thier letters witnessed to the progress of intellectual
decay.

Somewhat of their old independence lingered indeed among the lower clergy
and the monastic orders; it was in fact the successful resistance of the
last to an effort made to establish arbitrary taxation which brought about
their ruin. Up to the terrible statutes of Thomas Cromwell the clergy in
convocation still asserted boldly their older rights against the Crown.
But it was through its prelates that the Church exercised a directly
political influence, and these showed a different temper from the clergy.
Their weakness told directly on the constitutional progress of the realm,
for through the diminution in the number of the peers temporal the greater
part of the House of Lords was now composed of spiritual peers, of bishops
and the greater abbots. Driven by sheer need, by the attack of the barons
on their temporal possessions and of the Lollard on their spiritual
authority, into dependence on the Crown, their weight was thrown into the
scale of the monarchy.

[Sidenote: Change in the Lower House]

And while the ruin of the baronage, and the weakness of the prelacy, broke
the power of the House of Lords, the restriction of the suffrage broke the
growing strength of the House of Commons. Even before the outbreak of the
civil war the striving of the proprietary classes, landowners and
merchants, after special privileges which the Crown alone could bestow,
had produced important constitutional results. The character of the House
of Commons had been changed by the restriction of both the borough and the
county franchise. Up to this time all freemen settling in a borough, and
paying their dues to it became by the mere fact of settlement its
burgesses.

[Sidenote: Restriction of Borough Freedom]

But during the reign of Henry the Sixth and still more under Edward the
Fourth this largeness of borough life was roughly curtailed. The trade
companies which vindicated civic freedom from the tyranny of the older
merchant gilds themselves tended to become a narrow and exclusive
oligarchy. Most of the boroughs had by this time acquired civic property,
and it was with the aim of securing their own enjoyment of this against
any share of it by "strangers" that the existing burgesses for the most
part procured charters of incorporation from the Crown, which turned them
into a close body and excluded from their number all who were not
burgesses by birth or who failed he