which (according to the harangue of Sir Philip de Poitiers at the Estates-
General at Tours in 1484) was to pray for, counsel, and exhort the other
estates, as the nobility’s function was to protect clergy and people by
arms, and the people’s ‘to nourish and sustain the nobles and clergy
with payments and produce’.^224 Churchmen themselves were divided
into distinct ‘orders’ and ‘grades’, each with a different function. In
the thirteenth century Aquinas discussed the virtues and vices peculiar
to different estates of men (speciales status hominum) as shown by
their actions, asking whether a philosopher’s life was better than a
politician’s, a monk’s than a bishop’s; he concluded that the Church
depended on the diversity of offices and states (officiis et statibus) with-
in it, the active status praelatorumas much as the contemplative status
religiosorum.^225
It was the actions of prelates, and the laity’s resentment at the privi-
leges of the wealthier churchmen which prelates defended, that added to
the king’s traditional concern for the status ecclesiaea determination to
set limits to the clergy’s state. At a parliament at Carlisle in 1307 ‘the
earls, barons and all the community of the land’ (including on this
occasion proctors of the lesser clergy) petitioned Edward I against the
papal provision of aliens to English benefices ‘in abasement of God’s
law, & undoing of the state (l’estat) of holy Church... & in subversion
of the whole state of the Realm’: the right of presentation to livings
should rest with the king and the lords whose ancestors had founded the
Church in England ‘in all these states (estats) of prelacy’.^226 The com-
plaint against this and other papal exactions was presented ‘for the state
of the royal crown and of the said king’s lands of Scotland, Wales and
Ireland, and for the whole community of England’, and a statute,
directed principally against the draining abroad of the endowments of
religious houses, which should have relieved the sick and the poor and
maintained prayers for the founders, was made for ‘the common utility
of the people of our realm, and for the betterment of the state of our
whole lordship’.^227 At the end of the fourteenth century Wyclif and his
followers placed on the king a general duty of seeing that priests did not
‘pass their state in God’s law’ and seek to do the offices of knights: only
the ‘worship of lords’ was properly ‘grounded in states’, while the
‘worship of priests’ was ‘grounded in virtues’ and in preaching, con-
templation, and prayer.^228 The clergy’s landed wealth remained virtually
intact till the Reformation, but French ordinances beginning in 1275
Estates of people 237(^224) Jehan Masselin, Journal des États Généraux de France tenus à Tours en 1484, ed.
A. Bernier (Paris, 1835), 504–5; Lewis, Later Medieval France, 168–70.
(^225) Gratian, Decretum, Dist. XXV; Aquinas, STII–II, [Secunda Secundae] qq. 183–6.
(^226) RPi. 217–20.
(^227) SRi. 316.
(^228) Four English Political Tracts, ed. Genet, 13–14.