the lay nobility, the Commons embracing the lesser landlords along
with the burgesses but without permanent clerical representation.
The English clergy’s choice to respond to the king’s fiscal demands
separately in the convocations of Canterbury and York left them more
vulnerable to attack by a jealous laity. The Commons were quick to
complain of perceived attempts by the bishops to demand payment of
tithes from ‘every sort of wood, which was never done before’, and to
allow a serf or a wife (of anyone) to make a will, ‘which is against
reason’. They petitioned Edward III that in these matters ‘his people
might remain in the same state that they were accustomed to, in the time
of all his progenitors’, and that prohibitions be issued to stop the church
courts hearing cases of tithes of wood; and in 1371 they secured, by a
statute which they repeatedly invoked, the definition of tithable wood
as only coppice wood less than twenty years old.^234
The struggle between the papacy and the kings of France and
England precipitated by clericis laicos, the bull of 1296 in which Boni-
face VIII lamented the habitual hostility of ‘laity to clerks’ and forbade
the taxing of the clergy by princes without his permission, was the turn-
ing-point in the replacement of pope by prince as the guardian of a
national church—the ecclesia Gallicanaor ‘the church of England’—
and the identification of the clergy as another estate of the common-
wealth.^235 At the beginning of the thirteenth century Innocent III,
the greatest of papal legislators, had summoned the Fourth Lateran
Council to change what, in the changing times (secundum varietatem
temporum), ‘urgent necessity and evident utility’ required to be changed
in ‘the common state of the whole body of the faithful’: one of the
council’s decrees had permitted clerical contributions to public
finances—but only if bishop and clergy made them voluntarily, judging
that they would provide for ‘common benefits and needs’.^236 At the end
of the century, Boniface VIII was eventually forced to concede in the
bull Etsi de statu that, ‘although the state of every kingdom’ was
the pope’s concern, Philip IV might tax the clergy when he, the king,
decided that France was threatened by a ‘perilous necessity’.^237 The
king prevailed over the pope by rallying to his cause all sections of
the people, including the French clergy, in the first national assemblies,
called to deliberate on matters touching ‘the honour, state and ancient
Estates of people 239(^234) RPii. 142b (51), 149b (no. 9), 150a (no. 9), 305b (23), 319a (21), iii. 43b (47), 201a
(21), 318a (13), iv. 21a (19), 451a (55) etc.
(^235) Guenée, States and Rulers in Late Medieval Europe, 166.
(^236) Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, Centro di Documentazione Istituto per le Scienze
Religiose, Bologna (2nd edn. Freiburg im Breisgau, 1962), for the decrees of the Fourth
Lateran Council, esp. 231, 233–4 (cc. 46, 50).
(^237) The bull Etsi de statucan be found in Les Registres de Boniface VIII, i, ed. A. Thomas,
M. Faucon, and G. Digard (Paris, 1907), col. 942 (no. 2354).