Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/159

 At the outset, Parliament was strongly and unmistakably on his side. Until misfortunes abroad and corruption at home brought discredit upon Lancaster and his colleagues, we hear little of opposition in the Commons. It was not likely that the knights and burgesses would protest against the heavy burdens laid upon the Church, though they were very stiff when it came to a question of taxing wool and movables. Doubtless there would be vigorous remonstrances in the representative chamber when the King claimed increasing dues on the raw material of Norwich fustians, Sudbury baize, Kentish broad-cloths, Colchester sayes and serges, Kendal cloth, Devonshire kerseys, Welsh friezes, Taunton serges, and the various cloths produced in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, in Sussex, Berkshire, and Hampshire. But, when the demand was addressed to the rulers of the Church, every other interest in the kingdom endorsed it without hesitation.

In the House of Lords the clergy had no lack of spokesmen, who protested bitterly against the King's demands. The levy of 1371 must have appeared to the majority of Englishmen as evidence of a new departure against the national Church, if not as a first step towards wholesale confiscation. A special tax was laid upon all lands which had come into mortmain since 1292; in addition to which the tenth already paid by the Church, from which the less wealthy benefices had hitherto been exempt, was now made of universal application.

These taxes would produce a large revenue; and though the wars sucked up money like a quicksand,