as a check on it.
What rent the ruling classes in twain was the growing pressure of the war.
The nobles and knighthood of the country, already half ruined by the rise
in the labour market and the attitude of the peasantry, were pressed harder
than ever by the repeated subsidies which were called for by the
continuance of the struggle. In the hour of their distress they cast their
eyes greedily--as in the Norman and Angevin days--on the riches of the
Church. Never had her wealth been greater. Out of a population of some
three millions the ecclesiastics numbered between twenty and thirty
thousand. Wild tales of their riches floated about the country. They were
said to own in landed property alone more than a third of the soil, while
their "spiritualities" in dues and offerings amounted to twice the king's
revenue. Exaggerated as such statements were, the wealth of the Church was
really great; but even more galling to the nobles was its influence in the
royal councils. The feudal baronage, flushed with a new pride by its
victories at Crecy and Poitiers, looked with envy and wrath at the throng
of bishops around the council-board, and attributed to their love of peace
the errors and sluggishness which had caused, as they held, the disasters
of the war. To rob the Church of wealth and of power became the aim of a
great baronial party.

[Sidenote: Weakness of the Church]

The efforts of the baronage indeed would have been fruitless had the
spiritual power of the Church remained as of old. But the clergy were rent
by their own dissensions. The higher prelates were busy with the cares of
political office, and severed from the lower priesthood by the scandalous
inequality between the revenues of the wealthier ecclesiastics and the
"poor parson" of the country. A bitter hatred divided the secular clergy
from the regular; and this strife went fiercely on in the Universities.
Fitz-Ralf, the Chancellor of Oxford, attributed to the friars the decline
which was already being felt in the number of academical students, and the
University checked by statute their practice of admitting mere children
into their order. The clergy too at large shared in the discredit and
unpopularity of the Papacy. Though they suffered more than any other class
from the exactions of Avignon, they were bound more and more to the Papal
cause. The very statutes which would have protected them were practically
set aside by the treacherous diplomacy of the Crow