The Reign of Richard II (1377-99)

Summary

Overview

The first thing to notice about the convocations of Richard II is that they were much more frequent than those of Edward III. From 1327 to 1377 there had been only twenty-seven convocations and/or provincial councils in the province of Canterbury, or about one every two years. But during Richard IPs reign, there were at least twenty-one, with another one planned for February 1399 which apparently was never held, plus a provincial council in 1378. That makes an average one provincial assembly a year, and is as close as the church was to come until modern times to the ideal of holding an annual synod. Of course, the fundamental reason for this frequency is clear and had nothing to do with the demands of canon law. The church was unwilling to grant large subsidies to the crown, and this reluctance made frequent convocations necessary. A comparison of the two reigns will show that when the sums are averaged out on an annual basis, Richard II got only slightly more money out of the church than Edward III had done. However, given that in Edward Ill's reign the precedent had been set for using these assemblies as a forum for presenting clerical grievances, frequent meetings could work very much to the church's advantage.

Another noticeable feature of the reign is the growing formalization of the procedures by which convocations were held. For example, the royal writ summoning them, which had taken different forms for most of the previous century, was reduced to two variants under Richard II, of which one had definitely prevailed by 1399. Provincial councils were still distinct from convocations at the beginning of the reign, as can be seem from the council held at Gloucester in 1378, but by its end, this distinction had all but disappeared. However, it should be noted that there was still no need for convocations to be summoned by a royal writ, nor were they necessarily tied to sessions of parliament, as they had been earlier and would be again after the reformation.

Given that the main controversy of the reign concerned the teachings of John Wycliffe, it is surprising to find that the convocations had relatively little to say about him or his followers, the so-called Lollards. They appear only twice in Canterbury (1382 and 1397) and not at all in York.