inquiries, parliamentary encroachment, and reviving taste for literature
and art, Chaucer arose.

His remarkable career extended over the last half of the fourteenth
century, when public events were of considerable historical importance.
It was then that parliamentary history became interesting. Until then
the barons, clergy, knights of the shire, and burgesses of the town,
summoned to assist the royal councils, deliberated in separate chambers
or halls; but in the reign of Edward III. the representatives of the
knights of the shires and the burgesses united their interests and
formed a body strong enough to check royal encroachments, and became
known henceforth as the House of Commons. In thirty years this body had
wrested from the Crown the power of arbitrary taxation, had forced upon
it new ministers, and had established the principle that the redress of
grievances preceded grants of supply. Edward III. was compelled to grant
twenty parliamentary confirmations of Magna Charta. At the close of his
reign, it was conceded that taxes could be raised only by consent of the
Commons; and they had sufficient power, also, to prevent the collection
of the tax which the Pope had levied on the country since the time of
John, called Peter's Pence. The latter part of the fourteenth century
must not be regarded as an era of the triumph of popular rights, but as
the period when these rights began to be asserted. Long and dreary was
the march of the people to complete political enfranchisement from the
rebellion under Wat Tyler to the passage of the Reform Bill in our
times. But the Commons made a memorable stand against Edward III. when
he was the most powerful sovereign of western Europe, one which would
have been impossible had not this able and ambitious sovereign been
embroiled in desperate war both with the Scotch and French.

With the assertion of political rights we notice the beginning of