against what they doubtless considered unjust and exorbitant taxation: but they showed more than once that they preferred the exactions of the King to the exactions of Rome. And, as a matter of fact, the Church and the various Orders in England had grown so enormously rich that if they had not paid heavy ransoms throughout the century, and borne a very considerable share of the cost of the wars, they could not have escaped with their title-deeds. Their possessions were so largely increased after sundry visitations of the Black Death, which shook the tree of superstition until their garners were full of its fruit, that the taxable area outside the Church was sensibly and even seriously diminished. Henceforth, if not before, it was one of the political axioms of intelligent English laymen that the State could never thrive again until the Church had been made to restore the immense superfluity of wealth which pious Christians had bestowed upon her. And the truth is that it never did thrive until the earlier Tudors had redressed the balance, at any rate so far as the Orders had disturbed it.
John of Gaunt seems to have entered political life with the special object of enforcing this restoration of property by the Church, and for a time it looked as though nothing could save the clergy from the zeal of the Duke and the barons. "Never," says Mr. Green, "had the spiritual or moral hold of the Church on the nation been less; never had her wealth been greater. Out of a population of little more than two millions the ecclesiastics numbered between twenty and thirty thousand, owning in
