the clergy had been represented in parliament from the Conquest as well
as before it. Many of the passages he quotes are very inconclusive; but
possibly there may be some weight in one from Matthew Paris, ad ann.
1247 and two or three writs of the reign of Henry III.

[324] Hody, p. 381; Atterbury's Rights of Convocations, p. 221.

[325] Hody, p. 386; Atterbury, p. 222.

[326] Hody, p. 391.

[327] Gilbert's Hist. of Exchequer, p. 47.

[328] Rot. Parl. vol. i. p. 189; Atterbury, p. 229.

[329] The lower house of convocation, in 1547, terrified at the progress
of reformation, petitioned that, "according to the tenor of the king's
writ, and the ancient customs of the realm, they might have room and
place and be associated with the commons in the nether house of this
present parliament, as members of the commonwealth and the king's most
humble subjects." Burnet's Hist. of Reformation, vol. ii.; Appendix, No.
17.

This assertion that the clergy had ever been associated as one body with
the commons is not borne out by anything that appears on our records,
and is contradicted by many passages. But it is said that the clergy
were actually so united with the commons in the Irish parliament till
the Reformation. Gilbert's Hist. of the Exchequer, p. 57.

[330] Hody, p. 392.

[331] The praemunientes clause in a bishop's writ of summons was so far
regarded down to the Reformation, that proctors were elected, and their
names returned upon the writ; though the clergy never attended from the
beginning of the fifteenth century, and gave their money only in
convocation. Since the Reformation the clause has been preserved for
form merely in the writ. Wilkins, Dissertatio, ubi supra.

[332] Hody, p. 396. 403, &c. In 1314 the clergy protest even against the
recital of the king's writ to the archbishop directing him to summon the
clergy of his province in his letters mandatory, declaring that the
English clergy had not been accustomed, nor ought by right, to be
convoked by the king's authority. Atterbury, p. 230.

[333] Hody, p. 425. Atterbury, p. 42, 233. The latter seems to think
that the clergy of both provinces never actually met in a national
council or house of parliament, under the praemunientes writ, after the
reign of Edward II., though the proctors were duly returned. But Hody
does not go quite so far, and Atterbury had a particular motive to
enhance the influence of the convocation of Canterbury.

[334] Atterbury,