign.  The need of continual grants brought about an assembly of Parliament year by year, and the subsidies that were accorded to the king showed the potency of the financial engine which the Crown could now bring into play.  In a single year the Parliament granted twenty thousand sacks, or half the wool of the realm.  Two years later the Commons voted an aid of thirty thousand sacks.  In 1339 the barons granted the tenth sheep and fleece and lamb.  The clergy granted two tenths in one year, and a tenth for three years in the next.  But with each supply some step was made to greater political influence.  In his earlier years Edward showed no jealousy of the Parliament.  His policy was to make the struggle with France a national one by winning for it the sympathy of the people at large; and with this view he not only published in the County Courts the efforts he had made for peace, but appealed again and again for the sanction and advice of Parliament in his enterprise.  In 1331 he asked the Estates whether they would prefer negotiation or war:  in 1338 he declared that his expedition to Flanders was made by the assent of the Lords and at the prayer of the Commons.  The part of the last in public affairs grew greater in spite of their own efforts to remain obscure.  From the opening of the reign a crowd of enactments for the regulation of trade, whether wise or unwise, shows the influence of the burgesses.  But the final division of Parliament into two Houses, a change which was completed by 1341, necessarily increased the weight of the Commons.  The humble trader who shrank from counselling the Crown in great matters of policy gathered courage as he found himself sitting side by side with the knights of the shire.  It was at the moment when this great change was being brought about that the disasters of the war spurred the Parliament to greater activity.  The enormous grants of 1340 were bought by the king’s assent to statutes which provided remedies for grievances of which the Commons complained.  The most important of these put an end to the attempts which Edward had made like his grandfather to deal with the merchant class apart from the Houses.  No charge or aid was henceforth to be made save by the common assent of the Estates assembled in Parliament.  The progress of the next year was yet more important.  The strife of the king with his ministers, the foremost of whom was Archbishop Stratford, ended in the Primate’s refusal to make answer to the royal charges save in full Parliament, and in the assent of the king to a resolution of the Lords that none of their number, whether ministers of the Crown or no, should be brought