re granted,
they were often altered in the royal ordinance which professed to embody
them. A plan of demanding supplies for three years at once rendered the
annual assembly of Parliament less necessary. Its very existence was
threatened by the convocation in 1352 and 1353 of occasional councils with
but a single knight from every shire and a single burgess from a small
number of the greater towns, which acted as Parliament and granted
subsidies.

[Sidenote: The Baronage and the Church]

What aided Edward above all in eluding or defying the constitutional
restrictions on arbitrary taxation, as well as in these more insidious
attempts to displace the Parliament, was the lessening of the check which
the Baronage and the Church had till now supplied. The same causes which
had long been reducing the number of the greater lords who formed the upper
house went steadily on. Under Edward the Second little more than seventy
were commonly summoned to Parliament; little more than forty were summoned
under Edward the Third, and of these the bulk were now bound to the Crown,
partly by their employment on its service, partly by their interest in the
continuance of the war. The heads of the Baronage too were members of the
royal family. Edward had carried out on a far wider scale than before the
policy which had been more or less adhered to from the days of Henry the
Third, that of gathering up in the hands of the royal house all the greater
heritages of the land. The Black Prince was married to Joan of Kent, the
heiress of Edward the First's younger son, Earl Edmund of Woodstock. His
marriage with the heiress of the Earl of Ulster brought to the king's
second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, a great part of the possessions of
the de Burghs. Later on the possessions of the house of Bohun passed by
like matches to his youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, and to his grandson,
Henry of Lancaster. But the greatest English heritage fell to Edward's
third living son, John of Gaunt as he was called from his birth at Ghent
during his father's Flemish campaign. Originally created Earl of Richmond,
the death of his father-in-law, Henry of Lancaster, and of Henry's eldest
daughter, raised John in his wife's right to the Dukedom of Lancaster and
the Earldoms of Derby, Leicester, and Lincoln. But while the baronage were
thus bound to the Crown, they drifted more and more into an hostility with
the Church which in time disabled the clergy from acting