provincial council at Reading. In this gathering canons were passed
against pluralities which frightened every benefice hunter among the
clerks of the royal household. Orders were also issued for the
periodical denunciation of ecclesiastical penalties against all
violators of the Great Charter in a fashion that suggested that the
king was an habitual offender against the fundamental laws of his
realm.

Edward wrathfully laid the usurpations of the new primate before
parliament, and forced Peckham to withdraw all the canons dealing with
secular matters, and particularly those which concerned the Great
Charter. The king set up the counter-claims of the State against the
pretensions of the Church, and the estates passed the statute of
Mortmain of 1279 as the layman's answer to the canons of Reading. Like
most of Edward's laws the statute of Mortmain was based on earlier
precedents. The wealth of the Church had long inspired statesmen with
alarm, and a true follower of St. Francis like Peckham was specially
convinced of the need of reducing the clergy to apostolic poverty. By
the new law all grants of land to ecclesiastical corporations were
expressly prohibited, under the penalty of the land being forfeited to
its supreme lord. The statute was not a mere political weapon of the
moment. It had a wider importance as a step in the development of
Edward's anti-feudal policy, and may be regarded as a counterpart of
the inquest into franchises, and as a means of protecting the State as
well as of disciplining the Church. A corporation never died, and never
paid reliefs or wardships. Its property never escheated for want of
heirs, and, as scutages were passing out of fashion, ecclesiastics were
less valuable to the king in times of war than lay lords. The recent
exigencies of the Welsh war had emphasised the need of strengthening
the military defences of the crown, and the new statute secured this by
preventing the further devolution of lands into the dead hand of the
Church. But all medieval laws were rather enunciations of an ideal than
measures which practical statesmen aimed at carrying out in detail. The
statute of Mortmain hardly stayed the creation of fresh monasteries and
colleges, or the further endowment of old ones. All that was necessary
for the pious founder was to obtain a royal dispensation from the
operation of the statute. There was little need to fear that the new
law would stand in the way of the power of the e