e clergy
summoned to parliament in legislation, as much as that of the spiritual
court in temporal jurisdiction. With the ordinary subjects, indeed, of
legislation they had little concern. The oppressions of the king's
purveyors, or escheators, or officers of the forests, the abuses or
defects of the common law, the regulations necessary for trading towns
and seaports, were matters that touched them not, and to which their
consent was never required. And, as they well knew there was no design
in summoning their attendance but to obtain money, it was with great
reluctance that they obeyed the royal writ, which was generally obliged
to be enforced by an archiepiscopal mandate.[332] Thus, instead of an
assembly of deputies from an estate of the realm, they became a synod or
convocation. And it seems probable that in most, if not all, instances
where the clergy are said in the roll of parliament to have presented
their petitions, or are otherwise mentioned as a deliberative body, we
should suppose the convocation alone of the province of Canterbury to
be intended.[333] For that of York seems to have been always considered
as inferior, and even ancillary, to the greater province, voting
subsidies, and even assenting to canons, without deliberation, in
compliance with the example of Canterbury;[334] the convocation of which
province consequently assumed the importance of a national council. But
in either point of view the proceedings of this ecclesiastical assembly,
collateral in a certain sense to parliament, yet very intimately
connected with it, whether sitting by virtue of the praemunientes clause
or otherwise, deserve some notice in a constitutional history.

In the sixth year of Edward III. the proctors of the clergy are
specially mentioned as present at the speech pronounced by the king's
commissioner, and retired, along with the prelates, to consult together
upon the business submitted to their deliberation. They proposed
accordingly a sentence of excommunication against disturbers of the
peace, which was assented to by the lords and commons. The clergy are
said afterwards to have had leave, as well as the knights, citizens, and
burgesses, to return to their homes; the prelates and peers continuing
with the king.[335] This appearance of the clergy in full parliament is
not, perhaps, so decisively proved by any later record. But in the
eighteenth of the same reign several petitions of the clergy are granted
by the king