If the formal statements of Lollard creed are to be got from these Conclusions, the popular view of their controversy with the church may be gathered from the ballads preserved in the _Political Poems and Songs relating to English History_, published in 1859 by Thomas Wright for the Master of the Rolls series, and in the Piers Ploughman poems. _Piers Ploughman's Creed_ (see LANGLAND) was probably written about 1394, when Lollardy was at its greatest strength; the ploughman of the _Creed_ is a man gifted with sense enough to see through the tricks of the friars, and with such religious knowledge as can be got from the creed, and from Wycliffe's version of the Gospels. The poet gives us a "portrait of the fat friar with his double chin shaking about as big as a goose's egg, and the ploughman with his hood full of holes, his mittens made of patches, and his poor wife going barefoot on the ice so that her blood followed" (_Early English Text Society_, vol. xxx., pref., p. 16); and one can easily see why farmers and peasants turned from the friars to the poor preachers. The _Ploughman's Complaint_ tells the same tale. It paints popes, cardinals, prelates, rectors, monks and friars, who call themselves followers of Peter and keepers of the gates of heaven and hell, and pale poverty-stricken people, cotless and landless, who have to pay the fat clergy for spiritual assistance, and asks if these are Peter's priests. "I trowe Peter took no money, for no sinners that he sold.... Peter was never so great a fole, to leave his key with such a losell." In 1399 the Lancastrian Henry IV. overthrew the Plantagenet Richard II., and one of the most active partisans of the new monarch was Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury and the most determined opponent of Lollardy. Richard II. had aided the clergy to suppress Lollardy without much success. The new dynasty supported the church in a similar way and not more successfully. The strength of the anti-clerical party lay in the House of Commons, in which the representatives of the shires took the leading part. Twice the Commons petitioned the crown to seize the temporalities of the church and apply them to such national purposes as relief of taxation, maintenance of the poor and the support of new lords and knights. Their anti-clerical policy was not continuous, however. The court party and the clergy proposed statutes for the suppression of heresy, and twice at least secured the concurrence of the Commons. One of these was the well-known statute _De heretico comburendo_ passed in 1401.