In 1401 the commons attempted to make dependence of supply upon redress of grievances a part of the regular parliamentary procedure. They prayed the king that they know his responses to petitions before setting themselves to the business of granting a supply. Henry met the issue squarely. “On the last day of the Parliament,” say the Rolls, “response was made that this manner of deed had not been seen nor used in the time of any of his ancestors or predecessors, that they should have any response to their petitions or knowledge of the same before they had taken up and completed all the other business of Parliament, be it to make any grant or otherwise. And therefore the king did not wish in any way to change the good customs and usages made and used in former times.”[256] Nevertheless, the commons proceeded to put into practice the substance of their demand by delaying their grants of supply until the last day of the session, when the most important of the petitions would have received answers. Thus the next Parliament, that which met on the 30th September, 1402, withheld its grant until the 24th November; the session closed on the 25th and no business was transacted in the meantime. [Initiation of tax levies in the House of Commons, 1407] The chief advance in the reign of the new king lay not in a fuller control by Parliament in the matter of laying taxation; that would scarcely have been possible. But it lay rather in a differentiation of powers within Parliament itself, leading to a more complete supervision of taxation by the House of Commons. Since the end of Edward III’s reign the theory had been practiced that the commons should exercise a decisive power over the levy of taxes, as illustrated in the levy of the poll-tax of 1380. The form of making a grant, “made by the commons with the assent of the lords spiritual and temporal” first occurred in the grants to Richard II in 1395.[257] Votes of money previous to that year were made in conjunction with the House of Lords. The phrase was repeated in the grants of 1401 and 1402. In 1407 came the assertion that to the commons not only belonged decisive power, but that they alone had the faculty of originating taxation. It came not as a direct demand for the yielding of a principle, but as an implication that the practice already existed, and as such it gains in strength.