commons, during this reign, showed a laudable zeal for
liberty in their transactions with the crown, their efforts against the
church were still more extraordinary, and seemed to anticipate very
much the spirit which became so general in little more than a century
afterwards. I know that the credit of these passages rests entirely on
one ancient historian;[***] but that historian was contemporary, was a
clergyman, and it was contrary to the interests of his order to preserve
the memory of such transactions, much more to forge precedents which
posterity might some time be tempted to imitate.

* Cotton, p. 454.

** Rymer, vol. viii. p. 462.

*** Walsingham.

This is a truth so evident, that the most likely way of accounting
for the silence of the records on this head, is by supposing that the
authority of some churchmen was so great as to procure a razure, with
regard to these circumstances, which the indiscretion of one of that
order has happily preserved to us.

In the sixth of Henry, the commons, who had been required to grant
supplies, proposed in plain terms to the king, that he should seize all
the temporalities of the church, and employ them as a perpetual fund
to serve the exigencies of the state. They insisted that the clergy
possessed a third of the lands of the kingdom; that they contributed
nothing to the public burdens; and that their riches tended only to
disqualify them from performing their ministerial functions with proper
zeal and attention. When this address was presented, the archbishop of
Canterbury, who then attended the king, objected that the clergy, though
they went not in person to the wars, sent their vassals and tenants
in all cases of necessity; while at the same time they themselves, who
staid at home, were employed night and day in offering up their prayers
for the happiness and prosperity of the state. The speaker smiled, and
answered without reserve, that he thought the prayers of the church
but a very slender supply. The archbishop, however, prevailed in the
dispute; the king discouraged the application of the commons; and the
lords rejected the bill which the lower house had framed for stripping
the church of her revenues.[*]

* Walsing. p. 371. Ypod. Neust. p. 563.

The commons were not discouraged by this repulse: in the eleventh of the
king, they returned to the charge with more zeal than before: they
made a calculation of all the ecclesiastical revenues, w