In Richard II.'s reign the _Curia Regis_ separated from Parliament and became a Privy Council. The Lords were then as unwilling as the Commons to attend diligently to their Parliamentary duties, and it was only the subsequent creation of dukes, marquesses, and viscounts that stimulated the desire to sit and claim a writ of summons as a right. The number of earls and barons summoned to Parliament in the reigns of the first three Edwards varied from fifty to seventy-five. At times, owing to the absence of the fighting men of the country who were engaged in foreign warfare, it fell as low as sixteen. In the first Parliament of Henry VIII. there were less than thirty temporal peers, but in Elizabeth's time this number had doubled. Since Stuart days the Lords have become more and more numerous. James I. granted peerages right and left to his favourites, and, by selling baronies, viscountcies, and earldoms for sums ranging from £10,000 to £20,000, enriched his coffers and added some fifty members to the Upper House. The eighty-two temporal peers who sat in his first Parliament were gradually reinforced by his successors, until, in the time of George III., they numbered two hundred and twenty-four, exclusive of their ecclesiastical brethren. The Lords spiritual have not always sat in the House of Lords. In early days the abbots and priors largely predominated in that assembly, but with the abolition of the monasteries they were banished from it, though a certain number retained their seats in right of the baronies which they possessed.[38] Bishops were excluded from the House of Lords by Act of Parliament in 1640--Cromwell omitted to summon them to his Upper House in 1657--and were not finally readmitted until 1661. Within living memory several unsuccessful attempts have been made to keep them out of Parliament. In 1836 a member of the Commons moved that spiritual peers be released from attendance, but his motion was defeated. Another member in the following year suggested their exclusion on the ground that they had plenty to occupy them elsewhere, that their contributions to debate upon most legislative subjects were not particularly edifying, and that they always voted with the Minister to whom they were indebted for preferment. This motion met a fate similar to that of its predecessor, as did another of the same kind in 1870. [38] In the sixteenth century the Prior of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (near Clerkenwell), whom Selden calls "a kind of an otter, a knight half-spiritual and half-temporal," had precedence of all the lay barons in Parliament. His priory was suppressed in 1536, but his name continued to appear spasmodically in the Journals of the House of Lords until some time in Queen Elizabeth's reign. To-day some twenty-six spiritual peers, including the two Archbishops of Canterbury and York, are given seats in the House of Lords, where they help to swell the number of that ever-increasing assembly.