d by lending to
the Crown at usurious rates of interest. When the empty treasury forced
them to call a Parliament the ministers tampered with the elections through
the sheriffs.

[Sidenote: The Good Parliament]

But the temper of the Parliament which met in 1376, and which gained from
after times the name of the Good Parliament, shows that these precautions
had utterly failed. Even their promise to pillage the Church had failed to
win for the Duke and his party the good will of the lesser gentry or the
wealthier burgesses who together formed the Commons. Projects of wide
constitutional and social change, of the humiliation and impoverishment of
an estate of the realm, were profoundly distasteful to men already
struggling with a social revolution on their own estates and in their own
workshops. But it was not merely its opposition to the projects of
Lancaster and his party among the baronage which won for this assembly the
name of the Good Parliament. Its action marked a new period in our
Parliamentary history, as it marked a new stage in the character of the
national opposition to the misrule of the Crown. Hitherto the task of
resistance had devolved on the baronage, and had been carried out through
risings of its feudal tenantry. But the misgovernment was now that of the
baronage or of a main part of the baronage itself in actual conjunction
with the Crown. Only in the power of the Commons lay any adequate means of
peaceful redress. The old reluctance of the Lower House to meddle with
matters of State was roughly swept away therefore by the pressure of the
time. The Black Prince, anxious to secure his child's succession by the
removal of John of Gaunt, the prelates with William of Wykeham at their
head, resolute again to take their place in the royal councils and to check
the projects of ecclesiastical spoliation put forward by their opponents,
alike found in it a body to oppose to the Duke's administration. Backed by
powers such as these, the action of the Commons showed none of their old
timidity or self-distrust. The presentation of a hundred and forty
petitions of grievances preluded a bold attack on the royal Council.
"Trusting in God, and standing with his followers before the nobles,
whereof the chief was John Duke of Lancaster, whose doings were ever
contrary," their speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare, denounced the
mis-management of the war, the oppressive taxation, and demanded an account
of the expenditure. "W