Meanwhile the Duke’s unscrupulous tampering with elections had packed the Parliament of 1377 with his adherents.  The work of the Good Parliament was undone, and the Commons petitioned for the restoration of all who had been impeached by their predecessors.  The needs of the treasury were met by a novel form of taxation.  To the earlier land-tax, to the tax on personality which dated from the Saladin Tithe, to the customs duties which had grown into importance in the last two reigns, was now added a tax which reached every person in the realm, a poll-tax of a groat a head.  In this tax were sown the seeds of future trouble, but when the Parliament broke up in March the Duke’s power seemed completely secured.  Hardly three months later it was wholly undone.  In June Edward the Third died in a dishonoured old age, robbed on his death-bed even of his rings by the mistress to whom he clung, and the accession of his grandson, Richard the Second, changed the whole face of affairs.  The Duke withdrew from Court, and sought a reconciliation with the party opposed to him.  The men of the Good Parliament surrounded the new king, and a Parliament which assembled in October took vigorously up its work.  Peter de la Mare was released from prison and replaced in the chair of the House of Commons.  The action of the Lower House indeed was as trenchant and comprehensive as that of the Good Parliament itself.  In petition after petition the Commons demanded the confirmation of older rights and the removal of modern abuses.  They complained of administrative wrongs such as the practice of purveyance, of abuses of justice, of the oppressions of officers of the exchequer and of the forest, of the ill state of prisons, of the customs of “maintenance” and “livery” by which lords extended their protection to shoals of disorderly persons and overawed the courts by means of them.  Amid ecclesiastical abuses they noted the state of the Church courts, and the neglect of the laws of Provisors.  They demanded that the annual assembly of Parliament, which had now become customary, should be defined by law, and that bills once sanctioned by the Crown should be forthwith turned into statutes without further amendment or change on the part of the royal Council.  With even greater boldness they laid hands on the administration itself.  They not only demanded that the evil counsellors of the last reign should be removed, and that the treasurer of the subsidy on wool should account for its expenditure to the lords, but that the royal Council should be named in Parliament, and chosen from members of either estate of the realm.  Though a similar request for the nomination of the officers of the royal household was refused, their main demand was granted.  It was agreed that the great officers of state, the chancellor, treasurer, and barons of exchequer should be named by the lords in Parliament, and removed from their offices during the king’s “tender years” only on the advice of the lords.  The pressure