the Crown in which both united in the spoliation and enslavement of the Church.  The voice of chapters, of monks, of ecclesiastical patrons, went henceforth for nothing in the election of bishops or abbots or the nomination to livings in the gift of churchmen.  The Crown recommended those whom it chose to the Pope, and the Pope nominated them to see or cure of souls.  The treasuries of both King and Pope profited by the arrangement; but we can hardly wonder that after a betrayal such as this the clergy placed little trust in statutes or royal protection, and bowed humbly before the claims of Rome.

[Sidenote:  Its Worldliness]

But what weakened the clergy most was their severance from the general sympathies of the nation, their selfishness, and the worldliness of their temper.  Immense as their wealth was, they bore as little as they could of the common burthens of the realm.  They were still resolute to assert their exemption from the common justice of the land, though the mild punishments of the bishops’ courts carried as little dismay as ever into the mass of disorderly clerks.  But privileged as they thus held themselves against all interference from the lay world without them, they carried on a ceaseless interference with the affairs of this lay world through their control over wills, contracts and divorces.  No figure was better known or more hated than the summoner who enforced the jurisdiction and levied the dues of their courts.  By their directly religious offices they penetrated into the very heart of the social life about them.  But powerful as they were, their moral authority was fast passing away.  The wealthier churchmen with their curled hair and hanging sleeves aped the costume of the knightly society from which they were drawn and to which they still really belonged.  We see the general impression of their worldliness in Chaucer’s pictures of the hunting monk and the courtly prioress with her love-motto on her brooch.  The older religious orders in fact had sunk into mere landowners, while the enthusiasm of the friars had in great part died away and left a crowd of impudent mendicants behind it.  Wyclif could soon with general applause denounce them as sturdy beggars, and declare that “the man who gives alms to a begging friar is ipso facto excommunicate.”

[Sidenote:  Advance of the Commons]

It was this weakness of the Baronage and the Church, and the consequent withdrawal of both as represented in the temporal and spiritual Estates of the Upper House from the active part which they had taken till now in checking the Crown that brought the Lower House to the front.  The Knight of the Shire was now finally joined with the Burgess of the Town to form the Third Estate of the realm:  and this union of the trader and the country gentleman gave a vigour and weight to the action of the Commons which their House could never have acquired had it remained as elsewhere a mere gathering of burgesses.  But