Page:The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe Volume 3.djvu/435

 nuns, should equal the number of the twelve apostles and seventy-two disciples. The order of these was, according to the description of St. Paul the apostle [Col. i.], "Eat not, taste not, touch not," &c.; to eat no flesh, to wear no linen, to touch no money, etc.

About Michaelmas, the same year, the king began his parliament at Leicester, above mentioned. In which parliament the commons put up their bill again, which they had put up before, in the eleventh year of Henry IV.; that temporalties, disorderly wasted by men of the church, might be converted and employed to the use of the king, of his earls and knights, and to the relief of the poor people, as is before recited; in fear of which bill, lest the king would give thereunto any comfortable audience, as testify Robert Fabian and other writers, certain of the prelates and other head men of the church, put the king in mind of to claim his right in France: whereupon Henry Chichesly, archbishop of Canterbury, made a long and solemn oration before the king to persuade him to the same, offering the king, in behalf of the clergy, great and notable sums: by reason whereof, saith Fabian, the bill was again put off, and the king set his mind for the recovery of the same: so that soon after he sent his letters and messengers to the French king concerning that matter, and received from him again answer of derision, with a pipe of tennis-balls, as some record, sent from the Dauphin, for him to play with at home. Whereby the king's mind was incensed the more toward that voyage; who, when furnishing himself with strength and armour, with powder and shot, and gunstones, to play with in France, and with other artillery for that purpose convenient, so set over into France, where he got Harfleur, with divers other towns and castles in Normandy and Picardy, and, at Agincourt, had a great victory over the French army, they being counted but seven thousand, by pricking sharp stakes before them, &c. After that he won Caen, Touques Rouen, with other towns besides, as Meldune, or Melione, and married with Katharine, the French king's daughter. And yet, notwithstanding, he made his voyage again the third time into France, where at length, at Blois, he fell sick and died: concerning all which voyages, because they are sufficiently discoursed in Fabian, Hall, and other chronographers, referring therefore the reader unto them, I will turn my story to other matters of the church more effectual.

I declared a little before, how, by the occasion of queen Anne, who was a Bohemian, and married to king Richard II., the Bohemians coming thereby to the knowledge of Wickliff's books here in England,