What rent the ruling classes in twain was the growing pressure of the war.  The nobles and knighthood of the country, already half ruined by the rise in the labour market and the attitude of the peasantry, were pressed harder than ever by the repeated subsidies which were called for by the continuance of the struggle.  In the hour of their distress they cast their eyes greedily—­as in the Norman and Angevin days—­on the riches of the Church.  Never had her wealth been greater.  Out of a population of some three millions the ecclesiastics numbered between twenty and thirty thousand.  Wild tales of their riches floated about the country.  They were said to own in landed property alone more than a third of the soil, while their “spiritualities” in dues and offerings amounted to twice the king’s revenue.  Exaggerated as such statements were, the wealth of the Church was really great; but even more galling to the nobles was its influence in the royal councils.  The feudal baronage, flushed with a new pride by its victories at Crecy and Poitiers, looked with envy and wrath at the throng of bishops around the council-board, and attributed to their love of peace the errors and sluggishness which had caused, as they held, the disasters of the war.  To rob the Church of wealth and of power became the aim of a great baronial party.

[Sidenote:  Weakness of the Church]

The efforts of the baronage indeed would have been fruitless had the spiritual power of the Church remained as of old.  But the clergy were rent by their own dissensions.  The higher prelates were busy with the cares of political office, and severed from the lower priesthood by the scandalous inequality between the revenues of the wealthier ecclesiastics and the “poor parson” of the country.  A bitter hatred divided the secular clergy from the regular; and this strife went fiercely on in the Universities.  Fitz-Ralf, the Chancellor of Oxford, attributed to the friars the decline which was already being felt in the number of academical students, and the University checked by statute their practice of admitting mere children into their order.  The clergy too at large shared in the discredit and unpopularity of the Papacy.  Though they suffered more than any other class from the exactions of Avignon, they were bound more and more to the Papal cause.  The very statutes which would have protected them were practically set aside by the treacherous diplomacy of the Crown.  At home and abroad the Roman See was too useful for the king to come to any actual breach with it.  However much Edward might echo the bold words of his Parliament, he shrank from an open contest which would have added the Papacy to his many foes, and which would at the same time have robbed him of his most effective means of wresting aids from the English clergy by private arrangement with the Roman court.  Rome indeed was brought to waive its alleged right of appointing foreigners to English livings.  But a compromise was arranged between the Pope and