The rise of the middle classes was the rise of a power antagonistic to the Church. It was the beginning of the revolt against constituted authority. It foreshadowed the strife between reason and dogma. All the movements that have arisen against the power of the Church have come from the middle classes. The spirit of inquiry which led men to question the claims of an infallible priesthood, and culminated in the breakdown of the power of the Roman Catholic Church in England, had its birth among the middle classes. The modern scientific movement, to which the Anglican Church has been so bitterly opposed, started from the same source. The battle for freedom of worship, whether fought by Anglicans against Romanists, or by Dissenters against Anglicans, has been mainly carried on by members of the middle classes. After the fall of feudalism, in the period immediately preceding the Reformation, the extension of commerce was raising the middle classes into power. New paths were opening out, and as riches were more diffused and intercourse between different parts of the country and with other nations became easier, the influence of the Church was weakened. It became less dominant as new interests arose. It was in this period that a remarkable step was taken among women of the middle class--a step which shows that their interest in public affairs was very keen. A number of city dames drew up a petition to Parliament and presented it in person. It was not the stimulus of private interest or the sharp spur of national calamity that sent them to the doors of the legislature. It is a significant fact that it was an affront offered to a woman which stirred the citizens’ wives to action in the year 1429, when that unfortunate kinglet, the puppet of his party, Henry VI., was nominally reigning. The Duke of Gloucester’s matrimonial concerns were creating a good deal of agitation. He had put away his wife, the Countess Jacqueline of Hainault, daughter of William IV., Count of Holland, and widow of the Dauphin John, and set in her place Eleanor Cobham. The good citizenesses were full of righteous wrath. They resolved to present a remonstrance to the House of Lords. “One Mistress Stokes, with divers other stout women of London, of good account and well apparelled, came openly to the Upper House of Parliament and delivered letters to the Duke of Gloucester, to the Archbishop, and other lords there present, containing matters of rebuke and sharp reprehension to the said Duke of Gloucester because he would not deliver his wife Jacqueline out of her grievous imprisonment, being then detained prisoner by the Duke of Burgundy, and suffering her to remain unkindly whilst he kept another adulteress contrary to the law of God and the honourable estate of matrimony.”