Edward II. and Edward III. followed the precedent, and during the last reign, when the penny dropped four grains, these revenues were sequestered no less than twenty-three years. Under Henry IV. the penny lost three grains, and what remained of the income of these houses was permanently applied to defraying the expenses of the court. Henry V. dissolved them, and vested their estates in the crown. In the reign of Henry IV., when the penny was on the point of losing three grains of its silver, the tone of Parliament was similar to that of the parliaments of the Reformation. On one occasion the king asked for a subsidy, and the Speaker suggested that without burdening the laity he might “supply his occasions by seizing on the revenues of the clergy”;[194] and in 1410 Lord Cobham anticipated the Parliament of 1536 by introducing a bill for the confiscation of conventual revenues to the amount of 322,000 marks, a sum which he averred represented the income of certain corporations whose names he appended in a schedule.[195] Year by year, as society consolidated, the economic type was propagated; and, as the pressure of a contracting currency stimulated these men to action, the demand for cheap religion grew fiercer. London, the monied centre, waxed hotter and hotter, and a single passage from the _Supplicacyon for Beggers_ shows how bitter the denunciations of the system of paying for miracles became:-- “Whate money pull they yn by probates of testamentes, priuy tithes, and by mennes offeringes to theyre pilgrimages, and at theyre first masses? Euery man and childe that is buried, must pay sumwhat for masses and diriges to be song for him, or elles they will accuse the dedes frendes and executours of heresie. whate money get they by mortuaries, by hearing of confessions ... by halowing of churches, altares, superaltares, chapelles, and bells, by cursing of men and absoluing theim agein for money?”[196] One of the ballads of Cromwell’s time ridiculed, in this manner, all the chief pilgrimages of the kingdom:-- “Ronnying hyther and thyther, We cannot tell whither, In offryng candels and pence To stones and stockes, And to olde rotten blockes, That came, we know not from whense. “To Walsyngham a gaddyng, To Cantorbury a maddyng, As men distraught of mynde; With fewe clothes on our backes, But an image of waxe, For the lame and for the blynde. “Yet offer what ye wolde, Were it otes, syluer, or golde Pyn, poynt, brooche, or rynge, The churche were as then, Such charitable men, That they would refuse nothyng.”[197]