sual and emphatic manner, the three estates agreed that the
pope should be resisted; and an act passed "that all persons suing at
the court of Rome, and obtaining thence any bulls, instruments,
sentences of excommunication which touched the king, or were against
him, his regality, or his realm, and they which brought the same within
the realm, or received the same, or made thereof notification, or any
other execution whatever, within the realm or without, they, their
notaries, procurators, maintainers and abettors, fautors and
counsellors, should be put out of the king's protection, and their lands
and tenements, goods and chattels, be forfeited."

[Sidenote: The pope yields.]

The resolute attitude of the country terminated the struggle. Boniface
prudently yielded, and for the moment, and indeed for ever under this
especial form, the wave of papal encroachment was rolled back. The
temper which had been roused in the contest might perhaps have carried
the nation further. The liberties of the crown had been asserted
successfully. The analogous liberties of the church might have
followed; and other channels, too, might have been cut off, through
which the papal exchequer fed itself on English blood. But at this
crisis the anti-Roman policy was arrested in its course by another
movement, which turned the current of suspicion, and frightened back the
nation to conservatism.

[Sidenote: Analogous agitation among the laity against the corruption of
the clergy.]

While the crown and the parliament had been engaged with the pope, the
undulations of the dispute had penetrated down among the body of the
people, and an agitation had been commenced or an analogous kind against
the spiritual authorities at home. The parliament had lamented that the
duties of the religious houses were left unfulfilled, in consequence of
the extortions of their superiors abroad. The people, who were equally
convinced of the neglect of duty, adopted an interpretation of the
phenomenon less favourable to the clergy, and attributed it to the
temptations of worldliness, and the self-indulgence generated by
enormous wealth.

[Sidenote: John Wycliffe.]

This form of discontent found its exponent in John Wycliffe, the great
forerunner of the Reformation, whose austere figure stands out above the
crowd of notables in English history, with an outline not unlike that of
another forerunner of a greater change.

[Sidenote: His early career.]

The early