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43^
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
spending to the clerical estate in France. An additional factor,
sometimes overlooked, may be found in the Old English inter'
penetration ofChurch and State in the persons ofthe magnates
of each, which was continued in the Great Council. This
created a solidarity among the lords spiritual and temporal
which was not disturbed by the additional ecclesiastics tenv
porarily added by the two first Edwards; these, unlike the
burgesses and knights ofthe shire, had no representative import
tance. It would have required a planned reorganization, wholly
out ofharmony with the methods ofthe monarchy or the spirit
of the times, to disengage the essential elements from Parliax
ment and convocation and unite them in a single assembly
of their own. Convocation therefore remained an essential if
lethargic witness and guarantee of the independence of the
Church, and its abdication of sovereignty was rightly seen by
both More and Cromwell as the end of a chapter.
In the earlier decades of the fourteenth century the number
ofreligious houses in England and Wales, and ofreligious men
and women within them, reached a total which was never smv
passed. The losses in numbers from the Black Death were
there were a few
slowly repaired, but only in part, and although
new foundations notably a handful of Charterhouses and
the
Bridgettine Syon Abbey these were more than offset by
the disappearance ofa few houses, and the
suppression ofmany of the alien At priories. almost the same time, in the later de-"
cades ofthe same century, the administrative organization and
the parish and guild life of the medieval Church attained its
fullest expansion. The Great Pestilence of 1348-9 has often in
the past been regarded as a catastrophe to religion, but in fact
the feature that was most characteristic and, as the event
proved, most pregnant with consequence in the last medieval
centuries a hierarchy recruited almost exclusively from gov>
ernment circles and largely absentee had nothing to do with
the plague, while the most significant ofthe new appearances
the birth of Lollardy and the flowering of college foundations
were symptoms of energy rather than of decay. It was an
accident, ifa striking one, that the last medieval archbishop of