The power of the Houses seemed indeed as high as ever; great statutes were passed.  Those of Provisors and Praemunire settled the relations of England to the Roman Court.  That of Treason in 1352 defined that crime and its penalties.  That of the Staples in 1353 regulated the conditions of foreign trade and the privileges of the merchant gilds which conducted it.  But side by side with these exertions of influence we note a series of steady encroachments by the Crown on the power of the Houses.  If their petitions were granted, they were often altered in the royal ordinance which professed to embody them.  A plan of demanding supplies for three years at once rendered the annual assembly of Parliament less necessary.  Its very existence was threatened by the convocation in 1352 and 1353 of occasional councils with but a single knight from every shire and a single burgess from a small number of the greater towns, which acted as Parliament and granted subsidies.

[Sidenote:  The Baronage and the Church]

What aided Edward above all in eluding or defying the constitutional restrictions on arbitrary taxation, as well as in these more insidious attempts to displace the Parliament, was the lessening of the check which the Baronage and the Church had till now supplied.  The same causes which had long been reducing the number of the greater lords who formed the upper house went steadily on.  Under Edward the Second little more than seventy were commonly summoned to Parliament; little more than forty were summoned under Edward the Third, and of these the bulk were now bound to the Crown, partly by their employment on its service, partly by their interest in the continuance of the war.  The heads of the Baronage too were members of the royal family.  Edward had carried out on a far wider scale than before the policy which had been more or less adhered to from the days of Henry the Third, that of gathering up in the hands of the royal house all the greater heritages of the land.  The Black Prince was married to Joan of Kent, the heiress of Edward the First’s younger son, Earl Edmund of Woodstock.  His marriage with the heiress of the Earl of Ulster brought to the king’s second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, a great part of the possessions of the de Burghs.  Later on the possessions of the house of Bohun passed by like matches to his youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, and to his grandson, Henry of Lancaster.  But the greatest English heritage fell to Edward’s third living son, John of Gaunt as he was called from his birth at Ghent during his father’s Flemish campaign.  Originally created Earl of Richmond, the death of his father-in-law, Henry of Lancaster, and of Henry’s eldest daughter, raised John in his wife’s right to the Dukedom of Lancaster and the Earldoms of Derby, Leicester, and Lincoln.  But while the baronage were thus bound to the Crown, they drifted more and more into an hostility with the Church which in time disabled the clergy from acting as a check on it.