n, without any business having been
transacted, and so all our affairs would have been ruined, we
dissembled, as was our duty, and allowed the pretended statute to be
sealed." For more than two years he did not venture to face a
parliament, but the next gathering of the estates in April, 1343,
repealed the offensive acts of 1341. Parliament was so reluctant to
ratify the king's high-handed action, that he did not venture to ask it
for any extraordinary grant of money. The only other important act of
this parliament was a petition from lords and commons, urging the king
to check the claims of a French pope, friendly to the "tyrant of
France," to exercise ever-increasing rights of patronage over English
benefices. The anti-clerical tide was still flowing.

Before parliament met in 1343, the French war had been renewed on
another pretext. A new source of trouble arose in a disputed succession
to the duchy of Brittany. The duke John III., the grandson of John II.
and Edward I.'s sister Beatrice, died in April, 1341. He left no
legitimate children, and his succession was claimed by his half-brother,
John of Montfort, and his niece Joan of Penthievre. Montfort, the son of
Duke Arthur II. by his second wife, had inherited from his mother the
Norman county of Montfort l'Amaury, which became her possession as the
representative on the spindle side of the line of Simon de Montfort the
Albigensian crusader. Joan was the daughter of Guy, John III.'s brother
of the full blood, in whose favour the great county of
Penthievre-Treguier, including the whole of the north coast of the duchy
from the river of Morlaix to within a few miles of the Rance, had been
dissociated from the demesne and reconstituted as an appanage.[1] The
heiress of Penthievre thus ruled directly over nearly a sixth of
Brittany, and her power was further strengthened by her marriage with
Charles of Blois, who, though a younger son, enjoyed great influence as
the sister's son of Philip VI., and also by reason of his simple,
saintly, honourable, and martial character. The house of Penthievre not
only stood to Brittany as the house of Lancaster stood to England, as
the natural head of the higher nobility; it also enjoyed the favour and
protection of the French king, who was ever anxious to find friends
among the chief sub-tenants of his great vassals. Against so formidable
an opponent John of Montfort could only secure his rights by
promptitude. Accordingly he made his