By these gifts and legacies the Church grew more and more wealthy. But this generous gift to the Church did not altogether find favour with the kings or other feudal overlords of the givers, because every {194} such gift to the Church meant a diminution of the taxes payable to the lord. Such feudal taxes were those paid at a vassal's death, on the succession of a new heir--but the Church did not die; or on marriage--but the Church did not marry. Lands of which the owners died without leaving an heir lapsed back to the Crown, which was looked on as having originally given the lands to the tenant on a feudal tenure, or tenancy--but the lands of the Church never thus lapsed. In order to put a check on this, Edward I. found it easy to persuade his Parliament to pass an Act to prevent such giving of land to the Church unless leave were first obtained from the Crown. The Act was called the Statute of Mortmain, or of The Dead Hand, probably because land given to the Church passed into a hand that was dead so far as any giving of fees to a feudal lord was concerned. The Crown might, or it might not, grant the leave requested. The persuasion of the Parliament to pass the measure was easy, because most of the influential members of the Parliament suffered in the same way as the king. Their vassals, as well as his, might leave or give land to the Church, and so diminish their fees. [Sidenote: Wycliffe and Huss] Thus king and barons stood together in this particular, against the Church, and all through our story we find a certain difference in this respect between England and the rest of Europe. In England we find that the king, the nobles, and the commons were generally ready to stand together to resist the power claimed by the Pope, representing the Church. They might, and they did, constantly fight amongst themselves, but on the whole they were very ready to unite on this one point, and to resist Rome. The great teacher and preacher Wycliffe gave the Crown all the assistance of his eloquence in denouncing the greed of the Church for civil power and great possessions. {195} Just as we look on Dante, the Italian, as a forerunner of the new birth in learning, so we may regard our Wycliffe as forerunner of the great Reformation in the Church. A great preacher in Bohemia, John Huss, preached the doctrines of Wycliffe and gained far more followers than he; and after Huss, Luther, the greatest of all the reformers, carried the work to its conclusion in the seventeenth century.