religious 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.