But the inconvenience of changes having afterwards appeared, from experience, the commons, in the twentieth of this king, applied; by petition, that the sheriffs might be continued; though that petition had not been enacted into a statute, by reason of other disagreeable circumstances which attended it.

See Cotton, p.361.It was certainly a very moderate exercise of the dispensing power in the king to continue the sheriffs, after he found that that practice would be acceptable to his subjects, and had been applied for by one house of parliament; yet is this made an article of charge against him by the present parliament.

See article 18.

Walsingham, speaking of a period early in Richard's minority, says, "But what do acts of parliament signify, when, after they are made, they take no effect, since the king, by the advice of the privy council, takes upon him to alter, or wholly set aside, all those things which by general consent had been ordained in parliament ?" If Richard, therefore, exercised the dispensing power, he was warranted by the examples of his uncles and grandfather, and indeed of all his predecessors from the time of Henry III., inclusive.] [Footnote 17: NOTE Q, p.318.The following passage in Cotton's Abridgment (p.

196) shows a strange prejudice against the church and churchmen.