[Sidenote:  Edward and the Parliament]

But the strife between employers and employed was not the only rift which was opening in the social structure.  Suffering and defeat had stripped off the veil which hid from the nation the shallow and selfish temper of Edward the Third.  His profligacy was now bringing him to a premature old age.  He was sinking into the tool of his ministers and his mistresses.  The glitter and profusion of his court, his splendid tournaments, his feasts, his Table Round, his new order of chivalry, the exquisite chapel of St. Stephen whose frescoed walls were the glory of his palace at Westminster, the vast keep which crowned the hill of Windsor, had ceased to throw their glamour round a king who tricked his Parliament and swindled his creditors.  Edward paid no debts.  He had ruined the wealthiest bankers of Florence by a cool act of bankruptcy.  The sturdier Flemish burghers only wrested payment from him by holding his royal person as their security.  His own subjects fared no better than foreigners.  The prerogative of “purveyance” by which the king in his progresses through the country had the right of first purchase of all that he needed at fair market price became a galling oppression in the hands of a bankrupt king who was always moving from place to place.  “When men hear of your coming,” Archbishop Islip wrote to Edward, “everybody at once for sheer fear sets about hiding or eating or getting rid of their geese and chickens or other possessions that they may not utterly lose them through your arrival.  The purveyors and servants of your court seize on men and horses in the midst of their field work.  They seize on the very bullocks that are at plough or at sowing, and force them to work for two or three days at a time without a penny of payment.  It is no wonder that men make dole and murmur at your approach, for, as the truth is in God, I myself, whenever I hear a rumour of it, be I at home or in chapter or in church or at study, nay if I am saying mass, even I in my own person tremble in every limb.”  But these irregular exactions were little beside the steady pressure of taxation.  Even in the years of peace fifteenths and tenths, subsidies on wool and subsidies on leather, were demanded and obtained from Parliament; and with the outbreak of war the royal demands became heavier and more frequent.  As failure followed failure the expenses of each campaign increased an ineffectual attempt to relieve Rochelle cost nearly a million; the march of John of Gaunt through France utterly drained the royal treasury.  Nor were these legal supplies all that the king drew from the nation.  He had repudiated his pledge to abstain from arbitrary taxation of imports and exports.  He sold monopolies to the merchants in exchange for increased customs.  He wrested supplies from the clergy by arrangements with the bishops or the Pope.  There were signs that Edward was longing to rid himself of the control of Parliament altogether.