The royal armies were still dangerously weak in relation to the thousands of insurgents across a swathe of the North, and the appearance of concession and conciliation must continue, particularly in religion; hence the retention of that passage in the printed text suggesting that the King would listen to complaints against his ministers. Yet that did not stop the reviser of the King’s original draft adding a page and a half in print vigorously defending the suppression of monasteries, with detailed and accurate historical examples right back to Edward III, taking in on the way ‘the Cardinal of
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