In the year 1907 letters of business were issued by the Crown to the Convocations inviting and enabling them to make alterations in the Prayer Book (afterwards to be embodied in an act of parliament).
On the 4th of November 1555 Pole opened, in the chapel royal at Westminster, a legatine synod, consisting of the united convocations of the two provinces, for the purpose of laying the foundations of wise and solid reforms. In the Reformatio Angliae which he brought out in 1556, based on his Legatine Constitutions of 1555, he ordered that every cathedral church should have its seminary, and the very words he uses on this subject seem to have been copied by the Council of Trent in the twenty-third session (1563).
Characteristic of the priestly calendar are (1) the enumeration of " holy convocations," (2) the prohibition of all work, (3) the careful determination of the date by the day and month, (4) the mention of " the offerings made by fire to Yahweh," and (5) the stereotyped form of the regulations.
In 1846 he established the western and north-eastern convocations of priests in his diocese; from 1850 to 1860, when its corner-stone was laid, he laboured for the "Hospital of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia"; and in 1861 he established the Philadelphia Divinity School.
The frequent convocations of military assemblies, far from testifying to political liberty, was simply a means of communicating the emperors commands to the various feudal groups.
