In Cade's revolt the Kentishmen complained that "the people of the shire are not allowed to have their free elections in the choosing of knights for the shire, but letters have been sent from divers estates to the great nobles of the county, the which enforceth their tenants and other people by force to choose other persons than the common will is." It was primarily to check this abuse that a statute of the reign of Henry the Sixth restricted in 1430 the right of voting in shires to freeholders holding land worth forty shillings, a sum equal in our money to at least twenty pounds a year and representing a far higher proportional income at the present time.

Whatever its original purpose may have been, the result of the statute was a wide disfranchisement.

It was aimed, in its own words, against voters "of no value, whereof every of them pretended to have a voice equivalent with the more worthy knights and esquires dwelling in the same counties." But in actual working the statute was interpreted in a more destructive fashion than its words were intended to convey.

Up to this time all suitors who attended at the Sheriff's Court had voted without question for the Knight of the Shire, but by the new statute the great bulk of the existing voters, every leaseholder and every copyholder, found themselves implicitly deprived of their franchise.
[Sidenote: The French War and the Baronage] The kingship of Edward and his successors therefore was not a mere restoration of the kingship of John or of Henry the Second.

It was the kingship of those kings apart from the constitutional forces which in their case stood side by side with kingship, controlling and regulating its action, apart from the force of custom, from the strong arm of the baron, from the religious sanctions which formed so effective a weapon in the hands of the priest, in a word, apart from that social organization from which our political constitution had sprung; even the power of Parliament itself died down at the very moment when the cessation of war, the opening of new sources of revenue, the cry for protection against social anarchy, doubled the strength of the Crown.