The Statute of Mortmain had forbidden the King’s subjects from bequeathing lands and tenements to the _religiosi_ without the King’s license. But the shrewd, cunning monks eluded the Act by licenses of alienation. Here we have another instance of ecclesiastical ingenuity in devising plans to evade the law. Testators left property in perpetuity to support priests to pray for their souls. Hence originated thousands of chantries throughout the country, but they followed the same fate as the monasteries. Much landed property had thus indirectly passed into the hands of ecclesiastics. In 1531, an Act was passed that all such wills would not in future hold good for more than twenty years. The Legislature thought that twenty years’ prayers were sufficient to get a testator’s soul out of purgatory, and that twenty years’ revenue amply remunerated the priest for his services.[250] The House of Commons was not a century old when a Bill was brought in, “That no statute or ordinance of the clergy be granted without the assent of the Commons, and that the Commons be not subjected to any constitutions _which the clergy make for their own advantage_, without the assent of the Commons, for the clergy do not wish to be subjected to any statute or ordinances made by the Commons without the consent of the clergy.” From the angry tone of the Commons on the canon of 1343, may we not naturally infer that if the House existed in 1175 or 1195, or at an earlier date, or was a little older in 1295, when the most important canon was passed, that they would have made a similar energetic protest that “They would not be subjected to any canons which the clergy made for their own advantage without the assent of the Commons”? I have already fully explained that the popes, archbishops, bishops, chapters, secular clergy and monks, took advantage of their position in the dark and middle ages in imposing on the credulity of the simple and innocent laypeople, by pretending that the Christian priesthood were the successors of the Mosaic priesthood, and therefore were entitled by Divine right to the tithes enacted by the Mosaic laws, and even a great deal more of the tithes which those cunning and crafty ecclesiastics added thereto by their numerous canons passed by them at councils and synods where no layman dare appear.