[321] West's Inquiry, p. 65. This writer does not allow that the king possessed the prerogative of creating new peers without consent of parliament. But Prynne (1st Register, p. 225), who generally adopts the same theory of peerage as West, strongly asserts the contrary; and the party views of the latter's treatise, which I mentioned above, should be kept in sight. It was his object to prove that the pending bill to limit the numbers of the peerage was conformable to the original constitution. [322] Hody's History of Convocations, p. 12. Dissertatio de antiquâ et modernâ Synodi Anglicani Constitutione, prefixed to Wilkins's Concilia, t. 1. [323] 2 Gale, Scriptores Rer. Anglic, t. ii. p. 355; Hody, p. 345. Atterbury (Rights of Convocations, p. 295, 315) endeavours to show that the clergy had been represented in parliament from the Conquest as well as before it. Many of the passages he quotes are very inconclusive; but possibly there may be some weight in one from Matthew Paris, ad ann. 1247 and two or three writs of the reign of Henry III. [324] Hody, p. 381; Atterbury's Rights of Convocations, p. 221. [325] Hody, p. 386; Atterbury, p. 222. [326] Hody, p. 391. [327] Gilbert's Hist. of Exchequer, p. 47. [328] Rot. Parl. vol. i. p. 189; Atterbury, p. 229. [329] The lower house of convocation, in 1547, terrified at the progress of reformation, petitioned that, "according to the tenor of the king's writ, and the ancient customs of the realm, they might have room and place and be associated with the commons in the nether house of this present parliament, as members of the commonwealth and the king's most humble subjects." Burnet's Hist. of Reformation, vol. ii.; Appendix, No. 17. This assertion that the clergy had ever been associated as one body with the commons is not borne out by anything that appears on our records, and is contradicted by many passages. But it is said that the clergy were actually so united with the commons in the Irish parliament till the Reformation. Gilbert's Hist. of the Exchequer, p. 57. [330] Hody, p. 392. [331] The præmunientes clause in a bishop's writ of summons was so far regarded down to the Reformation, that proctors were elected, and their names returned upon the writ; though the clergy never attended from the beginning of the fifteenth century, and gave their money only in convocation. Since the Reformation the clause has been preserved for form merely in the writ. Wilkins, Dissertatio, ubi supra. [332] Hody, p. 396. 403, &c. In 1314 the clergy protest even against the recital of the king's writ to the archbishop directing him to summon the clergy of his province in his letters mandatory, declaring that the English clergy had not been accustomed, nor ought by right, to be convoked by the king's authority. Atterbury, p. 230.