l6o TAXES AND CONTRIBUTIONS. 



cursory inspection of the totally different nature of the pro- 

 perty assessed will shew that the clergy, as far as concerns 

 the wants of the state, were far more lightly burdened than 

 the laity. Such a distribution of public imposts must inevi- 

 tably have produced at least a portion of that disaffection at 

 clerical immunities which characterized the literature of the 

 fourteenth century ; which forms the burden of the complaints 

 in the rolls of parliament ; which gave vigour to Lollardism 

 and which made the confiscations of the Reformation possible. 

 The social and economical position of the Church made it 

 popular. Its endowments were not the inheritance of patrons j 

 its dignities were not, till a comparatively late period, the 

 means of ekeing out the scanty appanage of younger sons. 

 Except during the time when the exigencies of foreign war 

 made rulers careless about the birth of the best and most 

 active partizans, it formed the only road to social advance- 

 ment ; and though the churchman was debarred from founding 

 a family of his own, he was not prevented from creating a 

 collateral nobility in the persons of his brothers, his nephews, 

 or other kinsfolk. All the prospects which the Church offered 

 (and perhaps the statement that it owned a third of the landed 

 estate of England is true) were open in effect to the mass 

 of the people. We have seen that the villains strove to 

 educate their sons for the Church, and that the knights of 

 the shire petitioned the crown in vain to prohibit such per- 

 sons from so natural an ambition. The English peasant, 

 with infinitely higher prospects, had a stronger motive to ad- 

 vance his son than the Irish cottier has now, when he seeks 

 to get his boy into Maynooth, with the hope of his becoming 

 a priest j and the Scotch farmer had, perhaps has still, to 

 make his son fit for holding a parish and a manse. The son 

 of a villain could, if fortune, or merit, or whatever else might 

 contribute to such a result, favoured him, reach from the hut 

 of his parents to the mitre of a parliamentary abbot, to the 

 crosier of the bishop, to the custody of the great seal, to the 

 wand of the lord high treasurer, to the princely state of the 



