e, if he were asked now,
being a monk, and having professed and vowed
solemnly wilful poverty, he can with conscience
keep a deanery and three or four benefices."--Mason
to Petre: _MS. Germany_, bundle 16, _Mary_, State
Paper Office. It is not clear who the offender was.
Perhaps it was Weston, Dean of Westminster and
Prolocutor of Convocation.]

They demanded, therefore, first, that if a statute was brought into
parliament for the assurance of the church estates to the present
possessors, nothing should be allowed to pass prejudicial to their
claims "on lands, tenements, pensions, or tythe rents, which had
appertained to bishops, or other ecclesiastical persons."

They demanded, secondly, the repeal of the Statute of Mortmain, and
afterwards the abolition of lay impropriations, the {p.177}
punishment of heretics, the destruction of all the English
Prayer-books and Bibles, the revival of the act _De Haeretico
Comburendo_, the re-establishment of the episcopal courts, the
restoration of the legislative functions of Convocation, and the
exemption of the clergy from the authority of secular magistrates.

Finally, they required that the church should be restored absolutely
to its ancient rights, immunities, and privileges; that no Premunire
should issue against a bishop until he had first received notice and
warning; that the judges should define "a special doctrine of
Premunire," and that the Statutes of Provisors should not be wrested
from their meaning.[402]

[Footnote 402: Demands of the Lower House of
Convocation, December, 1554; printed in Wilkins's
_Concilia_.]

The petition expressed the views of Gardiner, and was probably drawn
under his direction. Had the alienated property been no more than the
estates of the suppressed abbeys, the secular clergy would have
acquiesced without difficulty in the existing disposition of it. But
the benefices impropriated to the abbeys which had been sold or
granted with the lands, they looked on as their own; the cathedral
chapters and the bishops' sees, which had suffered from the second
locust flight under Edward, formed part of the local Anglican Church:
and Gardiner and his brother prelates declared that, if the pope chose
to set aside the canons, and permit the robbing of the religious