UC-NRLF " Mllll III lllll! I III SB M7D flT3 MnmT'bHlSTORl' I LIBRARY OF THE University of California. Class foeroes of tbe IFlations, PER VOLUME, CLOTH, $1.50. HALF MOROCCO, $1.75. I. Nelson, and the Naval Supremacy of England. By W. Clark Russell, author of "The Wreck of the Grosvenor," etc. II. Gustavus Adolphus, and the Struggle of Protest- antism for Existence. By C. R. L. Fletcher, M.A., late Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. III. Pericles, and the Golden Age of Athens. By Evelyn Abbott, M.A., Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. IV. Theodoric the Goth, the Barbarian Champion of Civilization. By Thomas Hodgkin, author of "Italy and Her Invaders," etc. V. Sir Philip Sidney : Type of English Chivalry. By H. R. Fox Bourne. VI. Julius Caesar, and the Organization of the Roman Empire. By Warde Fowler, M.A., Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. (For titles of volumes next to appear and for further detail? of this Series see prospectus at end of volume.) G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, Publishers, NEW YORK AND LONDON Iberoes of tbe IFiationg EDITED BY Evelyn Bbbott, /ft.B. FKLLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD FACTA DUCIS VIVENT OPEROSAQUE GLORIA RERUM. OVID, IN LIVIAM, 265 THE HERO'S DEEDS AND HARD-WON FAME SHALL LIVE. JOHN WYCLIF JOHN WYCLIF. FROM HOUSTON' MEZZOTINT IN ROLT'S LIVES OF THE REFORMERS A TABULA IN COLL. REG. CANTAB." JOHN WYCLIF LAST OF THE SCHOOLMEN AND FIRST OF THE ENGLISH REFORMERS BY LEWIS SERGEANT AUTHOR OF "NEW GREECE " ETC. G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK LONDON 27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND $,\iz gutickerboehcr ||rcss 1893 2. . S'Y- Main Tib HISTORr I OC-V) . COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Entered at Stationers' Hall, London by G. P. Putnam's Sons Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by Wye Ikmcfecrbocker press, mew l^orfe G. P. Putnam's Sons HE plan on which this volume has been written, and (I trust) the excuse for adding one more to the considerable number of recent works on Wyclif, are per- haps sufficiently indicated in the first few chapters, and particularly in the irth. It might not have been worth le to rewrite the story of this English worthy of the fourteenth century, even with the encouragement of a few fresh facts and side- lights to develop and illustrate his character, if it had not been for the opportunity thus afforded of doing something to popularise the picture of John Wyclif as an Oxford Schoolman, and the picture of the Schoolmen in general as pioneers of the Refor- mation of Religion and the Revival of Learning. In a volume not specially intended for laborious students, it would scarcely have been appropriate to enter on a detailed examination of Wyclif's scholastic and controversial writings. Such a work remains to be accomplished, but it cannot well be undertaken until the Wyclif Society has completed its task. For a similar reason I have not introduced a full 225698 iv Preface. bibliography of books and other documents relating to Wyclif. Most of my authorities will be found cited in the text and notes ; but I would here express my special obligation to the editors of various volumes in the Rolls Series, to the writers of sundry articles in the Dictionary of National Biography which has become indispensable to every historical student, to Mr. R. L. Poole, and Mr. F. D. Matthew. Of the reputed portraits of Wyclif mentioned in the first chapter,* six are reproduced in the present volume. Three of the most characteristic of these the Bale, Hondius, and Houston engravings do not seem to have been printed since the centuries in which they were respectively produced. At any rate the six are now brought together for the first time, and the reader must be left to determine for himself which of the series is most likely to represent John Wyclif as he lived. L. S. November, 1892. * See also At/ienS first makes its appearance in Hearne's printed copy of the Itinerary. All this looks natural enough ; but it does not make the birth of a Wycliffe of Wycliffe at Ipreswell 78 John Wyclif. H320- (assuming that Hipswell was once Ipreswell) any the more natural. If John Wyclif's birth at that place was remembered more than two centuries later, one would imagine that it must have been on account of a continued residence of his parents there, and not on the strength of a casual visit of his mother at the time of his birth. There is a difficulty in reconciling the Hipswell theory with the surmises which I shall presently venture to make in respect of the parentage of Wyclif and mainly for the reason just stated. If Stow's transcript of Leland be regarded as finally establishing the form " Ipreswell," all that can be said is that we have one reason the fewer to hesitate over Leland's statement. The statement is not very definite in itself, and it is introduced with a couple of words which almost imply that Leland did not attach great weight to it not so much weight, for instance, as he attached to his independent statement about the village of Wycliffe. " They say " these are his words " that John Wiclif Haereticus was borne at Spreswel [Ipres- wel], a poore village, a good myle from Richemont." If we accept the Ipreswell and the " good myle," there is still room for doubt in the " Haereticus " and the introductory words. Leland merely repeats a rumour which he had not verified ; and the fact of his stating it as a rumour implies that he thought it needed verification. His doubt may well have been the same as our own ; it must have appeared strange to him that a Wycliffe of Wycliffe should have been born at Ipreswell ; and, again, he would be quite alive to the possibility that any Wyclifle, or even 1369] Wyclif's Early Days, 79 Whitcliffe, reputed to have lived at Ipreswell two hundred years ago, would tend to become identified with the famous " heretic " who gave Englishmen their open Bible. The local tradition of a Spreswell close to the village of Wycliffe, which has beeji accepted by Dr. Vaughan, and also by Professor Lechler, presents various difficulties, and must be treated with particu- lar caution, because one would be decidedly glad to believe it. According to this tradition, Spreswell was no mere figment of a name, and still less Ipres- well or Hipswell, but an actual hamlet or thorp, within the manor of the Wycliffes, and about half a mile from the present village of Wycliffe-on-Tees. Certain evidence in support of this contention has been adduced by the Rev. John Erskine, now Rector of Wycliffe. The evidence consists of : 1. A letter from William Chapman, 133 Church Street, Monkwearmouth (January 14, 1884), to the Rev. J. Erskine: " I saw an account of the intended ' Restoration of Wycliffe Church, which stands close to Wycliffe Hall, the supposed birthplace of Wycliffe.' Leland, the historian, says Wycliffe was born at Spreswell, near Richmond. I enclose a copy of a statement made by my great-grandfather, John Chapman, who died 1849, aged eighty-one years, at Alwent Hall, Gainford." 2. The statement of John Chapman : u Spreswell or Speswell stood half a mile west from Wycliffe, and on the same side and close to the River Tees. The Plough has passed over its site, So John Wyclif. 1320 and all is quite level. There was a Chapel there, in which were married William Yarker and Penetent Johnson, and there [sic] son John Yarker has many times related the occurance to his Grandson, the Writer of this. The above coupel were the last mar- ried there, for the Chapel soon after fell down. Francis Wycliffe of Barnard Castle, the last of the Wycliffes in the Neighbourhood, said John the Reformer was born at the above Village. John Chapman, Headlam, June 2ist, 1839." 3. Mr. Erskine says : " The tradition of Wycliffe having been born in this parish [Wycliffe-on-Tees] has existed for over two hundred years, while there is no trace of him or tradition at Hipswell . . . Might not Spreswell be a corruption of Thorpeswell ? There is a manor house in the township of Thorpe, and there are ruins of a village close to it. I have also in my possession part of the mullion of a church window, and a piscina, which were found in the pulling down of an old wall on the property. The former might have been carried away from the east window of our church, but the latter could not, as it is in perfect preservation, while two in the church are broken close off by the wall. The property of Thorpe belonged to the Wilkinsons of Richmond, who pur- chased it from the Wycliffes . . . The man who gave me the piscina said that his great-grandfather spoke of the chapel at Thorpe, and that after the marriage of the two persons named in Mr. Chap- man's letter the roof fell in . . . There was a village close to Thorpe Hall, as there are traces of 1369] Wyclifs Early Days. 8 1 foundations of houses, and, as some believe, also of the village stocks." Now, of course, this theory of a Speswell-on-Tees imposes on its advocates the necessity of explaining away Leland's " good myle from Richemont." Some have evolved an Old Richmond on the river bank, three or four miles below Wycliffe, and have interpreted the " good myle " in the sense of a Scot's " mile and a bit," where the bit is apt to be more than the mile. There is now on the same spot a village called Barforth, which, according to Lewis's Topographical Dictio7iary y was " formerly called Old Richmond " ; and a place of this name appears in Carey's map of the North Riding of Yorkshire. The evidence is very recent, and as " Richemont " was in its present position long before Leland's time we should hardly be any better off if we were to accept it. Others say that the antiquary was well informed as to Spreswell, but ill informed as to the distance from Richmond ; and with respect to this alternative it is only fair to remember that Leland or his informers made some curious mistakes in matters of locality and distance. There are at least two of these mistakes in the Itinerary within fifty lines of the passage which has given so much trouble to the biographers of Wyclif, from which it would seem that Leland had no very clear and precise picture of the Richmondshire country in his mind. Without building anything upon the name of Spreswell and it is as easy to conclude that the local tradition refers to Thorpeswell as that Leland's original was the otherwise undistinguished village of 82 John Wyclif. N320- Hipswell there is evidence as to a group of houses close to the manor house where the Wycliffes lived, and nearer to it than the village of Wycliffe was. Nothing is more likely than that there should have been a little thorp and a chapel near the gates of the manor house other than the village and the church of Wycliffe. We know, in fact, that there was a Thorp as early as the thirteenth century which formed part of the Wycliffe estate ; and if there was no chapel at that early date one would almost cer- tainly have been built in the sixteenth century. The family remained staunchly Romanist to the last, and intermarried with Rokebys, Coniers, Constables, and Tunstalls, though on the ground of their reli- gion they could no longer present to the living of Wycliffe. A private chapel of some kind would be a necessity for them as soon as the Reformation had made headway, and this may well have been the chapel in which Penitent Johnson was married towards the close of the seventeenth century. It is but a melancholy picture which is presented to us of these Richmondshire Wycliffes, poor in purse, proscribed in religion, proud of heart, gradually fading away amongst the more substantial Northern Catholics, sternly repudiating the one strong mem- ber of their race who ranks with the great Worthies of England, and owing much of their later mis- fortune to the obstinacy with which they cherished the discarded faith. The last of the Wycliffes was a poor gardener, who dined every Sunday at Thorpe Hall, as the guest of Sir MarmadukeTunstall, on the strength of his reputed descent, 13691 Wyclif s Early Days. 83 It would be impossible to speak with confidence as to the origin of this family of Wycliffes. There is nothing to show whether they were Norman or English. The local surname would be natural enough in either case, and it is no more difficult to conceive a man of English origin bearing a Norman patronymic than it is to think of Anglo-Normans in the eighth or tenth generation who had lost their Norman characteristics and their Norman speech. Wycliffe means " the water cliff." It is not the same name as that derived from " the white cliff," although the latter name also came to be written Wycliffe. The point is significant. There is a white cliff near Hipswell, and a hamlet called Whitcliff, which has been suggested as the place from which the Reformer took his name. But it is worthy of note that although we find more than twenty varia- tions in the spelling of this name,* it was never (so far as I am aware) spelt with a /, though John Wycliffe of Mayfield is occasionally called Whitcliffe. As for the baptismal name of John, it was already more employed than any other ; it was even in higher favour in the fourteenth century than it is in the nineteenth. If we can point to only two French kings and one English king of that name, there had been twenty-two Pope Johns when Wyclif was born. There is scarcely a list of proper names in the cen- tury wherein the Johns do not show a remarkable * Wycliffe, Wycliff, Wyclif, Wyclyffe, Wyclef, Wyccliff, Wyc- clyff, Wycklef, Wyclyve, Wyckliff, Wykliffe, Wykliff, Wykclyff, Wykclyffe, Wyklive, Wicliffe, Wicliff, Wiclif, Wicleff, Wiclef, Wic- clyff, Wickcliffe, Wicklef, Wigclif. 84 John Wyclif. 11320- predominance. In Courtenay's Synod of 1382, for instance, seventy-three theologians and lawyers took part, and twenty-six of them were named John. Again, out of the twelve doctors assembled at Oxford by William Berton, who agreed in his condemnation of Wyclif s opinions in 1381, no fewer than nine were Johns. One of the writers of the Chronicon Anglic? , probably himself a John, referring in a certain passage to Wyclif, says quaintly : " This fellow was called John but he did not deserve to be. For he had cast away the grace which God gave him, turning from the truth which is in God, and giving himself up to fables." If we are tempted to look with some doubt on the Hipswell conjecture, and to nurse the idea that John Wyclif was born in the home of the Wycliffes, we shall gain additional support for the general belief of the past five centuries that the father of the English Reformation was a scion of one of the most devout Catholic families of the North, the head of which was lord of the manor of Wycliffe-on-Tees. Let us see what contemporary records have to tell us about the Plantagenet Wycliffes. The genealogy preserved by the Wycliffe family, which will be found recorded in Whitaker's Rich- Ptondskire, includes three generations admitted to be insufficiently proved.* They are given in the fol- * Before a historical student could use a document of this kind with any degree of confidence, he would need to know the pedigree of the pedigree. Nothing more is claimed for the genealogy here quoted than that it preserves the traditions of the Wycliffe family at a comparatively late date, and that its accuracy in a number of particulars is supported by independent historical evidence. 1369] Wyclifs Early Days. 85 lowing form except that the dotted line is here introduced by way of conjecture : Robert de Wycliff, Lord of Wycliffe, &c, 6 Edward I., by Kirkby's Inquest, 1287 [1278], held 12 car[ucates] of land, &c, in Wycliffe, Thorp, and Girlington ; married ? ? I Roger Wycliffe, Lord of Wy- = Catherine, his wife, buried at cliffe, &c, 1319 ; buried at | Wycliffe. Wycliffe. T JohnWyclif "1 William Wycliffe of [_' Haereticus."J Wycliffe, esquire (married). Now if the date 13 19 above given is that of the marriage of Roger, which is probable (since Cath- erine Wycliffe was still living in 1369), it is a note- worthy coincidence that the year 1320 has generally been accepted, on independent grounds, as the ap- proximate date of John Wyclifs birth. But there is more substantial evidence than this for the belief that Roger and Catherine Wycliffe were the actual father and mother of the future divinity lecturer at Oxford- Another link in the chain is supplied by a close cata- logue of rectors of Wycliffe, quoted in Torre's Arch- deaconry of Richmond, from which the following entries are taken : Daie. Rectors. Patrons. 2 Aug. 1362 Dns Robert de Wycliffe, CI. Kath. relicta Rogi. Wicliffe 7 Aug. 1363 Dns William de Wycliffe John de Wycliffe 7 Oct. 1369 Dns Henr. Hugate, Cap. iidem. The significance of the " iidem " will be at once ap- parent. In 1362 Roger Wycliffe was dead, and the vacancy in the family living was supplied by his widow Catherine, who nominated Robert Wycliffe. 86 John Wyclif. N320- It need not be concluded from the genealogy already quoted that Roger Wycliffe had no brother, and only one son. The later Wycliffes had numer- ous families, and that was probably enough the case with Robert and Roger. At any rate, there was a Robert de Wycliffe, clerk, ready to take the living in 1362; and when he died, a year later, William de Wycliffe of Balliol College was appointed by John de Wycliffe to succeed him. Who was this John de Wycliffe ? Observe that Dame Catherine had nomi- nated in 1362, possibly after consulting John ; that John nominated in 1363, possibly consulting Dame Catherine; and that in 1369 there was admittedly a consultation between Catherine and John, resulting in their joint nomination of Henry Hugate. Who could this John de Wycliffe be except the eldest son of Roger and Catherine, legally the lord of the manor, but leaving some of (perhaps nearly all) the duties and privileges of the lordship to his mother ? The varying exercise of this patronage, as shown in the close catalogue, would be adequately explained on the supposition that John de Wycliffe was the eldest son of Roger, himself lord of the manor, an absentee from his small estate, living on his earned income as a secular priest and an Oxford lecturer, and leaving the management of the Wycliffe prop- erty to his widowed mother. In brief, the circum- stances would be well explained by assuming that John Wyclif, the Reformer, was the son and heir of Roger Wycliffe. If we are to be satisfied with this explanation, and to adopt it as a trustworthy detail of biography, our >- j < , 3 > > POPE GREGORY XI. 1370-8. 1377] The Conference at Bruges. 125 influence or money had secured his nomination from the Pope, and now presented himself for election by virtue of a document signed months or years before- hand. The Pope's provisions, amounting as they often did to sheer confiscation, and liable to the very grossest abuse, were more than once denounced by Parliament as an intolerable scandal and usurpation. In the year 1343, and again in 1359, statutes were passed to restrain or debar this claim, and in 1353 the statute of Praemunire made it a serious crime, punishable by severe pains and penalties, to allow the Pope's writ to run in England, or to appeal from England to Avignon. But these statutes were constantly evaded, and the anti-clerical Council of 1 371-1375 determined to make an effort to get rid of the abuse. In 1373 the King sent a special mission to Avign- on to discuss the matter with Pope Gregory XL, who had succeeded Urban V. in 13/1. There were four members of this delegation John Gil- bert, Bishop of Bangor ; William de Berton, a distin- guished graduate of Oxford, resident at Merton, and subsequently Chancellor of the University ; Uhtred Bolton, a monk of Dunholme, and John de Shepeye. They represented the difficulty which had been created in England by the existing irregularities of reservation, collation, and provision, especially when English clergymen were displaced by aliens. Greg- ory seems to have listened without replying; but it was arranged, now or subsequently, that a confer- ence should be held in the following year at Bruges, between representatives of the Pope and of the 126 John Wyclif. [1373- English King, when the whole question was to be thoroughly discussed. Probably in order to provide trustworthy materi- als for this Conference, a Commission was issued by the Crown early in 1374, charged to inquire into and secure an exact return of all benefices and dignities throughout the kingdom in the hands of Italians, Frenchmen, or other aliens, with their names, incum- bents, and yearly value. The return was willingly furnished by the bishops, and it was sent in to the Chancellor's court. The figures are said to have caused a good deal of surprise to those who had not realised how far the alienation of English benefices had already proceeded. Two Conferences at Bruges had been arranged for about the same time. England had asked the Pope, or at any rate had concurred in inviting him, to settle the terms of an armistice in Europe ; and for this purpose Gregory sent his legate to preside over a meeting between John of Gaunt and the Earl of Salisbury, representing England, and the Dukes of Anjou and Burgundy. A year's cessation of arms was agreed upon in June, 1375 ; and the Duke of Lancaster was instantly twitted at home with having begged for peace after being beaten in the field. The ecclesiastics had been waiting for the poli- ticians to finish. They were originally appointed to meet on St. John Baptist's Day, 1374, and it was not until the beginning of August, 1375, that the Com- missioners were able to set to work. The Commis- sion included Gilbert of Bangor, who had been to Avignon in 1873 '> Dr. John Wyclif, professor of 1377] 7*he Conference at Bruges. 127 theology ; John Guter, Dean of Sechow ; Simon de Multon, doctor of laws ; William de Berton, Robert Bealknap, and John de Henyngton. The Pope was represented by three nuncios Bernard, Bishop of Pampeluna ; Ladulph, Bishop of Senigaglia, and Sancho, Provincial of Valenza. The position of Wyclif in connection with this special embassy may be denned with greater clear- ness than would otherwise be possible by means of an extract from the Exchequer accounts of the year 1375. The entry supplies " details of the settlement of Master John Wyclyff, professor of theology, in respect of his travelling and other expenses on a royal embassy in the parts of Flanders, for the transac- tion of the King's business therein, during the forty- eighth year of the reign." Wyclif " accounts for 60 1. received personally from the exchequer on 3 1 July " possibly at the port of embarkation. " From 27 July, in the year 48, on which day he set out from London for Flanders, to 4 September, when he returned, namely 50 days at 20s. a day 50 1.; and for crossing and re-crossing the sea, 42s. 3d. Ex- pended, 52 1. 2s. 3d. Credit, 7 1. 17s. 9d." Other entries in the same accounts show that John of Gaunt, on an embassy to Flanders in 1364, received one hundred shillings a day ; Sir Henry le Scrope, on another mission, had an allowance of forty shillings ; and Reginald Newport, despatched on the King's business in the jubilee year, was paid at the rate of thirteen shillings and fourpence a day. Wyclif's treatment, therefore, seems to have been fairly liberal, but it can hardly be regarded as exceptionally hand- 128 John Wyclif, [1373 some for a Royal Commissioner. In the first year of Edward's reign the Bishop of Worcester, who was sent to Avignon in order to secure a dispensation for the marriage of the young King to Philippa, received an allowance of five marks a day for 299 days. The value of money was higher in 1327 than in 1375, and the treatment of this bishop must have been at least three times and a half as good as that of Wyclif. The negotiations ended in an unfortunate com- promise. It was agreed that the Pope should desist from making reservations of benefices in England, but only on condition that the English King should no longer confer benefices by his writ of quare impedit. Evidently the whole question was left un- settled. Even if both parties had acted upon this agreement, which they did not, more harm than good would have been done. Englishmen had hoped to see the authority of the monarch in his own kingdom vindicated, and admitted by the Pope's delegates ; but instead of this there was a formal limitation of his authority, and nothing had been effected to estab- lish the rights of chapters and other ecclesiastical patrons. It is true that claims were made, then or subsequently, that the Pope had given way on other points, and that the nuncios had pledged him by word of mouth to abstain from certain acts to which the English Commissioners had taken exception. It is also possible that minor points were reserved at Bruges, and settled at leisure in the course of 1376; for in the Parliament of the following year (when the " King's friends " were in power again) mention was QUEEN PHILIPPA, CONSORT OF EDWARD III. FROM A PORTRAIT IN THE HALL OF QUEEN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD. 1377] The Conference at Bruges. 129 made of other concessions on Gregory's part, though there was no formal document to show for them, and nothing which could be held to bind future popes. These alleged concessions were to the effect that the Pope would not take action with regard to vacant sees until a free election had been made ; that he would abate his demands in the matter of first-fruits ; and that he would use moderation in respect of pro- visions and the nomination of aliens. Granting the genuineness of these concessions, it is clear that matters were not much mended by them. It may well occur to a man of plain ideas and common sense at the present time that the despatch of the mission to Bruges was something of a mistake. What was expected of it ? Surely not the voluntary consent of Rome to forgo the advantages which she had usurped and enjoyed for many years. The journey to Bruges was a sign of weakness, or at any rate a mark of concession in a matter which, logically considered, left no room for concession. There was one course which the English Govern- ment might have adopted which, in fact, it had begun to adopt, and which only called for steady resolution and persistence. If the King, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Lancaster, with the Chancel- lor and Treasurer, supported by the barons, knights, and burgesses if, that is to say, the Royal Council and the Parliament had been determined to put an end to papal provisions in England, they might have done so by enforcing the laws already on the statute book, leaving the " French popes " to say what they liked, and never going back upon their word. That 130 John Wyclif. [1373- is what the enemies of Rome and Avignon thought they were doing all along. For what had already happened in respect of the papal assumptions ? After Edward came of age, no further tribute was paid to the Pope. In 1340 the chancellorship had for the first time been given to a layman, as though to make the subsequent steps more easy of accomplishment. In 1343 a petition was presented by Parliament to the King, condemn- ing the provisions and reservations of the popes. In 135 1, effect was given to this petition by a statute declaring that the Pope had no authority to provide a benefice with an incumbent before the vacancy had occurred. Then followed the statute of Praemunire in 1353, forbidding appeals from the King's courts in courts beyond the seas, on pain of outlawry, forfeiture, and imprisonment. Ten years later it was forbidden under the same penalties to introduce bulls or other instruments of the Pope into England ; and the statute of Provisors was more strictly interpreted, so as to forbid the patron- age of the Pope altogether. In 1366, John's tribute having been formally demanded by Urban V., was formally and precisely refused. In 1370 ecclesiastics were removed from the principal offices of State. Thus for nearly forty years the effort had been continuous, and the aim was to all appearance con- sistent. Strange that the sudden arrest of the move- ment, the partial and temporary reversal of progress already achieved, should follow directly upon the attainment of power by those who had only craved an opportunity of carrying the matter to a definite 1377] The Conference at Bruges. 1 3 1 issue. For there was no question that a backward instead of a forward step had now been taken, and that Rome had rather gained a victory than suffered a defeat. The clerical Commissioners had gone to Bruges in order to clip the claws of papal usurpation in England. They came back after arranging a simple quid pro quo between the Pope and the King, and abandoning the principle of national indepen- dence, on which the whole strength of their case rested. Of one thing we may be fairly certain ; no one would be more disappointed with this result than Wyclif. The only ground on which the Commis- sioners could have persuaded themselves that they were making a good bargain would be that they had brought the Pope to renounce his claim to reserve benefices, whereas the English King had merely undertaken not to supply vacancies by an arbitrary exercise of his power, and without regard for the spiritual authority of Rome. No doubt the worst abuse of all was the papal traffic in English benefices, and the disposal of next presentations without refer- ence to local rights and needs. The Commissioners may have flattered themselves that they had got rid of this abuse without paying too dear for it. But that was not what people thought at home ; and it is difficult to believe that the shrewd mind of Wyclif could have been led away by such a contention, or that he acquiesced in any finding or conclusion of the Conference which would have the effect of strength- ening instead of putting an end to the authority of the Pope in England. 132 John Wyclif. H373- The commissionership was an honourable appoint- ment. The Pope had asked King Edward to send to Bruges " claros scientia ac laudandae virtutis, et cuncta prudentia praeditos, cultoresjustitiae, sedulosque pads et concordiae zelatores." It was no small thing to have been designated in response to such an invitation ; but, so far as temporal advantage was concerned, Wyclif was not much the richer by his journey to Flanders. He had been presented by the Crown to the living of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire of the annual value of 26 some months before the Commission was nominated. Of course he would have to make provision for the superintendence of the parish during his absence, and, as his expenses at Bruges must have been considerable, this would swallow up nearly as much as he could have saved out of his allowance. There was indeed no grudging of rewards amongst the Commissioners on their return. The Bishop of Bangor was promoted to the see of Hereford, vacated in 1375 by Courtenay's translation to London. Berton was placed on another Commission, and afterwards became Chan- cellor of Oxford. Wyclif was nominated on Novem- ber 6th to the prebend of Aust, in the cathedral church of Westbury, in the diocese of Worcester. It would have been in keeping with the ordinary clerical morality of the day if he had enjoyed the fruits of this appointment, and of as many more sinecures as his patron Lancaster might have obtained for him. But his past utterances had made it im- possible for him to become a pluralist, and so the prebend was refused. Less than a fortnight after 1377] The Conference at Bruges. ' 133 his nomination we find that it was granted to another. The discontent of Englishmen had meanwhile come to a head ; and at last the group which had held office up to 1370, and which had been dismissed by royal ordinance following on a parliamentary petition, secured another chance of directing the affairs of the nation. John of Gaunt had neglected to have Parliament summoned * since November, 1373 ; but his elder brother, always the most authori- tative of his father's subjects, though never a politi- cian, and now fast approaching his end, caused the writs to be issued at the beginning of 1376. There could be no question as to the temper of the men who would be returned to these writs. The new House of Commons represented by a great majority not merely the grievances due to over-taxation and the widespread misery of the country, but also the indignation caused by Lancaster's attempt to limit the privileges of Parliament, the disgust of English- men at the two inglorious compacts at Bruges, and a determination to put an end to the open scandals of the Court. The old official group, with Bishop Wykeham at their head, and recruited by a still stronger man in Bishop Courtenay, now returned to power ; and before the session came to an end a Committee of barons and bishops was appointed to share the responsibility of the leaders in the Commons an arrangement manifestly contributing (so far as it goes) to the development of the Cabinet as distin- guished from the holders of particular offices of 134 John Wyclif. [1373 State. The Committee of Lords in 1376 appears to have been intended in part to meet the difficulty which had been raised by the anti-clerical petition of 1370. It enabled the responsible leaders to associate with themselves any capable bishop to whom objec- tion might be taken as a holder of office. So long as the Prince of Wales continued to live, and for a month beyond that is to say, for the ten weeks between April 28th and July 9th the Good Parliament used its opportunities with courage and judgment. By the vigour of its action, by the inde- pendent spirit of its leading members and its digni- fied Speaker, and by the character of its discussions and resolutions, it will hardly fail to suggest to the reader a curious, though not a very close, parallel with the earlier Stuart Parliaments. Indeed the varying constitution of the Royal Council during the years 1370 to 1399, the dismissal and recall of ministers, the alternations of policy between the " King's friends " and the clerical party, seem almost out of place before the Wars of the Roses. The fact is that the organism of Parliament developed with marvellous rapidity in the latter part of the fourteenth century. The reigns of Edward III. and his two grandsons were favourable to the growth of parliamentary authority and privilege, and at the beginning of the fifteenth century the great Council of the realm had attained a position of con- siderable strength, which, however, it soon lost, and did not regain for something like two hundred years. The first task of the Good Parliament was to apply a remedy to the accumulated abuses of the Court, 13771 The Conference at Bruges. 135 The dishonest were brought to book ; some were dismissed, others were made to disgorge, and others again sought to insure half the fruits of their em- bezzlements by returning the other half. Amongst the dismissed servants of the Crown was William Lyons, who had known how to provide large sums of money both for the King and for himself. When the new ministers attacked him, he had the insolence to send to the palace a bag of' gold by way of a bribe. " Keep it," Edward advised those who were present, " he owes us this and much more ; he only offers us our own ! " Another and a larger bribe was sent in a barrel from the city ; but the men into whose hands it came would not have the course of justice interfered with, and they sent the barrel back. The doting King, seeing that his ministers and Par- liament were in earnest, and knowing that Alice Perrers had incurred the hatred of his people, sent them a humbly worded petition on her behalf a petition recalling the abject submissiveness of his unfortunate father, Edward II., when the toils were closing around him, and reminding one of the phenomenal humility of his elder grandson, Richard II. The bishops humoured their monarch so far as to let his mistress depart unharmed, after swearing that she would never come back to Court. John of Gaunt began by showing fight. The nom- inated knights, whose uppermost thought may have been one of resentment for Lancaster's failure in the field, and for the tame treaty which he had negoti- ated at Bruges, united with the popularly elected burgesses in requiring an account of expenditure 136 John Wyclif. H373 during the previous five or six years. They went to the House of Lords to prefer their demand, headed by Peter de la Mare, Speaker of the Commons. Lancaster greeted them in a rather uproarious mood. " What do these base and low-born knights attempt ? " he cried. " Do they take themselves for kings and princes of the land?" But though he stormed and raged, threatening all who opposed him with the vengeance of the Crown, the protection of the Prince of Wales was sufficient to maintain the authority of the Commons. Lancaster was discreet enough to keep away from the meetings of the Council, and for a time the representatives of the people had their own way. De la Mare seems to have had the courage of a Lenthall. When the customary request for a sub- sidy came before the Commons in the name of the monarch, the Speaker replied that " the King needed not the substance of his poor subjects, if he were well and faithfully governed ; which he offered to prove effectually, and promised that if it were found that the King had need, his subjects should be ready most gladly to help him according to their power." This Peter de la Mare was a man of considerable personal influence. He was steward to the Earl of March, who had married the daughter of Lionel of Clarence. Probably also he was a near relative to Thomas de la Mare, the powerful Abbot of St. Alban's. Nothing could be more natural than his nomination as Speaker to a Parliament in which the Prince of Wales and the clericals had the upper hand. 1377] The Coriference at Bruges. 1 3 7 Unhappily for our sympathy with Wyclif cannot constrain us to sympathy with his arrogant patron, at any rate against the Parliament of 1376 the Prince of Wales died on the 8th of June, leaving a boy of eleven as heir-apparent to the Crown. The House of Commons did not allow itself to be demoralised by the sudden removal of its main supporter near the throne, nor did the " King's friends " venture to undo the work of the popular Prince whilst he was yet fresh in his grave. The session ran its average course, and Parliament was not dismissed for thirty- one days. The Commons requested that the young Prince should be brought in evidence before them a constitutional act, yet doubtless intended as a hint for the Duke of Lancaster. They held on their way, and completed the petitions on which they had been engaged, to the number of one hundred and forty; and then, probably with much misgiving, the knights and burgesses went home. Parliament had not long been dispersed when John of Gaunt resumed his old place in the Council, and dismissed under a royal warrant the Committee of Lords above mentioned. The banished courtiers were recalled, including Lord Latimer and Alice Perrers ; Sir Peter de la Mare was thrown into prison ; the Bishop of Winchester was deprived of his tem- poralities, and the acts of the Good Parliament were declared null and void. In due time a new Parliament was summoned, and Lancaster so worked upon the sheriffs, who had the nomination of the knights, as well as great influence over the freeholders, that scarcely a single member of the packed House 138 John Wyclif. U373 of 1377 had a word to say against his arbitrary conduct. During the session of this Parliament Edward III., who had celebrated the jubilee of his birth by formally recognising English as the national language, cele- brated the jubilee of his accession to the throne by a general pardon ; but John of Gaunt contrived that the Bishop of Winchester should be excluded by name from the benefits of the proclamation. A story which was current at the time, or not long afterwards, professed to give a personal (and perhaps it would have been an adequate) reason for the relentless animosity with which the Duke of Lan- caster pursued the disgraced Bishop. William of Wykeham is said to have declared that Queen Philippa had told him on her death-bed how, when she was confined at Ghent in 1340, she had given birth to a daughter, and had overlain it in the night. Fearful of her husband's anger, he being absent at the time, she had substituted a boy for the dead child. This boy, according to the Bishop, or to the inventor of the fable, was the wrong-headed and obstreperous John of Gaunt, who had manifestly been born for a Flemish burgher, and not for an English prince. Unquestionably if such a story reached the Duke of Lancaster's ears, it might account for his hatred of Wykeham. Of course it cannot be accepted, for vari- ous and sufficient reasons. Chaucer has been quoted as an authority for the light in which the overlying of children was regarded in those days ; for he says in The Parsons Tale that " if a woman by negligence 1377J The Conference at Bruges. 139 overlyeth her child in her sleeping, it is homicide and deadly sin." And a bishop who had confessed his queen, and shrived her of such a sin especially a high-minded bishop like William of Wykeham would be most unlikely to repeat the story in order to serve his private ends. Though the Good Parliament had had so short an existence, and its work was overruled as soon as it had been dissolved, there can be no question of its importance as a landmark of constitutional history. It is important also from our immediate point of view ; for one cannot but be startled to find a man like Wyclif, irreproachable in his moral character, whose every act reveals a roused and wakeful con- science, engaged in public affairs on the side of a man so incongruous, unsympathetic, and unpopular, as John of Gaunt. Nothing, indeed, could testify more eloquently to the high character and spotless reputation of Wyclif than the fact that his political association with Lancaster, and indirectly with Alice Perrers and the peculators of the royal household, did not cover his name with a cloud of suspicion and obloquy. The very worst that has been said of him, apart from his heretical opinions, is the accusation that he became a heretic from selfish and vindictive motives ; and we shall see that there is no reasonable ground whatever on which a charge of this kind could be based. It is true that he suffered severely by meddling with political affairs, as many a man of spiritual fervour and lofty enthusiasm, committing his bark to that treacherous sea, has suffered since his time. 140 John Wyclif. [1377 So long as Lancaster was really powerful, whilst the King was yet capable of personal intervention in public life, and the Prince of Wales held the enemies of his brother in check, Wyclif also was safe under the protection of the Court. But when the Prince was dead, when the King was dying amidst con- tempt and neglect, and when Lancaster's accumulated failures and overbearing conduct had made the populace actively and openly hostile to him, the animosity of the clerics against Wyclif could no longer be restrained. His persecution by the Church authorities began in 1377; but the machinery of persecution was set in motion early in 1376, at the very time when John of Gaunt had retired from the royal Council, and before it seemed probable that the Duke would speedily regain his power. A new and striking figure now appears upon the stage. Courtenay was the prominent champion of the orthodoxy of his day ; and, in order that we may have a clear perception of the events in which Wyclif and Courtenay enacted the leading parts, it may be well to glance backwards at the internal history of the English Church, and at the character of its principal rulers, since Wyclif began to attract the notice of his contemporaries. CHAPTER VIII. WYCLIF AND THE NATIONAL CHURCH. ROM the death of Bradwardine onwards, the line of English primates Islip, Langham, Whittlesey, Sudbury, Courte- nay became more and more closely associated with the political movements of the day, as indeed could not well have been avoided in that critical epoch of the Christian Church. Bradwardine was a Schoolman and a student, as well as a man of affairs. His friends must have had fairly good hope, on his nomination by the King in 1349, that his term of office would be marked by more than ordinary independence and vigour. He had distinguished himself at Oxford by the part which he took in opposing the extravagant claims of an Italian archdeacon, Cardinal de Mora, who, 141 142 John Wyclif. H349- not content with sending a deputy to make as much money as possible out of the post, coolly assumed authority over the university. Something has already been said of Bradwardine's liberal opinions, and it is not surprising that he should have been out of favour at Avignon. At Edward's request, Clement VI. had backed his nomination by a bull of provision, and he pettishly declared that, if the English King asked him to make a bishop out of a jackass, he could not refuse. This was soon after the battle of Crecy and the taking of Calais, when Edward was practically supreme in France as well as in England. The new Archbishop was enter- tained by Clement at a banquet, on the day of his consecration, and one of the cardinals thought it a good jest to send a donkey into the banqueting hall, with a man on his back who prayed that the quadruped might be made Archbishop of Canter- bury. The insult was resented even by the Pope, and it was certainly not calculated to improve the relations between the English Primate and the Papal Court. But the plague cut short a most promising career, before Bradwardine had had an opportunity of showing his mettle as a ruler of men. Simon Islip, who had been one of the King's sec- retaries a fairly safe channel of ecclesiastical promo- tion in those days, was a " doctor of decretals," that is to say, of the canon law, and a man of inexhaust- ible energy. He was appointed by Clement in the same manner as his two predecessors, by a bull couched in terms which probably did something to hasten the passing of the statute of Provisors " per 1377] Wyclif and the National Church. 143 provisioncm apostolicam, spreta electione facta de coy The Pope snapped his fingers at the election by the chapter, but he took care to nominate the same man whom they had elected, and whom the King had recommended, in the case of Islip as well as in that of Bradwardine. If Clement's bull was arrogantly worded, Edward had himself to thank, for he had actually begged the Pope to override the first electi6n of Bradwardine by a bull of provision. And it may be pointed out by way of parenthesis that if papal provisions had not been profitable to the Crown in more ways than one, and if the Crown had not varied its protests against them by occasionally turning them to account, they might have been abolished out of hand. It suited the King, moreover, to keep in reserve this check upon the power of the English clergy, and we may somewhat question the anxiety of Edward and his friends to dispense altogether with the advantage of a timely resort to Rome. The statute of Provisors was passed by Parliament in the second year of Islip's primacy, and it was followed two years later by the statute of Praemunire. It has already been men- tioned that neither statute was immediately effective ; provisions and reservations went on, to the scandal of all good churchmen, for generations to come. Islip came to Canterbury at a critical moment. The ever memorable visitation of the plague in 1349 and the following years a visitation by which (we are asked to believe) as many as one quarter of the human race was cut off within four years : one half of the population of England in little over a year : 144 John Wyclif. [1349 one hundred thousand in London alone produced new outbursts of religious enthusiasm, and contrib- uted largely to the moral and intellectual develop- ment of the fourteenth century. The Black Death was the benefactor of society which it dissolved, and of humanity which it decimated. The plague of boils on man, the deadly murrain amongst cattle, the bloody spectacles of the Flagellants all were on the side of free thought and the free expression of thought, for all encouraged counsels of perfection. There was enough already to set in motion the slowly grinding mills of God, from which even the fourteenth century began to witness the production of a new learning and a reformed religion. None of the older Schoolmen whose minds had restlessly stirred them- selves in sleep no timid student of Marsiglio and Ockham, plunged into a musing fit by reading those daring tomes, about the time when John Wyclif was conning his grammar at Oxford could have dreamed that the mighty Church of Pius and Boniface would so accumulate its blunders and crimes at Avignon as to play the whole game into the hands of the heretics, and to render the disruption of Christen- dom finally inevitable. And surely one of the worst crimes of the Papacy throughout this blundering century was to exact, as Clement did, the jubilee pilgrimage to Rome in the midst of the most horrible pestilence on record, in order that he might win his expected sacks of gold at the cost of something like a million human lives. The Franciscans alone reckoned as many as thirty thousand deaths in consequence of this enforced pilgrimage. 1377] Wyclif and the National Church. 145 Making every deduction for exaggeration and miscounting, it is plain that a very large number of the priests, as well as of their congregations, died of the successive plagues which visited England in the fourteenth century. Amongst other evils which resulted from the wholesale mortality, hundreds of parishes were robbed of spiritual guidance, or de- serted by their pastors when they were in special need of help. Hence the passage in Langland's Vision, written perhaps after the second plague (1361): " Parsons and parish priests Plaineth to their bishops That their parish hath been poor Since the pestilence, And asketh leave and license At London to dwell, And sing for simony For silver is sweet." The Archbishop did his best to cope with this evil, and to convince the priests that it was part of their duty to suffer with their people. He also took the sensible course of ordaining many poor survivors of the plague who had lost their family and friends, their heart and hope, sending them into the deserted parishes. And that they might have a rule of life beforehand, and know what their new vocation meant, he " did ordain that more should not be given to priests for their yearly stipend than three pounds six shillings and eightpence, which " Stow laconically adds " caused many of them to steal." Three pounds six-and-eightpence ! Multiply the sum by ten, to get a rough comparison with what 146 John Wyclif. [1349- that would mean in our own days, and it would seem that Islip's poor priests were not even passing rich on forty pounds a year. It is a question how far these humble missioners put into Wyclif's head the idea of his russet priests. At any rate it was in the same field that he was subsequently moved to labour. Islip gave many signs of his ability as an adminis- trator; and the manner in which he dealt with the Flagellants is worth mentioning on this ground alone. For a time these curious products of physical suffer- ing and spiritual elation convulsed the minds of many devoted men, in England as well as on the continent. The history of these fanatics is very much the same as that of irregular religious demon- strations in all ages. There were the same ecstasies, the same ability to endure pain, the same conviction that endurance would be accounted to them for right- eousness, the same aggressive bearing, which excited indignation and persecution. Persecution, too, had its usual effect in fostering what it tried to exter- minate. Only phlegmatic England, of all the western nations of Europe, escaped lightly from this epidemic of purely human origin. It was condemned in a bull from the Pope, who called on the different monarchs to take measures for its repression. To this message Edward paid no attention, and the Archbishop as little as possible. So far as England was concerned, the Flagellants may be said to have been tolerated out of existence. Some of the last acts of Islip's life the founda- tion of Canterbury Hall at Oxford, the exclusion of 1377] Wyclif and the National Church. 147 the monks at the end of 1365, and the appointment of one John Wyclif, a secular priest, as Warden have generally been connected with the biography of the Reformer, with which they have probably nothing to do. It seems to have been the Vicar of Mayfield, not the Rector of Fillingham, who was Warden of Canterbury Hall in 1365, was removed by Archbishop Langham, appealed unsuccessfully to the Pope, and lost his case in the King's Court in 1372. The con- siderations which identify the warden with Wyclif of Mayfield are in themselves almost strong enough to be conclusive ; but, when we remember what Wyclif the Reformer was doing between 1365 and 1372, it is difficult to imagine that the old Master of Balliol was occupied during seven years in fighting for this additional honour and emolument.* Simon Langham, who succeeded Islip in 1366, was a Benedictine monk, who had been successively prior, abbot, treasurer, Bishop of Ely, and chancellor in what we may call for convenience the ministries of 1 363- 1 366, when Wykeham was Keeper of the Seal. He was naturally a wealthy man, and had had time * One of the biographers of Wyclif, maintaining that the Canter- bury Hall story must refer to him, is convinced that it could not refer to John Wycliffe of Mayfield because the latter held his living continuously from before 1365 until after 1372. He apparently forgot that the Reformer also was beneficed during the whole of that time. The notion of Wyclif as a pugnacious and baffled pluralist is too absurd to be accepted. It is impossible to think of him resigning the mastership of Balliol for a poor country living, then fighting for Canterbury Hall, and then again refusing the prebend of Aust, all within thirteen or fourteen years. Dr. Shirley has a note on " The Two John Wyclifs," in the Appendix to his edition of the Fasciculi. 148 John Wyclif. [1349- to forget any strong prejudices which he may have formed in favour of the Pope or the Orders in his younger days. If it had been possible for the Pope to override his election, he would probably have done so, for Langham had been a Minister of the Crown when the statutes of Provisorsand Praemunire were passed, and Chancellor when Wyclif was called upon to argue against the payment of tribute to Rome. It is not surprising that the old monk should have shown scant favour to the friars ; but his action in regard to Canterbury Hall shows that at any rate he had not ceased to believe in the virtues and merits of the Benedictines. He has been described as a pugnacious prelate. A well-known reference to him by Lord Campbell, in his Lives of the Lord Chan- cellors, is worth quoting again, if only as an illustra- tion of the perplexities which have beset everyone who ventured too lightly amongst the details of Wyclif's career. Campbell tells us that " among those with whom (Langham) quarrelled at Canter- bury was the famous John Wyclif, then a student at the college there erected by Islip, his predecessor. The ardent youth being unjustly expelled, and finding no redress for the wrong he suffered, turned his mind to Church usurpations, and prepared the way for the Reformation which blessed an after age." Langham made his peace with Rome, and received the cardinal's hat in 1368. He ought to have known that his acceptance of this honour would at once make him a suspect with the English Court, if not with the English Church. At any rate it lost him 1377] Wyclif and the National Church, 149 the Primacy. The King seized his temporalities, and sent a congi d'ttire to Canterbury, with a recom- mendation to elect William Whittlesey, a nephew of Simon Islip, who held the position for the next six years without making much of a mark on his gen- eration. Of Simon Sudbury, who succeeded hfm (1375-1381) it would not be altogether correct to say the same thing ; but, so far as he came directly into touch with Wyclif, he is overshadowed by the stronger personality of Courtenay. It will suffice to speak of his primacy hereafter, in connection with the proceedings which were taken against Wyclif on the charge of heresy. William Courtenay was the fourth son of Hugh Courtenay, Earl of Devon, who had married Mar- garet Bohun, granddaughter of Edward I. He was thus allied in blood both to the Prince and to the Princess of Wales ; and, when his parents destined their boy to the secular priesthood, no doubt they anticipated, or knew that they could guarantee, his rapid rise to the highest ecclesiastical dignities. According to Dean Hook, in his Lives of the Arch- bishops, Courtenay was actuated more by partisan- ship than by principle. At all events he was before everything the political prelate, ambitious and haughty, a natural leader of men, stepping at once to the front rank of English churchmen, and claiming to be recognised as a champion of the national Church. At the age of twenty-five (in 1367) he was made Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and did good service in resisting the claim of the Bishop of Lincoln to appoint to that office. 150 John Wyclif. [1349- From the family records it appears that he was one of the earlier Knights of the Garter. The future malleus hcereticorum was already at Oxford the hammer of recalcitrant friars. Before his election to the chancellorship the friars had given the university a great deal of trouble, claiming to be outside its authority, not only for themselves but even for the students whom they sheltered in their houses. The same difficulty arose at Cambridge ; and both the friars and the universities carried their quarrel to the Archbishop and to the King to the former, apparently, before he had resigned his chancellorship of the kingdom into the hands of Wykeham. As a result it was ordered in the King's name that henceforth no scholar should be received into the houses of any of the four mendicant Orders Dominicans, Francis- cans, Carmelites, or Augustinians under the age of eighteen ; that the friars should not produce any new bull from the Pope, or take advantage of any old one, in their controversies with the universities ; and that any future difference between the parties should be decided in the King's Court, without further appeal to Rome which, indeed, would be an offence against the statute of Praemunire. Wyclif and Courtenay were associated in this dispute against the Orders, which left rankling memories in the minds of all concerned. It was natural that Courtenay's election should have been stoutly resisted by the friars, who were by no means prepared to obey the monition which had been addressed to them. They even went so far as to 1377] Wyclif and the National Church, 1 5 1 cite the head of the University to appear before the Pope ; but Wykeham and Langham took prompt action, and secured the quashing of the citation. At twenty-seven Courtenay became Bishop of Hereford, a bull being obtained from Rome to cover the irregularity in point of age. He soon made his name known in Convocation, where in 1373 he protested vigorously against the heavy taxation of the Church both by the State and by the Pope. The latter had made a levy of a hundred thousand florins on the English clergy, and it must be admitted that the double burden was too heavy to be borne. Courtenay stiffened the resolution of his colleagues by " rising in anger and loudly declaring that neither he nor any of the clergy in his diocese would give anything until the King found a remedy for the evils from which the Church suffered." John of Gaunt wanted nothing better at the moment than such a declaration ; and it was soon after this incident that the mission to Avignon was despatched. Convocation agreed to pay one-tenth to the King on condition that " the intolerable yoke of the Pope" should be lifted from their necks ; and it was then that Bishop Gilbert and his colleagues were nomi- nated. The easement of the Church in respect of papal exactions must in fairness be set off against the unsatisfactory results of the mission and subse- quent Conference in the matter of reservations and provisions. Courtenay's consecration as bishop had coincided with the exclusion of ecclesiastics from the higher po- litical offices. When Sudbury was made Archbishop 152 John Wyclif. L1349- of Canterbury in 1375, the young Bishop of Here- ford was promoted to London, and in the following year he was appointed a member of the committee of Lords who were associated with the leaders of the Commons during the term of the Good Parliament. From this time forward he was in sharp antagonism with the Duke of Lancaster, and through him (apart from any question of orthodoxy) with John Wyclif. It was impossible that two strongly aggressive na- tures like those of Lancaster and Courtenay should be thrown together in public life without coming sooner or later into conflict ; and their quarrel was doubtless none the less bitter because both of them had Plantagenet blood in their veins. In his political action and sympathies Courtenay was probably, to the best of his judgment, patriotic and loyal to the core. At Oxford, as we have seen, he fought splen- didly for his university, and with special gusto against the friars who owned allegiance to Rome. As an ecclesiastic he fought still more splendidly for the English Church against the two tyrannies (as he could not but think them) which threatened to crush out her life. No cause could have a stronger, a more deter- mined and undaunted champion ; and it is evident that in dignity and courtesy he can well bear compari- son with John of Gaunt in his excitable youth. Two examples of his force of character recorded by his biographers one telling as much against him as the other tells to his credit may be repeated here be- cause they show how his disagreement with the Duke was aggravated at a critical moment, and because 13771 Wyclif and the National Church. 153 they are not without a bearing on the subsequent events of Wyclif's life. Towards the close of the year 1376, Gregory XL, who had a quarrel with the people of Florence, con- ceived the idea of bringing them to their senses by excommunicating all Florentines without distinction wherever they might be found. He issued a bull to this effect, and declaring those against whom he had launched the thunders of heaven incapable of pos- sessing any property. Now the introduction of this bull into England was a violation of recent statutes, and equally illegal was the conduct of Courtenay in taking it to Paul's Cross and commending it to the turbulent citizens. The citizens of London were already inflamed against all the foreigners in Eng- land, whether Italian priests, German Esterlings, Dutch weavers, or Florentine merchants and money- lenders. They wanted no stronger inducement than that which their Bishop had given them ; they sacked the houses of the Florentines, and in the riot which ensued they were not very careful to establish beforehand the nationality of their victims. The city authorities it may well have been that Richard Whittington was amongst them had to suppress the riot ; and they would probably be in sympathy with the Florentine merchants, as the Court and the royal Council undoubtedly were. It was just at this juncture that Lancaster had recovered his influence in the Council. He was supreme for the moment, and he let the Bishop know it. Courtenay had subjected himself to the penal- ties of Praemunire by acting on the Pope's bull ; but 154 7hn Wyclif. [1349- he was too highly placed to be proceeded against according to the strict letter of the law. He was, however, compelled to eat his words, and he sent a deputy to Paul's Cross to announce that his action in the matter had been misunderstood. The other incident, which occurred soon after- wards, at the meeting of Convocation in Febru- ary, 1377, presents the fiery prelate in a more amiable light. The Crown had omitted to send a writ to the Bishop of Winchester. Courtenay pro- tested indignantly against the treatment of Wykeham who had served the King long and faithfully in many capacities and induced Convocation to refuse to consider the demand for a subsidy until the Bishop should receive his summons and take his seat. It was a Roland for Lancaster's Oliver. The Duke was obliged to give way, and Wykeham was re-instated. The monk of St. Alban's already quoted says that the Bishop secured his pardon by appealing to and brib- ing Alice Perrers. But the monks were often preju- diced against ecclesiastics, and this story is evidently superfluous, if not incredible. Clearly, then, there was no love lost between the Duke and his cousin. It is worthy of mention that Wyclif himself was in some measure hostile to William of Wykeham, if not actually in accord with Lancaster on this point. Speaking in one of his sermons against the meddling of ecclesiastics in matters of State, he complained that " benefices, instead of being bestowed on poor clerks, are heaped on a kitchen clerk, or one wise in building castles, or in worldly business." Now 1377] Wyclif and the National Church. 155 Wykeham, before he received his mitre, had been surveyor of works and architect at Windsor, and secretary to the King, in addition to holding sundry pieces of preferment in the Church. Wyclif, as a declared enemy to pluralists, and to ecclesiastics who grew wealthy by dividing the trust-funds of the Church, would have been inconsistent if he had not blamed Wykeham amongst the rest or amongst the very first. But there is no other -evidence of serious or personal animosity between these two men, whom their countrymen for ample reasons have so long agreed to honour. Nevertheless, there is one kind of honour for churchmen who refuse their share in the trust-funds, preferring a life of apostolic poverty in order that they may preach the gospel by example as well as by precept, and another kind of honour for such as take what comes to them, perhaps restoring the bulk of it in their own time and manner. Wykeham was a magnificent founder and benefactor, to whom students of all succeeding ages have been largely indebted. Yet Stow, on the authority of Walsingham, says that in 1365, when he was made Archdeacon of Lincoln and Keeper of the Seal, Wykeham was already Provost of Wells, incumbent of a benefice in Devonshire, and the holder of no fewer than twelve prebends. In the same year, on the death of Bishop Edington of Winchester, he was made " general administrator of spiritual and temporal things per- taining to the bishopric." The Duke of Bourbon was at that time a prisoner in English hands ; and, as the Pope was more easily approachable from 156 John Wyclif. [1377 France than from England, King Edward was induced to agree to an arrangement whereby the Duke went to Avignon, secured the nomination of Wykeham for Winchester, and so " earned his deliverance." By this transaction the King netted twenty thousand francs, and the pluralist became a bishop. The story may have reached us in a distorted shape, and it must be accepted for what it may be worth. But Wyclif knew what he was talking about when he spoke of the heaping of benefices on rich men, whilst the poor clerks starved or stole. And it may be mentioned, by the way, that Courtenay himself was a confirmed pluralist. CHAPTER IX. PERSECUTION. ROM Courtenay, it is evident, Wyclif would have little to expect save a stern and un- compromising opposition. The young aristocrat from the West of England, ever conscious of the royal blood in his veins, the haughty prelate whose proud bearing and intellectual vigour overawed bishops old enough to be his father, found little in common with the simple gentleman's son from the North. Courtenay has been described as a patriotic and anti-papal English- man, and so no doubt in a sense he was. But his qualified hostility to the papal assumptions is not to be compared with the vehement antagonism of Wyclif in his later years. Courtenay, as we have seen, was ready enough to accept the mandate of Rome i57 158 John Wyclif. H376- where it did not imply the humiliation or impoverish- ment of the English Church. Wyclif would make no terms with the Papacy, which for him was (at its worst) antichrist and anathema. Both were staunch to a lofty ideal of the national Church of England ; but they differed enormously in the model which they set up differed by a space as wide as that which separates the barefooted apostle from the purple-clad prince of a dominant church. Express complaints against Wyclifs teaching had reached the bishops, as well as the Papal Court at Avignon, soon after the Conference of Bruges. Of course it is not meant to imply that the bold doctrines of the Oxford Schoolman and lecturer in divinity were generally held to be sound up to 1376, and were recognised as heretical afterwards. His accusers were ready enough at the last-named date with a score of faulty instances, gleaned from his writings, sermons, and university lectures during the preceding years. No one becomes suddenly or accidentally a heretic ; and the Oxford friars, who certainly hated Wyclif since 1366, if not earlier, had been taking notes of his teaching in anticipation of a day when they might find an orthodox corrector of his heresies. And they found such a corrector in the Chancellor whom they had attempted to hale to Rome, and whose authority they had defied. Wyclifs heterodoxy, we cannot doubt, was an old affair perhaps as old as his first association with John of Gaunt. But the actual persecution of " the Evangelical Doctor " began after the papal nuncios at Bruges had had an opportunity of hearing his incisive 1377] Persecution. 159 arguments, after the friars had found a willing listener in Courtenay, and after the Duke of Lancaster had begun to stumble in his ambitious course. When the Reformer may be said in fighting phrase to have thrown away his scabbard, or at what particular moment the Pope and the Sacred College determined to crush their formidable enemy, it would be difficult to say. The bulls which arrived in England in November, 1377, demanding that proceedings should be taken against Wyclif, were dated May 22d of the same year. The charges on which they were ostensibly based had reached Avignon from England before the close of 1376. It is in every way probable that this first open breach between Wyclif and the authorities of the Church was brought about by the initiative of the friars before June, 1376, whilst John of Gaunt was not a member of the King's Council. The tem- porary eclipse of the powerful Duke would naturally seem to afford a good opportunity for moving against the heretic whom he had protected. The death of the Prince of Wales, and the renewal of his brother's influence, would be quite enough to make the astute Pope withhold his bulls for a time. It was clearly hopeless to move against a friend of the Duke's and to hazard a new decretal amongst these wrong- headed and contemptuous English, at a crisis when holy bishops like Wykeham and Courtenay were stripped of their honours and goods, or made to eat their words in public for the very offence of pub- lishing a papal bull. Before long the Pope would hear of the famous 160 John Wyclif. [1376- Convocation in 1377. He would learn how that splendid champion of the Church, William Courte- nay, rising in dignity amongst his peers, and even rebuking the weaker Primate to his face, had made a scathing speech against the formidable Duke, and had refused in the name of the Church to grant a single penny for the King's necessities until the wrongs of the disgraced Wykeham should be re- dressed. Here evidently was a man who dared to withstand the outrageous John of Gaunt ; and the same month of February was not to pass away with- out giving Gregory another proof that the tide was beginning to turn in England, and that the star of Courtenay was in the ascendant. The Pope had himself been Archdeacon of Canterbury, and may have known something of English feeling though the facts do not go far to warrant such a conclusion. It is necessary to keep the order of events precisely fixed in our minds, for confusion has arisen amongst some of the earlier biographers of Wyclif in respect of the proceedings taken against him by Courtenay. Wyclif was cited by Courtenay to appear before him at St. Paul's or perhaps before Convocation in February, 1377, at the time when the annual parlia- ment of the clergy was assembled in London. Clearly this had nothing to do with Gregory's bulls, which were not signed until the following May. The citation need not have been issued many days before it was returnable, on the 19th of February, but it may well have been conceived and prepared weeks or months before. It was Courtenay's act, and ap- parently Courtenay's alone ; for the citation was to 2 I * CO & 2g o < [1377 Persecution, 1 6 1 the Lady Chapel of old St. Paul's, and he presided in person over the inquiry. Is it possible to disso- ciate it from the bold act which procured Wykeham's restoration ? Must we not take the two acts together as Courtenay's retort for his treatment after the Florentine riot or at any rate as a challenge to John of Gaunt on behalf of the rulers of the Church ? It is probable enough that Wyclif's militant spirit led him to anticipate with a certain keen satisfaction the opportunity of fighting out so noble a cause with an antagonist so worthy of his steel. He could not foresee that his own friends would make any- thing like a connected argument impossible, even if his enemies had been willing to hear him. But the Duke of Lancaster seems to have made up his mind beforehand that Courtenay was acting in excess of his jurisdiction and it is certainly not quite clear what the jurisdiction was. Courtenay was not Wyclif's diocesan ; but the latter had preached for many years in the diocese of London, and the Bishop's authority was doubtless sufficient to prevent him from doing so again, if on inquiry he found that the King's chaplain was in the habit of preaching rank heresy. For anything beyond this it would seem that Courtenay would need authori- sation from the Pope or the Archbishop. There is no evidence of a bull up to this point, and it is extremely improbable that the proceedings were taken on the authority of Sudbury, who was not heroic enough in his mood to break with and defy the Duke of Lancaster. We can only suppose that Courtenay's position in the matter was a weak one, 1 62 John Wyclif. [1376- and that the Duke felt himself safe in overbearing him with a manifestation of physical force. He would naturally have no confidence in the fairness of the tribunal which Courtenay had set up, appar- ently for the sole purpose of silencing his clerical ally. And what would the people say, his friends as well as his enemies, if he suffered this priest to get the better of him after such a palpable defiance ? Thus, when the Reformer put in an appear- ance at St. Paul's on the 19th of February,, he was accompanied by John of Gaunt and by a posse of armed men under Lord Percy of Aln- wick, afterwards first Earl of Northumberland, who had recently been appointed Marshal of England. Lancaster also brought with him, accord- ing to one account, four mendicant friars, perhaps by way of a moral counterpoise to the friars who had notoriously been egging on the Bishop and the Pope to take action against the English Doctor. The arrival of this party in the crowded cathedral created a great disturbance, and Courtenay came forward and reproved them, saying grimly that if he had known they would behave in that fashion he would have taken care that the Marshal and his men should not have entered. The Duke was quite ready for his cousin, and declared that he would exercise his authority there whether the Bishop liked it or no. Then they entered the Lady Chapel, and found, according to the account in the Chronicon Anglice, not only bishops but also a number of barons. It is possible that all except Courtenay were assembled as mere spectators of what promised to be an inter- INTERIOR OF OLD ST. PAUL'S, LOOKING EAST. DUGDALE. 13771 Persecution. 163 esting and exciting case. The barons are mentioned in association with the Duke, and they may have come in Lancaster's train from Westminster. Before the inquiry could be opened Lord Percy did what he may have considered humane and natural under the circumstances. Wyclif was very properly standing, out of respect for his ecclesias- tical superiors, and Percy bade hirn take a seat. " As he will have many things to answer," said the Marshal, " he should have a more comfortable seat." But the Bishop flatly said that he should not sit there at all. " It is against reason and against the practice of courts," he said, " that he should sit, for he has come on a summons, to answer for himself before his ordinary, and in respect of charges which have been brought against him. For the time of his answer, and so long as his case is being tried, it is right that he should stand where he is." Thus at the outset a dispute arose between Percy and the Bishop, with many hard words on both sides, and the whole assembly was thrown into confusion. The Duke then began to argue with the Bishop, and Courtenay did his best to let John of Gaunt have tit for tat. Lancaster, says the chronicler, was ashamed of himself because he could not talk the Bishop down ; so he began to threaten, and swore that he would humble not his pride only but that of all the bishops in England. " You trust too much in your father and mother," he said, " but they will not be able to help you. They will have enough to do to look after themselves." 164 John Wyclif. [1376- " I do not rely on my parents," said Courtenay, " any more than on yourself, or on any mortal man, but I rely on my God, who deserts none that put their trust in him." " I would rather take him by the hair," the Duke said in an audible aside, " and drag him out of the church, than put up with such talk from him." The bystanders were enraged to hear the Bishop insulted in his own cathedral. They not only broke into the wordy contest, but apparently made it plain that they were ready to pass from words to deeds. We are not told whether the city guard were present, inside or outside the cathedral ; but it is quite possi- ble that they were, and that both the King's son and the Marshal were a little overawed by the strength arrayed against them. At any rate the wrangle was so fierce that Courtenay found it necessary to dis- miss the assembly ; and thus the " lying glutton," as the St. Alban's monk piously calls Wyclif " Doctor Wicked-believe " was another and a more ingenious name for him escaped censure for the time. That day and the day which succeeded it were momentous in the records of the city of London, as well as in the lives of Wyclif, Lancaster, and Courte- nay. Parliament had met at Westminster in the afternoon, an hour or two before the assembly at St. Paul's, with the Duke of Lancaster presiding. Thomas of Woodstock, afterwards Duke of Glouces- ter, the King's fifth son, was present, with Lord Percy and the friends of the princes. Apparently there had been a rally of King's friends, by way LJ Q. . o co 2 1377] Persecution. 165 of outflanking the Bishop and the Corporation of London. A string of requests or " petitions " was made in the King's name, amongst which the most im- portant were that the city guard should in future be in command of a captain instead of a mayor (" major "), and that the Marshal of England should have power to arrest within the walls as he had outside the object being to deprive the Londoners of some of their privileges, and to clip their growing wings. But it happened that one of the most honourable citizens, John Philipot, recently appointed a parlia- mentary treasurer and auditor-general, in association with Walworth, was in the House, and he entered a vigorous protest against the action of the Court party. He spoke with so much force that the meet- ing is said to have broken up in confusion probably not before the majority had agreed to all the propo- sitions. Woodstock and Percy maintained that this had been done, and the Marshal seems to have lost no time in exercising his new authority. Next day there was a hastily summoned meeting of the City Council, with the aldermen and possibly the mayor in attendance, which discussed the attack made upon their privileges, and considered how it might be repelled. Whilst they were debating, two citizens of superior rank, Lords Fitzwalter and Guy de Brian, made their way into the meeting. They were allowed to remain on condition that they took an oath of loyalty to the Corporation, which they willingly did ; and then Fitzwalter made an inflammatory speech, informing the Council that the Marshal had already arrested and imprisoned one of 1 66 John Wyclif. [1376- their fellow-citizens. The Londoners had been at white heat since the previous afternoon, and now they could be restrained no longer. They rushed out, armed or unarmed, and, gathering volume as they went, made straight for Lord Percy's. The Marshal had fled, but the crowd released the prisoner and sacked the house. From thence they marched upon the Savoy; and Lancaster's palace, rich with the spoils of France and Castile, had a very narrow escape. Percy had fled to the Duke, and the two together were said to have crossed the river and appealed to the Princess of Wales at her palace in Kennington. There are two or three versions of the manner in which Lancaster escaped the vengeance of the mob ; but it is clear that the Princess befriended him at this crisis, and made terms between him and the enraged citizens. The latter are reported to have de- manded a fair trial for the Bishop of Winchester and Peter de la Mare. Probably it was only the leaders of the mob who made these stipulations, and not the city authorities. We know more than enough of the Duke of Lan- caster to account for the bitterness displayed against him at this period of his life. The disasters with which the decade had begun, the not very honour- able peace concluded with France and Castile at Bruges, his repeated attacks on the bishops and on the city, his close relations with the most corrupt persons about the Court, his apparent rivalry with the popular Prince of Wales, his opposition to the Good Parliament, his unscrupulous packing of the MONUMENT OF JOHN, DUKE OF LANCASTER, AND OF HIS WIFE CONSTANCE, IN OLD ST. PAUL'S. DUGDALE. 1377J Persecution, 167 Parliament of 1377, have been mentioned already. He had made so many enemies by this time that the more ignorant as well as the more unscrupulous amongst them either believed or pretended to believe that he had profited by the embezzlements of men like Lyons, and that, instead of being a legitimate prince, he had been palmed upon Edward III. by Queen Philippa. It is not surprising that, when his eldest brother died, he should have been thought capable of harbouring a design to get rid of his nephew Richard, and to secure the throne for him- self. The insult to Courtenay would scarcely have moved the citizens so deeply if their prejudice had not already been raised by such facts and suspicions as these. Walter Savage Landor, with the insight of genius, has imagined a conversation, occurring on the day of the riot, between John of Gaunt and Joanna of Kent, his cousin in blood, and the widowed mother of Richard. He represents the Princess of Wales as coming to rescue him in the Savoy palace, and standing with him at a window, looking down on the surging mob beneath. " How is this, my cousin," she says, " that you are besieged in your own house, by the citizens of London ? I thought you were their idol." To which he answers : " If their idol, madam, I am one which they may tread on as they list when down ; but which, by my soul and knight- hood ! the ten best battle-axes among them shall find it hard work to unshrine." He suspects that she has come with her guard to arrest him ; but they are reconciled by a reference to the dead Prince, 1 68 John Wycltf. [1376- and Joanna says to him : " Cousin, you loved your brother. Love, then, what was dearer to him than his life: protect what he, valiant as you have seen him, cannot ! The father, who foiled so many, hath left no enemies ; the innocent child, who can injure no one, finds them ! " She speaks to the angry citi- zens and deftly turns their anger. " Let none ever tell me again he is the enemy of my son . . . your darling child, Richard. Are your fears more lively than a poor weak female's ? than a mother's ? yours, whom he hath so often led to victory, and praised to his father, naming each he, John of Gaunt, the de- fender of the helpless, the comforter of the desolate, the rallying signal of the desperately brave ! " She stands surety for his loyalty and allegiance, and the fickle mob cheer the Duke as well as herself. The scene is imaginary ; but it is an imagination which will scarcely lead us far astray. John of Gaunt had very possibly brought more odium upon himself than his acts deserved. He was faithful to his sister-in-law and loyal to his nephew, whom, if he had lived but a few months longer, he would have succeeded on the throne. Reasons have been assigned for thinking that the abortive failure of the St. Paul's inquiry, and the evidence which it gave of Courtenay's ability to hold his own, were amongst the motives which led the Pope to take action against Wyclif in the spring of 1377. But, between the signing of the bulls and their formal delivery in England, Edward III. had brought his glorious reign to its shameful end ; and the appeal which Gregory had framed for the 1377] Persecution. 169 veteran King had to be re-directed to his grandson. Gregory himself did not live long enough to see the issue of his attack on the strongest living enemy of Rome ; but he must have died in full confidence that the thunders of the Church would eventually strike down this impious English heretic. Richard II. came to the throne on June 21st. His first Council included Courtenay, with the Bishops of Carlisle and Salisbury, the Earl of March, Lord Stafford, Sir John Stafford, Sir Henry Scrope, Sir John Devereux, and Sir Hugh Segrave. It was a " clerical " ministry, independent of, if not opposed to, John of Gaunt though Walsingham says that it was selected with his " connivance." Courtenay does not appear to have taken any active part in the government of the country. Indeed we find him flatly declining to obey the Council, having fallen into another desperate quarrel with Lancaster, and publicly excommunicated his friends and instru- ments for a gross violation of sanctuary to which Wyclif himself refers as " a horrible crime." His refusal to abstain from the repeated publication of the sentence, when called upon to do so by the Council, was the best thing which he could possibly have -done for the Duke. From that time forward Lancaster seems to have steadily regained his influ- ence ; and he gradually assumed the lead of the new Court party. The first Parliament of this reign met at Glouces- ter on October 13th, and one of its earliest duties was to consider whether payment of Peter's pence should continue to be made to the Pope. The 170 John Wyclif. [1376- question was referred to Wyclif, as a similar question had been referred to him eleven years before ; and the answer which he gave was perhaps more signifi- cant than some of his biographers have led us to suppose. As a matter of fact, the King's chaplain gave two answers in the same treatise first, the answer of a logical and independent mind, and then the answer of prudence and expediency. He was asked " whether the realm of England may legiti- mately, under urgent necessity of self-defence, pre- vent the resources of the kingdom from being carried away to foreigners, even though the Pope demand it under pain of censure, and by a strict appeal to our obedience." Wyclif begins by declaring that he must leave it to trained lawyers to say what should be done ac- cording to the canon law, the law of England, and the civil law, and undertakes to argue the matter out according to the law of Christ. The realm, he says, is quite entitled to keep its property, first as a mode of self-preservation, and next because the pay- ments to Rome originated as alms and charity, and they are no longer required as such, whereas the Bible and the Fathers teach us that charity begins at home. Again we are bound by the law of conscience and especially the rulers of the country are so bound to think of our own country first, and not to im- poverish it. In regard to Peter's pence especially, pious founders left their benefactions for the Church of England alone, that the clergy might live thereby, and give the rest in alms. Before allowing any of this wealth to leave the country, our rulers should take 13771 Persecution. 1 7 1 immediate steps to check the abuse, moved thereto by thinking of the souls of the departed, of their own responsibility, and of the safety of the realm. All the world would laugh at our " asinine folly " if we who dared to invade other countries for secular causes were afraid of holding back trust-funds in the name of God from unworthy claimants. The laws of nature, of Scripture, of conscience, bid us boldly say No to the Pope. What then (Wyclif goes on to consider) would the Pope do if we refused this money ? Assume that he would excommunicate the whole realm, put us under an interdict, declare our goods forfeit, as he did to the Florentines, raise a crusade against us, stamp us with the mark of schismatics, as Rome has done for the Greeks. But only an unworthy affection could be disturbed by the withdrawal of such charity as this. The Holy Father, seeing on one side how the Turk grows stronger and stronger in Europe (for reasons best known to God), and seeing on the other that the realm of England is conspicuous for its piety, would not create so grave a scandal through mere greed of temporalities. And even if some disciple of Anti- christ should break out into such madness, it is a consolation to think that censures of this kind are not binding in the sight of God. The limit of what Christians should give to the Pope is what his office demands ; but people have been taught to confound the office with the pomp surrounding it. On the other hand, it has been argued that if we kept this money in England, it would be a cause of wantonness, lubricity, and avarice. If so, then let 172 John Wyclif. 1376- us reduce the gifts of our benefactors to their former modest level, and devote the overplus to restore the true peace of the Church. Another danger would exist in the lack of perseverance which distinguishes Englishmen. (Impossible not to see in this phrase a touch of the disillusion which politics had already produced in Wyclif's mind !) " So far as this danger is concerned, there is nothing for it but to strengthen the whole nation in unanimous firmness, before the thing can be attempted. . . . I do not see how we could attempt to do this, unless the common con- sent of the whole people were obtained for it. . . . It would be rash for a private individual to give this advice, since a matter of such a kind ought to proceed from the agreement of the realm as a whole. . . . It would behove us therefore to use great forethought, and to have a unanimous Parliament, before the nation begins to carry such a work into effect, lest personal influence or private advantage should cause an injury hereafter to the common weal of the country." The drift of this treatise is sufficiently evident. Wyclif answered the question as to the legitimacy of refusing Peter's pence with an unqualified affirm- ative. It is not only our right and our interest to do it, but it is our duty. Yet he who has a duty to perform may be at liberty to select the time for per- forming it. " I advise you to wait until you are stronger and more unanimous. By suddenly refus- ing all pecuniary aids to the Pope, you would risk not only disaster abroad, but even civil war at home. I dare not take upon myself the responsibility of 1377] Persecution. 1 73 counselling you to stop the payment of Peter's pence." Two things will probably occur to a sympa- thetic reader in connection with this interesting State document, written, as we know that it was, when the substance of the Pope's bulls had already come to Wyclif's ears, or at least the knowledge that such bulls. had been framed and despatched against him. One thing is that the writer could not have been a fanatic, and was far from losing his head through hatred of Rome, since, when he had the power of egging on the Commons and the barons to strike a telling blow at the Papacy, he forbore to do so from motives of wise calculation and prudence. And another thing which strikes us is that this calculation and this prudence were by no means based on selfish considerations, suggested by the aforementioned bulls, for never had Wyclif spoken or written in a more uncompromising spirit of the claims of Rome, the independence of England, and the freedom of the individual conscience. The paper was addressed to the King and the great Council. It would very probably be read aloud to both Houses, and certainly the bishops would be made acquainted with its contents, so that if the Reformer's object had been to strike a bargain, and to palter with his convictions, he could not have done it in a more unfortunate manner. The Parliament which received and acted upon this remarkable compound of anti-papal stricture and patriotic prudence was of course not the same as that which had met early in the year, in which 174 John Wyclif. [1377 the Commons had been packed by John of Gaunt, and which had discharged its functions by the first week of March. The demise of the Crown had been followed by the issue of new writs, and the new members would doubtless be thoroughly loyal, well- disposed to the Princess of Wales, and in perfect accord with the King's Council. It is probable that the elections had been free from interference ; the loyalty of the country would be taken for granted, and certainly the Duke of Lancaster was not just then strong enough to influence them, even if he had been minded to play the Princess false, which there is no reason to suppose. It is not without signifi- cance that this first Parliament of Richard II., chosen without any bias on the part of Wyclif s patrons, should have treated him with so much distinction, consulting him on a State question of capital im- portance, and receiving (and virtually approving) his rejoinder to the papal bulls. f7v% , ^^ e i vV //AiV H ^*Sa i y 1 ^^\ v. ^ yfejl ,f- \V l/ff * J V3; ^)1 // i I l TS=3g *^^^ ^^^ sgiF ^\7%&jm&$^~\ C (fi^Jk!\ /^flsl * o 6 , f0.9J40 1 ( V^VOcO^^tJ v^s f^rjj LlV^* 5 " jj 5 ^ S^ I n*H[ T&% j , V. v^^T/^ Vv\.^ 'L* a /^J >F \iJf CHAPTER X. POPE GREGORY S BULLS. May 22, 1377, as already mentioned, Pope Gregory XI. signed his bulls against Wyclif. They had not been received in England before the death of Edward III. on June 21st. It would be necessary to recall them if they had been de- spatched, or at any rate to send a covering letter for the personal appeal which was addressed to the King. In view of the consequent changes and pre-occupations of the English Govern- ment, Gregory would naturally allow two or three months to pass before he opened the matter. It does not appear that the documents were actually delivered in England until the Gloucester Parliament had been sitting for over a fortnight. There were in all five bulls, one of which was addressed to the King, one to the University of 176 John Wyclif, wzn- Oxford, and the other three to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London conjointly. Gregory called upon the Archbishop and Bishop to examine into the truth of the nineteen charges which had been brought against Wyclif, and which were set forth in the bulls. The ecclesiastics were to warn the Government of the country that they were har- bouring a dangerous heretic, and were to demand his arrest ; but if this demand were not complied with, they were to cite him to appear at Rome. As an alternative course, which may or may not have been suggested beforehand by Courtenay it was certainly in keeping with his personal courage and independence the last bull invited the prelates to arrest the accused (assuming that he was found to be guilty of heresy and that the civil arm would not touch him), and to await the sentence of the Pope. The bull addressed to the King was an appeal for the royal favour and protection on behalf of the two prelates in their action against Wyclif whom Gregory described as holding and teaching the "unlearned doctrine " of Marsilius of Padua, damnatce memories, who stands condemned by Pope John XXII., of happy memory. Writing to Oxford, the Pope declared that he could not but wonder and lament that, by their sloth and laziness, the authorities of the University per- mitted tares to spring up amongst the genuine wheat of their famous soil, and not only to spring up but, still more pernicious, to come to maturity, without taking any trouble to root them out. The Holy Father had been all the more distressed because the 1379] Pope Gregory s Bulls. 177 flourishing of these tares had been recognised at Rome before any notice had been taken of it in Eng- land, where it was necessary that the remedy should be applied. After more expostulation he strictly en- joined the University, in virtue of their obedience to the Holy See, and under penalty of being deprived of all graces, indulgences, and privileges bestowed upon them by the said See, that for the future they should suffer no man to teach the condemned opin- ions within the University. The nineteen charges which had been made against Wyclif, and which were endorsed by the Pope's bulls, attributed to him the following opinions : 1. Not even the universal consent of mankind since the time of Christ has power to ordain that Peter and his successors should hold political dominion over the world. 2. God himself could not give to any man and his heirs a civil dominion for ever. 3. Charters of human origin, concerning a per- petual inheritance for the future, are futile. 3. Everyone that is finally justified not only has a right to, but actually enjoys, all the good things of God. 5. Man can only ministerially give to his natural child, or to a child of imitation in the school of Christ, temporal or eternal dominion. 6. If God is [omnipotent], temporal lords may lawfully and meritoriously take away the property which has accrued to a delinquent Church. 7. Whether the Church be in such a state or not it is not my business to examine, but the business 178 John Wyclif. [1377 of temporal lords, who, if they find it in such a state, are to act boldly, and on pain of damnation to take away its temporalities. 8. We know that it is impossible that the Vicar of Christ should, purely by his bulls, or by them with the will and consent of himself and his College of Cardinals, qualify or disqualify anyone. 9. It is not possible for any man to be excom- municated, unless he be first and principally ex- communicated by himself. 10. Nobody is excommunicated, suspended, or tormented with other censures so as to be the worse for it, unless it be in the cause of God. 11. Cursing or excommunication does not bind simply of itself, but only so far as it is denounced against an adversary of the law of Christ. 12. Christ has given to his disciples no example of a power to excommunicate subjects principally for their denying temporal things, but has rather given them an example to the contrary. 13. The disciples of Christ have no power forci- bly to exact temporal things by censures. 14. It is not possible even for the absolute power of God to effect that, if the Pope or any other pretend that he binds or looses absolutely, he does actually so bind or loose. 15. We ought to believe that then only does the Pope bind or loose when he conforms himself to the law of Christ. 16. This ought to be universally believed, that every priest rightly ordained has a power of adminis- tering every one of the sacraments, and, by conse- 13791 Pope Gregory s Bulls. 179 quence, of absolving every contrite person from any sin. 17. It is lawful for kings to take away tem- poralities from ecclesiastics who habitually abuse them. 18. Whether temporal lords, or holy Popes, or saints, or the head of the Church, which is Christ, have endowed the Church with goods of fortune or of grace, and have excommunicated those who take away its temporalities, it is notwithstanding lawful, by the condition implied in the endowment, to strip her of temporalities for an adequate offence. 19. An ecclesiastic, yea, even the Pope of Rome, may lawfully be corrected by subjects, and even by the laity, and may also be accused or impeached by them. We have only to carry ourselves back in spirit to the intellectual and religious atmosphere of the four- teenth century in order to realise how overwhelming such a charge as that now brought against Wyclif must have appeared to every pious person who accepted the allegations as correct. Even those who thought with him, who were able to keep pace with his logic, and knew how reverently his beliefs were entertained, must have stood aghast in many instances at the temerity with which he assailed the position of the Popes and the current orthodoxy of his day. And Wyclif himself could scarcely hope to escape the censures of Rome, or even of the English bishops if they were compelled to pronounce a formal judg- ment on his conclusions. He knew that it was im- possible to obtain a perfectly impartial tribunal within 180 John Wyclif. n377- the Church, and probably foresaw that only the lapse of time could discredit a system which had required so many generations to build it up. The reception of the bulls was very different in different quarters. Courtenay alone rejoiced in his opportunity, and prepared to silence effectually this discordant and disturbing note within the national Church. Sudbury invited the Chancellor of Oxford to send him assessors and doctors of divinity, stating that he meant to hold an inquiry as requested by the Pope, but implying that he did not intend to go be- yond the inquiry. At Oxford there was a decided feeling of annoyance over Gregory's message ; and the King's Council could not fail to look with jealousy and dislike on the introduction of the bulls, which, strictly regarded, were a defiance of English law and an encroachment on the authority of the Crown. It was necessary for Wyclif, in view of his official relations with Parliament, to send in a statement dealing with the bull which had been addressed to the King. Perhaps he was called upon to do so ; or he may have thought it only respectful on his part to make his position clear to a body of men who had placed their confidence in him, and some of whom would certainly take the side of his accusers. There can be no doubt that the open censure of the Pope marked another important turning-point in his life, and that from this time forward he would have a largely increased number of his countrymen ranged against him. The paper presented to Parliament was in almost the same terms as that read before the 1379] Pope Gregory s Bulls, 181 Pope's Commissioners at Lambeth, to which we shall presently come ; but it differs in its conclusion. * This" he says, " is in some respect an answer to the bull. I want to be considered as delivering these conclusions like a grain of faith, separated from the chaff in which the unwelcome tares are burned, which tares, after their red blossom of malodorous revenge, provide materials for Antichrist against the genuine writings of faith. An unmistakable sign whereof is that a poison born of the Evil One reigns in the hearts of the clergy, a pride which consists in the lust of mastery, whose mate, the lust of earthly goods, begets children of the devil, whilst the children of evangelical poverty are extinct. You may judge of the fruitfulness of this procreation by the fact that many even of the children of poverty give coun- tenance to the degenerate brood, either by speech or by silence, whether because they are not strong enough or because they do not dare, on account of the seed of the man of sin which has been sown in their hearts, or from a slavish fear of losing such temporalities as they have, to make a stand for evan- gelical poverty." The tenour of the statement made by Wyclif to the University was very similar to this, and it is evident from the bitterness of the few sentences just quoted that the keen and natural indignation of the man could not be altogether suppressed. His moral and intellectual appreciation of the unchristlike attitude of the Christian Churches of his day, sensi- tive and palpitating as it was, had been stung to the quick. He would have been something very different 1 82 John Wyclif, n377 from what we know him to have been if he could have seen anything less than Antichrist in the viru- lence with which an advocate of ecclesiastical poverty was attacked by the Vicar of Christ and by the English prelates. How does Oxford bear the scrutiny of the nine- teenth century in this connection, across an interval of five hundred years? Half a millennium has passed since the premier University drew to the close of her first golden age. For Wyclif Oxford was still the head-quarters of thought, and work, and love. It was to Black Hall in Oxford that he hurried, as soon as the session was concluded at Gloucester, in order to hold communion with his life-long friends as another famous son of the Eng- lish Church, in circumstances curiously contrasted, yet in a certain sense parallel with those of Wyclif at this crisis in his faith, went up from Littlemore in the memory of some who are still living, to see, as he puts it, " those familiar affectionate companions and counsellors, who in Oxford were given to me, one after another, to be my daily solace and relief ; and all those others, of great name and high exam- ple, who were my thorough friends, and showed me true attachment in times long past ; and also those many young men, whether I knew them or not, who have never been disloyal to me byword or by deed." Wyclif was approaching a mental and moral crisis quite as searching for him as that through which Newman had passed in 1843. His doubts on the subject of transubstantiation had already begun to take form and substance, and he must have felt that t379i Pope Gregory s Bulls. 183 the action of Rome and Canterbury would impel him to a decision from which even his warmest friends would be likely to start back in alarm. But up to this point the question was not of tran- substantiation. The Archbishop and the Bishop, seeing that Wyclif had betaken himself to Oxford, and allowing the claim which he had thus tacitly made on his University, wrote on' December 18th to demand that the Chancellor and the theological au- thorities should hold an inquiry and make a report in answer to the papal bull, and that they should then remit the accused to London, to appear to their own citation. Oxford stood the test. The Chancellor directed Wycliff to remain within the hall where he was lodging, and the " conclusions ' which Gregory had condemned were duly examined, together with Wyclif's rejoinder. The decision arrived at was of a most important character. Oxford declared the conclusions to be true, and not heretical, though they were so expressed as to be open to misconception. With this testimonial from his University Wyclif was able to make his appearance before the prelates with a stout heart, but probably not without a con- viction that his struggle against the papal Court was rapidly coining to an issue. Meanwhile his most implacable enemies must have regarded all these things as mere by-play, and they must have been impatient for the discipline of the Holy See to produce its natural effect. The lightning had been hurled, and they wanted to hear the unmistakable thunders of Rome. It was all 184 John Wyclif. H377- very well for the nobles and the young King's mother to lull the heretic into fancied security, and for his University to stand by him in a spirit of simple partisanship ; but Rome had spoken, and the efforts of the orthodox, continued over a series of years, were about to meet their due reward. Devout sons of the Church, and good friars in particular, had been scandalised and tricked often enough, but at last the fox was run to earth, and the whole hunt were longing to see him taken. Archbishop Sudbury had originally cited Wyclif to appear on the 18th of December at St. Paul's, where, ten short months before, he had slipped through Courtenay's hands, owing to the disturbed condition of the city, and the deadly feud between the citizens and the Duke of Lancaster. It would not be strange if this appointment was counter- manded because the citizens, with the easy versa- tility of mankind in the mass, were now more likely to be on Lancaster's side than against him. Possibly London had not changed its mind and its sympa- thies in regard to Wyclif, except that Gregory's bulls must have made it more Wycliffite than ever; but John of Gaunt had almost ceased to vex the citizens. They were enthusiastic for the Princess Joan, who had not concealed her liking for the Court preacher ; and they had men to lead them, like brave John of Northampton, who had boasted that no bull from the Pope of Rome should harm John Wyclif within the liberties of the city. The citizens had been stirred, no doubt, as Oxford had been stirred, and liberal-minded Christians 1379] Pope Gregory s Bulls. 185 throughout England, by a moving appeal just circu- lated far and wide over London and the provinces. It was an anonymous tract, vigorous and eloquent, calling upon all good clerks and Christians to stand together at that important crisis, and rally in defence of the conclusions of Wyclif, and the independence of the English Church. " If these conclusions are heretical," said the pamphleteer,- " Holy Scripture itself falls to pieces." The tract has been generally ascribed to Wyclif. Whoever wrote it, it seems to have been very effective, and the Londoners were enthusiastic for the man who was making such a bold stand against the Pope. At any rate the prelates lost their nerve, and they were compelled to change the venue. Sudbury postponed the hearing until after Christmas, and summoned the accused to his town-house near the Lamb Hithe. The Archbishop was just now on as good terms as ever with the Duke, and perhaps, if the truth were known, he was not sorry to shift his ground almost within earshot of the royal palace at Kennington. The whole thing was more Courtenay's affair than his, and, if Courtenay could not answer for the rabble round his own cathedral, the nearer they drew to the protection of the Court, the better Sudbury would be pleased. So, on the appointed day, John Wyclif came before his judges at Lambeth, and with his cool collected look he scanned the group of assessors doctors of decretals, professors of theology and of the "sacred page," whether secular clergymen, monks, or friars, who had come up for the occasion from 1 86 John Wyclif. L1377- Oxford and Cambridge. It was perhaps not he who would be most disconcerted by that mutual recog- nition. He had brought with him a written paper of declarations, by way of defence against the charges. After the preliminaries were over, and Sudbury had reminded him what it was that he was called upon to answer, he would be allowed to read his defence ; and the paper in which his apology was comprised has been handed down to us carefully preserved by his stern censor, Thomas of Walden. This document, practically re-stating and justifying all the conclusions which had been attributed to him, opened in a strain of dignified humility. "To begin with," he said, " I make my public profession, as I have often done elsewhere, professing and claiming with my whole heart to be, by the grace of God, a sound Christian, and that so far as I am able, whilst there is breath in my body, I speak forth and defend the law of Christ. Furthermore, if, by ignorance or any other cause, I fall short in this, I beseech my God for pardon, and I do here and now revoke and withdraw it, submitting myself to the correction of holy Mother Church. ... I desire to state in writing my conviction in regard to that whereof I have been accused, which I will defend even to the death, as I hold that all Christians ought to do and in particular the Roman Pontiff, and the other priests of the Church." Then the indomitable man set himself to expound and expand his conclusions, and stated them all over again with increased clearness and pungency, 1379] Pope Gregory s Bulls, 187 neither shirking nor fining down, but treating every charge as a text for new exposition. Had it been arranged (by others, of course, than Courtenay) that he should have his say, completely and deliberately, and that then this abortive farce of the Pope's juris- diction in England should be brought to an end ? The Council, or at all events the Princess of Wales, had resolved that there should be no definite action upon Gregory's bulls ; and on the previous evening, according to some accounts, but at any rate before the conclusion of the hearing, one Lewis Clifford brought them word from the King's mother that they were not to pass judgment on Wyclif. The reference of the St. Alban's chronicle to these pro- ceedings is so quaint, and the indignation of the writer is so natural in an orthodox monk of his day, that a few sentences may be quoted here. " It would be better to say nothing than to speak of the indifferent and slothful manner in which the two Bishops performed the task entrusted to them. . . . On the arrival of the day (instante die) appointed for the examination of that apostate, through fear of a reed shaken by the wind, they made their words softer than oil, to the public loss of their own dignity and to the damage of the uni- versal Church. The men who had sworn that they would not obey the very barons and princes of the kingdom until they had punished the excesses of the heresiarch himself, according to the commands of the Pope, were paralysed with terror at the sight of some fellow from the court of the Princess Joan, who was neither a knight of good standing nor a 1 38 John Wyclif. H377- man of any influence, one Lewis Clifford to wit, who pompously ordered them that they should not pre- sume to come to any formal decision concerning the aforesaid John. " It is uncertain how far the inquiry before Sudbury and Courtenay was allowed to proceed. The Prin- cess and the Duke were not the only bars to its progress. Possibly Wyclif had read his defence, and Courtenay, it may be, relieving the Gallio-like Arch- bishop of his function, had exchanged a few vigor- ous words with the accused. His judges were awk- wardly placed, and were anything but masters of the situation. The few contemporary references to this dramatic scene unfortunately do not condescend to many details, and the details which they give are not consistent. According to the continuation of Murimuth's history, " the Archbishop imposed silence on him and all other persons, in regard to the matter in question, in the presence of the Duke of Lancaster," this being evidently mentioned as a proof of Sudbury's courage " forbidding him thenceforth to meddle with or dwell upon the points at issue, or to suffer others," his Poor Priests, for instance, " to spread them abroad. And for a time both he and they kept silence " which is not very likely, " but at length, relying on the temporal authorities, they again took up the same opinions, and others which were far worse, and persevered in their mischievous errors." Then the inevitable citizens, who had tramped across London Bridge, and through the Borough to the Archbishop's chapel, put themselves in evidence 1379] Pope Gregory s Bulls. 189 again ; and it must have been clear to Courtenay that, even if the King's mother and uncle had not protected this obstinate sower of tares, still the head- strong merchants, tradesmen, and apprentices from his own diocese would have made it extremely diffi- cult for him to give full effect to the papal bulls. As it was, the irruption of the citizens broke up the proceedings, and Wyclif, as just said, escaped with a mild warning. The St. Alban's chronicler, who was living at the time, declares that the crafty heretic (versipellis) tricked his examiners through the favour and zeal of the men of London, scoffed at the Bishops, and slipped away. It is possible enough, considering the force and boldness of Courtenay's character, that he may have had it in his mind and openly expressed his inten- tion to condemn Wyclif in spite of the request of the Princess of Wales, even at the risk of personal dis- aster to himself. That would explain the holding of the sitting after Clifford's message, the presence and watchfulness of the Duke, and the turbulence of the crowd of citizens. It must be remembered that Sudbury and Courtenay were acting not merely as prelates but also as the Commissioners of the Pope ; and the Bishop at all events may have felt and declared that his duty to the Holy Father was higher than his duty to the Princess. He is not likely to have changed his opinion on this point, though he may well have despaired for the moment of reaching the heretic behind the protection of the royal family and the public favour. The death of Gregory, which would in any case 190 John Wyclif. [1377- have put an end to the Commission, took place on the 27th of March. The news would not reach Eng- land for some days later, and could not have been anticipated at the hearing in Lambeth Chapel. On the contrary, the authority of the Pope and the de- termination of Courtenay must have been consider- ably strengthened by the recent return of the papal Court to Rome. The fact is manifest that the bulls of 1377, ob- tained by the religious Orders and acted upon by the Archbishop and Bishop, were not only a venture- some experiment against the laws of England and the notorious feelings of Englishmen, but also a grave tactical mistake on the part of the Holy See. The mere introduction of bulls into the country was an exasperating challenge to the English Parliament and Church, and could only weaken the cause which they were intended to promote. Courtenay, with some of the bishops and the friars, may have rejoiced over their promulgation, but it is doubtful if anyone else shared their feelings. The Arch- bishop certainly fought shy of them. The young King's advisers resolved at once to set them aside; and Oxford, as we have seen, was morally and in- tellectually strong enough to decide that the con- clusions which the Pope had declared heretical were substantially true. By the mistake of his enemies Wyclif came out of the ordeal stronger and more influential than he had been at any previous period of his life. From the time of his first prosecution in the spring of 1377 to the dark days in which he was accused of having 1379] Pope Gregory s Bulls. 191 incited the peasants to revolt, if not indeed to the end of his earthly career, he was the most important religious factor in England. Nevertheless it is clear that his enemies did not give him much rest between their successive attacks. The English ecclesiastics had made up their minds to push the assault on Wyclif's position to an issue, and even the death of Gregory, with the subsequent schism, only served to interpose a brief delay. The outcome of the Lambeth hearing was naturally unsatisfactory to them, and they doubtless took counsel with the Roman Curia on the earliest pos- sible opportunity, with a view to further and more effectual proceedings. It does not plainly appear whether Pope Urban took any immediate step to bring Wyclif to account, but there are passages in one of the Reformer's most important and well-con- sidered works which read as though he had had something to answer in 1379. He wrote in the De Veritate Sanctae Scripturae in the spring of this year : " I protested in writing, and it was sent to the papal Curia by the hands of two of the bishops, that I wish to insist upon my declaration, which I have made in the language of Holy Scripture and the sacred doctors ; for my salvation in two senses de- pends upon that language, and my double death would follow upon its contradiction. . . . Surely it is clear from what I have done that I have no fear in consequence of those conclusions, since I cir- culated them through a great part of England and of Christendom, and even to the Roman Curia, in order that they might be inquired into, at any rate 192 John Wyclif. L1379 indirectly. ... I have no misgiving as to the truth of the said conclusions, for I am willing that they should be examined not only by the Curia but by the whole Church militant and triumphant, that is to say our holy Mother Church, to which I have humbly submitted myself and far be it from me to exclude the Roman Church, which I hold to be the head of all the militant Churches. Wherefore, since I wished the matter at stake to be communicated to the clergy and laity, I collected and forwarded thirty-three conclusions, written in both languages." There is something which needs to be cleared up in connection with this bold challenge, and with the facts which preceded and followed it. Urban's own troubles, and the illness of Wyclif in 1379, may partly account for the delay of formal and public prosecution ; but it would be interesting to learn the exact circumstances under which the two bishops sent the above-mentioned protest to Rome, and the answer (if any) which was made to the challenge. POPE URBAN VI. 1378-89. CHAPTER XI WYCLIF THE EVANGELIST. HE title of Doctor Evangeli- cus, bestowed on John Wyclif by certain of his contempora- ries and successors, was un- questionably earned by the importance which he attached ^^2!&ffS&^3^il to ^ e worc ^ s f Holy Writ, by J^Q^^^^^^ l his heroic resolve to translate the Bible into English, and by his commission of the " Poor Priests," who were sent out for the express purpose of reading and preach- ing upon the English Scriptures. His action in appointing and commissioning these enthusiastic preachers of the Gospel has been com- pared with that of Dominic and Francis a hundred and fifty years earlier. The parallel is not very close, but we can hardly doubt that the Reformer was inspired by those two conspicuous examples to 13 193 194 John Wyclif. t1360- adopt a similar method, in the hope of re-awakening the conscience of Christian men and women. He could think of no better way of rousing the spirits of his ignorant countrymen than to put the Bible in the hands of devoted missionaries, and to bid them take it as their text whenever and wherever they could get an audience together. If he gave them any definite rules for their guidance beyond this, the rules have not been handed down to us.* The mendicant Orders have preserved their constitutions, which strike one as being almost too elaborate to have proceeded from the original founders of those Orders. The constitution of the Russet Priests may have been from first to last an unwritten law, as simple as the earliest Christian commission on record " Go into the world and preach the gospel." At any rate that is practically the limit of our knowledge concerning them with one exception hereafter to be mentioned. We do not know when the first Poor Priest was despatched, nor how many were commissioned, nor where they went, nor what was the measure of their success. We know their work, but not their names. We recognise the tree by its fruits, and the best evidence of their probably life-long labours is to be found in the conspicuous and astonishing vitality of so-called Lollard ism throughout the next few generations. The teach- ings of Wyclif and his missionaries, based upon a simple and familiar treatment of the Bible, which had hitherto been jealously and mysteriously with- * See, however, Chapter XIV. 13791 Wyclif the Evangelist. 195 held, sank during these generations so deeply into the popular mind that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found all England saturated with biblical knowledge. It is marvellous that such widespread results should have left behind them so little visible testimony of the process by which they were brought about. But indeed the very silence of history as to the personality of Wyclif s Poor Priests, and as to the details of their appointment and mission, is eloquent of the simplicity, the enthusiasm, the single-minded devotion with which they set about their work. Knowledge of and reverence for Holy Writ, an un- bleached sheepskin, a broad hat, and a pair of san- dals made up their moral and material equipment. Some of them were certainly university men, whilst some had graduated by the side of the master whom they revered, in no other learning than that of " the sacred page." It may be that the more scholarly amongst them carried copies of the Bible, or of the Gospels.only, made industriously by their own hands, at Oxford, at London, or at Lutterworth. In the same way they may have taken with them a few of Wyclif s sermons, or notes from the sermons which they had heard him preach. But the humblest of them all, it is very easy to believe, had nothing more than a well-furnished memory, together with a tested power to move the hearts of their fellow-men. Naturally the first translations made by Wyclif from the Latin Bible were taken in hand some time before the Poor Priests went forth on their mission. It is impossible to fix a date for the beginning of the 196 John Wyclif. [1360- work by Wyclif himself, or for its continuation by Nicholas Hereford at Oxford, John Purvey at Lut- terworth, and their assistants. Nor would it be easy to say when Wyclif began to write for his contempo- raries in English, or what is the date of his earliest English works which we now possess. But as to the motives which led him to translate the Bible for popular use, we are left in no doubt whatever. In a work, Of the Truth of Holy Scripture, written soon after his second escape from the hands of Courtenay, and before his English Bible was com- pleted, he puts his case both clearly and fully. God's will, he says, is plainly expressed in the two Testaments taken together. Christ's law suffices for Christ's Church, without requiring the addition or substitution of another priest-made law, and the Christian who understands it has enough for his needs in this world. The direct message and voice of God to man in the words of Holy Writ, without any necessity for an intermediary this was his " passionate conviction of truth " ; and we can un- derstand how such a declaration would shock the conventional orthodoxy of the fourteenth century. In another place he lays it down that " Christen men and women, olde and young, shulden study fast in the New Testament, and no simple man of wit shuldebe aferdeunmesurably to study in the text of holy Writ. Pride and covetise of clerks is cause of their blyndnesse and heresie, and priveth them fro verie understonding of holy Writ. The New Testa- ment is of ful autoritie, and open to understonding of simple men, as to the poynts that ben most need- 1379] Wyclif the Evangelist. 197 ful to salvation. The texte of holy Writ ben wordes of everlasting life, and he that kepeth mekenes and charitie hath the trewe understondynge and perfec- tion of all holy Writ. It seemeth open heresy to say that the Gospel with his truth and freedom suffiseth not to salvation of Christen men without kepynge of ceremonies and statutes of sinful men and un- kunninge, that ben made in the tyme of Sathanas and Antichriste." Wyclif, of course, exercised a notable influence on the history of English letters. He had been born into the early renaissance of literature, as well as into the early reformation of religion ; and since he was himself, in each of these two domains, a not in- considerable part of the epoch through which he lived, a brief glance at the literary aspects of his century may help us to appreciate his position as a pioneer of progress in the creation of the language which we speak and write to-day. In and about the fourteenth century, English, in common with the other languages of modern Europe, made an important advance towards a defi- nite written form. The central and western tongues had gradually developed themselves out of the in- terfused vocabularies and grammatical types of the Classical, Celtic, Scandinavian, and German stocks. Men of learning and imagination in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and England were only just begin- ning to find free literary expression in the familiar languages which they had been accustomed to use in their domestic and social intercourse. Latin was for the clergy, for philosophers and students; it could 198 John Wyclif. [1360 never be a fit medium for modern thought and fancy. And yet, where except in Latin could lit- erary expression be found ? "The delicacy," says Hallam, " that distinguishes in words the shades of sentiment, the grace that brings them to the soul of the reader with the charm of novelty united to clearness, could not be attainable in a colloquial jargon." Nor could such a jargon possibly attain to distinction and style where (as in our own country) the speech of the people was not the speech of the Court, the talk of the peasant was not the talk of those who owned the soil, the tongue of men who sought for justice was not the tongue of such as had to administer it. Where was genius to find her niche, until the language of everyday life, the language of the nation and not of the governing race, began to show its predilections, to set up its standard, to attract the notice and favour of men whose imaginations were already on fire and craving for utterance ? Whilst the Schoolmen were struggling bravely but lamely for freedom of religious life and thought, the French writers of fabliaux, pastourelles, and love songs, followed by the German minnesingers and meistersingers, broke the silence to which poetic souls had long been condemned, and lightly pre- luded the nobler strains of Dante and Petrarch. Higher elevation of thought and language it was impossible for poet to attain in those days than the height attained by the two devout Florentines, whose poems, religious and even devotional in their tone, largely secularized the mood and phraseology 1379] Wyclif Hie Evangelist. 199 of religion for the interpretation of human interests and passions. Italy was naturally ahead of other countries in the dignity and suppleness of her new literature, for Italian and the Italians had been hel- lenised many centuries ago, and the younger race was inheriting the intellectual property of its ances- tors. The literature of the northern nations was of slower growth, and their hellenisation was yet to come. Before the middle of the fourteenth century there was little or nothing in England which could be called literature no Greek at all, Latin with a mere savour of latinity, and of English no more than a few rude songs, mainly provincial and political, a few still ruder miracle plays, and a handful of hazardous translations from the Latin or French. It is true that as early as 1327 William of Shoreham had made his English version of the Psalms ; and not long afterwards the hermit Rolle of Hampole made an- other version, followed by a didactic poem, The Pricke of Conscience. But Wyclif was a middle- aged man before Chaucer indebted, like himself, to the protection and good-will of the Duke of Lan- caster translated The Romaunt of the Rose, and pro- duced, in Anglo-Norman amalgam, The Court of Love. John Wyclif may or may not have had all these English manuscripts, and others which succeeded them, under his notice, at one time or another in his active intellectual life. That he read some of them, the Psalms, the Pricke of Conscience, the Again- bite, the translation of the Manuel des Ptche's, 200 John Wyclif. [1360- and the Vision of Piers Plowman is most prob- able ; for copies would surely be at Oxford, and such as were not there he would hardly fail to see in Lon- don. It would be rash, however, to assume that the ardent devotee of scholastic theology, the earnest- minded student whose ambition was to earn distinc- tion amongst the secular clergy, the prominent ecclesiastic whose soul was immersed in the stern realities of the day, was attracted to any sort of profane writing outside the limits of religious expo- sition and devotion. There is little evidence in his own writings of a taste for dealing with lighter topics, or for greater freedom of imagination and treatment. On the other hand, this is not what we should expect to find in connection with the serious controversies in which he was engaged. We know that Wyclif was a bright and pleasant companion in everyday life and at the table, for his enemies twisted it into a charge against him. There is no reason why he should not have read the diverting fables of Sir John Mandeville, or even some of the sugared lays and translations of the courtly Chaucer. It is not out of the bounds of possibility that he should have seen before he died one or more of the stories which Chaucer subsequently collected in the Canterbury Tales. Be this as it may, there is no room for doubting that Wyclif had pored over the manuscripts at Balliol and Merton, and the costly treasures of Bishop Aungervile, better known as Richard de Bury, lately removed for safe keeping to Durham College, hard by Balliol, where two centuries nearer 1379] Wyclif the Evangelist. 201 to our own time the foundations of Trinity were to be laid. In one or other of these calm retreats he would find sundry versions and paraphrases of sacred history, more or less fragmentary, more or less freely rendered by monks or clerks of the northern or western shires, of the midlands or the south-east. One such manuscript, the Cursor Mundi, produced about the time of Wyclif s birth, and soon widely popular as a metrical version of Bible history, would certainly be found at Oxford, together with sermons in English, and Scripture stories in verse which were occasionally read in the churches. Wyclif, it must be confessed, would have fair reason to think that the partial translations of the Bible which had been made up to his own day could be improved upon without much difficulty. When they were not intended as mere service-books, which was the case with the different versions of the Psalms, these Scriptural paraphrases had the charac- ter of story-books for diversion. No serious attempt had been made to turn the whole of Scripture, or even the New Testament, into an accurate English equivalent. The prejudice against such a proceed- ing was too strong to be lightly faced ; it was com- mon to all Christendom, and has never been over- come in countries which have adhered to the Latin rfte. Wyclif was prepared to face it, but he felt it necessary, as we have seen, to justify and explain his action with considerable deliberation. He cannot have entertained any delusions as to the reception which his English Bible would meet with from the ecclesiastical authorities, and from the seculars and 202 John Wyclif. L1360- regulars who prided themselves most upon their orthodoxy. If, as is likely enough, he had nursed the idea of his translation from a comparatively early age, it may well have been that his denuncia- tion as a heretic by the Pope, and Courtenay, and the friars, finally nerved him to carry out his half- formed intentions. It was a bold venture in every way. Wyclif was more the cleric than the man of letters, and, great as were his services in promoting the formal and academic use of his mother tongue, in clearing and widening the sources of what was soon to become a broad and limpid stream, and in cutting as it were the matrix of the type in which the English Bible was to be printed and perpetuated for all time, there is assuredly no necessity to claim for him the laurels of literary excellence. That which especially connects Wyclif with the course of English literature and the development of the English language is the fact that the moment of his arrival at maturity maturity as a man, as a re- ligious thinker, as a political seer, and as a social in- novator coincided with the definitive triumph of the English tongue. Long despised by the Norman Court and aristocracy, from the French queens and their favourites down to the humblest hanger-on of the ruling classes, and equally despised by the clergy, monks, friars, and lawyers, whose debased Latin was their only current coin of speech, the language of our English forefathers suddenly, almost dra- matically, stood forth as the dominant tongue in every department of the national life. The formal 13791 Wyclif the Evangelist. 203 re-instatement of English was a jubilee gift which Edward gave to his country in 1 362, when Parliament ordered legal pleadings to be conducted in the popu- lar speech, on the ground that French was " much unknown." The date of this statute may be taken as the first turning-point of the English language and literature, as it was within a little of being the turning-point of religion in England. The change itself, to be sure, had not been so sudden as its formal sanction was striking and authoritative. The mass of the people, it need not be said, had always spoken English a varying and undigested English, without standard or model for three hundred years, in one part favouring a German type, in another French, and in some cases even tending to a sort of spurious latinisation, but still essentially the Eng- lish of Alfred and Edward and Harold. It is impossible without a vigorous effort of the imagination to realise the condition of our ancestors between the middle of the eleventh century and the middle of the fourteenth, divided as they were in heart and sympathy from the ruling race by this most effectual of all barriers, and thrown back upon themselves not only in matters connected with law and government, but also, as it must have been to a very large extent, in religion and social life. Every- one remembers the patriotic complaint, that " chil- dren in school, against the use and manner of all other nations, be compelled for to leave their own language and for to construe their lessons and their things in French ; and so they have since Normans first came to England." There must have been the 204 John Wyclif. [1360 same jealous feeling in regard to the preference given to the Norman-French at Court, in public offices of all kinds, and in trials at law, as well as to the use of Latin in religious services. It is easy to conceive the wonderful reaction which would follow the adoption of English where French had formerly been used, and the definite recognition of the national tongue for almost every public purpose. And no- where would the reaction and relief be greater than in the religious domain, when Wyclif s Poor Priests brought the gospel home to the poor, and " monk- ish Latin " gave place to the English Bible. Wyclif's prose was a little more scholastic than Mandeville's, and takes more of an academic charac- ter from the original text out of which it was translated. It is true that Mandeville's work is a translation, as he expressly states, for he seems to have made his first observations in Latin. " Ye shall understand," he says, " that I have put this book out of Latin into French, and translated it again out of French into English, that every man of my nation may understand it." But a version from the Latin Vulgate was not likely to be so free or supple as a traveller's version from his own Latin text. Before taking a few samples of Wyclif's English, it may be interesting to quote a short passage from The Voiage and Travaile of Mandeville, in order that the style of these two pioneers of written prose may be compared. Evidently the language which they wrote was the familiar language spoken by educated Englishmen of their day, with this distinc- 13791 Wyclif the Evangelist. 205 tion, that the writers were three-tongued men, who more or less pedantically used new-fangled words from the Latin and French, whereas the English speakers who knew no Latin would allow a marked predominance to French or to English types, accord- ing to their descent and early associations. " For als moche," Mandeville writes, " as it is longe tyme passed that there was no generalle passage ne vyage over the see, and many men desiren for to here speke of the holy lond, and han therof gret solace and comfort ; I John Maundevylle, Knyght, alle be it I be not worthi, that was born in Englond, in the town of Seynt Albones, passede the see in the year of our Lord Jhesu Christ MCCCXXII, in the day of Seynt Michelle ; and hidreto have ben longe tyme over the see, and have seyn and gon thorghe manye dyverse londes, and many provynces and kingdomes and iles . . . where dwellen many dyverse folkes, and of dyverse maneres and lawes, and of dyverse schappes of men." It is almost entirely a matter of spelling whether this language is plain and simple to us or not. In most essentials the three-tongued men of the four- teenth century spoke and wrote the colloquial speech of to-day. Wyclif's Bible, though it occupied several hands, is fairly homogeneous throughout. Probably the whole of it passed under his review ; and moreover the complete text was subsequently revised by Purvey, who had been his fellow-worker from the beginning. But we are most certain to find Wyclif's English in the Gospels, which were his special and 206 John Wyclif. [1360 original charge. In them alone we shall find suffi- cient evidence, apart from external knowledge, that the Wyclif Bible was translated from the Latin Vul- gate, that the translator had at least some little acquaintance, if only at second hand, with Greek, that his constant aim was to make his version clear and simple for the simplest English folk, that with this aim he added glosses where it occurred to him that the text required them, that his vocabulary was plentifully recruited from the French, though to nothing like the same degree as the language of his contemporary Chaucer, and that so far as Wyclif's English was provincial it had certain characteristic elements of the Northern dialect. There is also a distinct impression of pedantry in Wyclif, beyond what we find in the prose works of Chaucer and Mandeville though the Tale of Melibeus and the introduction to the Voiage and Travaile are quite pedantic enough to have been written by theo- logians. Wyclif is extremely literal, and nurses the Latin constructions of the Vulgate, at the cost of oc- casional vagueness. All these points are illustrated in the following passages in which the only moderni- sation of spelling is the use of the later characters g, g/i, thy v, and y. " And Marye seyde, My soule worschipe the Lord, and my spirit joiede in God myn heelpe. " For he lokide the mekenes of his hondmayden ; lo forwhi of that, blisful me schulyen seyn alle gen- eraciouns. " For he hath do to me grete thingis that mighti is, and his name holy. 13791 Wyclif the Evangelist. 20 7 " And the mercy of him fro kinredis into kynredis, to tho that dreeden him. " He dyde myght in his arm ; he scateride the proude fro the thought of his herte. " He putte doun the myghti of seete, and he highede the meke. u The hungrynge he fillide with goodis, and the riche he lefte empty. " He resseyvede Israel his child ; he thoughte of his mercy. "Ashe spak to oure fadris, to Abraham and to his seed into worldis." " And he, gon out, biganne to preche, and diffame, or publishe, the word." u He blasfemeth ; who may forgeve synnes, no-but God alone ? The whiche thing anoon knowen by the Holy Ghost, for thei thoughten so withinne hem- self, Jhesus seith to hem, what thenken yee these thingis in youre hertis? " " And whenne he passide, he saw Levi Alfey sittynge at the tolbothe, and he seith to hym, Sue thou me. And he rysynge suede hym." " No man seweth a pacche of rude or newe clothe to an old clothe, ellis he takith awey the newe sup- plement, or pacche, and a more brekynge is maad. And no man sendith newe wyn in to oolde botelis, or wyn vesselis, ellis the wyn shal berste the wyn vesselis, and the wyn shal be held out." " And thei hav nat roote in hemsilf, but thei ben temporal, that is, lasten a lityl tyme ; afterward tribu- lacioun sprongen up, and persecucioun for the word, anoon thei ben sclaundrid." 208 John Wyclif. [1360 " As a corn of seneveye, the which whann it is sowun in the erthe is lesse than alle seedis that ben in erthe ; and whanne it is bredd, or quykened, it stygheth up in to a tree, and is maad more than alle wortis, or erbis ; and it shal make grete braunchis, so that briddis of hevene mowe dwelle undir the shadewe therof." " Sothly Jhesus resceyved hym nat, but seith to hym, Go thou in to thin hous to thine, and telle to hem how many thingis the Lord hath don to thee, and hadde mercy of thee. And he wente forth, and bigan for to preche in Decapoly, that is, a cuntree of ten citees." " Yit him spekynge, messageris camen to the prince of synagoge, seyinge, For thi doughtir is deed ; what traveilist thou the maistir ferthere ? Forsothe the word herd that was seide, Jhesus seith to the prince of the synagoge, Nyle thou drede, oonly byleve thou." "And anon he spek with hem, and seide to hem, Triste ye, I am ; nyle ye drede." " And aftir sixe dayes Jhesus took Petre, and James, and John, and ledith hem by hem selve aloone in to an high hil ; and he is transfigurid byfore hem. And his clothis ben maad schynynge and white ful moche as snow, and which maner clothis a fullere, or walkere of cloth, may not make white on erthe. And Helye with Moyses apperide to hem, and thei weren spekynge with Jhesu." " Forsothe of the fyge tree lerne ye the parable. Whanne nowhisbraunche schal be tendre, and leevys ben sprongen out, ye witen for somer is in the nexte. 1379] Wyclif the Evangelist. 209 So and whanne ye schulen se alle these thingis been maad, wite ye that it is in the nexte, in the doris. Treuly I seye to you, for this generacioun schal not passe awey, til alle these thingis be don. Hevene and erthe schal passe, forsothe my wordis schulen not passe. Treuly of that day or our no man woot, neithir aungelis in hevene, neithir the sone, nobut the fadif." At some date which it is not possible to determine, Wyclif composed a number of sermons on the sub- ject of the Sunday Gospels. The title which he gave to the book was The Sonedai Gospelis, Expowncd in Partie, and these discourses (collected and published with others in 1382) are not so much sermons as skeletons, which a preacher might readily clothe with additional words and thoughts of his own. It is highly probable that Wyclif prepared some homi- lies of this kind for the use of his Poor Priests, to the less eloquent of whom they would manifestly be a great assistance. They include occasional direc- tions for preachers, which could not be verbally repeated to a congregation. Here, for instance, is the concluding paragraph of the sermon for the first Sunday after Trinity the Gospel for the day relating to Lazarus and Dives. " In this Gospel may preestis telle of fals pride of riche men, and of lustful lyf of myghty men of this worlde, and of longe peynes of helle, and joyful blis in hevene, and thus lengthe their sermoun as the tyme axith. And marke we how this gospel tellith that this riche man was not dampned for extorsioun or wrong that he dide to his neighbore, but for he 210 John Wyclif. ri360 failide in werkes of mercy ; and thus shulde we warne both o man and other how sum men shall be dampnyd more felly for raveyne, and sum shal be dampnyd more softly, for misusinge of Goddis goodis." The frank courage of the writer is stamped on all his sermons, and it is easy to understand how the outcry would arise, even amongst the secular clergy, against himself and the men whom he sent forth to preach. For in the mildest of these discourses there is no respect of persons, and neither Pope nor prelate, priest nor monk, is spared when he neglects his office for his own gain or convenience. On the fourth Sunday after Trinity, the Gospel dealing with the mote and the beam, we have the following suggestion : " Here may men see that sugettis shulden blame prelatis when they seen opynly greet defaultes in hem, as defaulte of Goddis lawe in keeping and teeching ; for this is a beeme bi which the fende bindeth his hous, and thei shulden knowe thes as thei shulden fele the lore (loss) thereof." Wyclif began to preach sermons in English in 1 361, if not earlier, and it is possible that some of the discourses in " The Sunday Gospels " were pre- pared at Fillingham, or at Ludgarshall. Others smack more of controversy, and deal so roundly with the religious Orders in particular that a considerably later date must be assigned to them. Thus in the sermon for the sixteenth Sunday after Trinity there is a sharp touch for the Pope and the Orders. u We shulden bewar of peril of ypocrisie, for many feynen hem in statis, and done reverse in her lyf, 13791 Wyclif the Evangelist. 211 and yit thei seien thei ben perfiter than waren the first clerkis of Crist. And thus enemyes of Cristis religioun chalengen to be of his Ordre, algif they done even the contrarie to name that thei beren ; as the Pope shulde be moost meke man, moost servys- able and moost pore, as we ben taught in Seint Petir, that was Pope next after Crist. And now men seyen that the Pope mote nedis reverse -this ordenaunce, and have more power for to do thingis that touchen excellence ; and thus bishopis that shulden be clerkis and pore men, as apostlis weren, ben moost lordis of this world, and reversen apostlis lyf. Sum tyme weren mounkes lewede men, as seintis in Jerusalem ; and thanne thei kept him silf fro synne, as seynt Bernard berith witnesse, but now monkes ben turned into lordis of this worlde most ydel in Goddis travaile, and seyen that thei ben betre monkes than weren the first seintis. And so freris, that weren bretheren in Crist, and not chargeous to the Chirche, neither in noumbre ne in clothing, ne in mete ne in housynge, ben even turned agen fro the first lyf of hem, and yet bi ther ypocrisie thei blynden the Chirche many gatis, and thus names of offices and names of virtues also ben changed bi ypocrisie, and cursed men reulen the world." It will be convenient here to add a few words on the other English works of Wyclif, known or alleged to be his. It may be said at once that there are many manuscripts of the fourteenth century which we are unable with any degree of confidence to assign to their true authors ; and this general statement 212 John Wyclif. U360- applies to the works of Wyclif amongst others. More than seventy distinct English works, over and above the Latin documents and treatises which are historically connected with him, have at different times been ascribed to him. Indeed Bishop Bale brought up the number of his Latin and English works to something like three hundred ; but he did not claim to have seen them all, and still less did he insist on their authenticity. The fact of the matter seems to have been that the attempts which were made to suppress the writings of Wyclif and the Lollards, and which in some in- stances succeeded, led to the concealment of many manuscripts by their possessors, whether in England or across the seas, without preserving any detailed account of their origin or authorship. When the age of sense or freedom returned, and it became possible to bring these treasures to the light, there would naturally be a disposition to claim them all as Wyclif's, whereas a considerable number may have been the works of Nicholas Hereford, of Purvey, John Aston, and other Wycliffites. There are, in- deed, comparatively few cases in which the original manuscript bears an inscription of such a kind as to settle its authorship beyond dispute. If we were to proceed strictly and sceptically in regard to these works, and especially if we were to refuse Wyclif the credit of any which are not his by unquestionable evidence, he would in fact be left with a somewhat meagre array. But on that phn we should certainly lose some of his genuine produc tions; and of the two-score English works which ~i> ere bc$iuip f>f Otfloge a* pcttWjT ' P* ^^ l ^P mc iwj** J* i>c{jofecof ofietfiam ^teiftawu attracts etetasttois urns- ist?T&n patottutat pc mote Outc&p pe &*tr gttcac *Cpcdie. otna Doec pe ua&e eJfcrmaitolr oepinlott. pat pcot&iWiCaat is act#&ffi at it pf audita* of mflj flint is pt tiutfaai op p'efifto** pejaf ,#&.* pst filOf petty. ffaAtyix pe&ramaoflr ,HCflGfc.%tnfp|jIc ;fijtjin*./foi&c - routptcaW of pufllltug^ftftfli uot?Dwi tfto-fcqte *ce r'fl jou f'aSc&BiAt'par o jwuor jrfrap.+ftooftfbmtiirc foanptopc taojt; ft: fitcru fmnotai m wa afei not-aon .^?ijc wimp fotfop pat tec ?tp firp pcfout^&iapnaf umcfcp w mtfof ^o'lPfittjruttfjafe *a# otoau tapciBcrfttsof^otuntowd^ fo^ffoo maid uotC^ tie otaotp net | uriceOuat o* mcnmpm ffoiCopgcto tttour par aiic ym#? wsjbh aok totycip be M(&ptii8Qjmi$ oppe touowflc of lotita/nwfi>f* pen t* not- tu $n teriima* of ottf&votl* bc pc ratuc of ucuesg mpr txp. lum&tateflfc tatfcp iBjjcfttrt atfi TuimOJp^wm?ranftt^ &iopp djaiiuat of ep.^teprtmtfstttc%4 juji tmtg ixmoHiw^titcfito mto>u^nt1ifttcnX> fiotycicrt totl* bcttcftii p0ufiWRt toit% 'titppti ^knv$i^vptitt)moffC PTMp88u& wtn&ttsa mkiwtt auattts uemx&f fionu tea of tftai cei)t aoeeitp fctfop to Ofm par fctp gaa tu to af. #4m&ia fiu&E^ P r^tid reum fto gQ&^jjwueii 8kOj> ijfetcftyaihap otitt#iaf&#toaia> aa etipi ittti (btuc C$fiJ not pn at iBtfiBmraa&MK&cn m a OOOW f|Ct t t|>tttt- ct tjOltfptor M<^Ut}fdflcmpecs?6tof{nQi ^ ^^ba$4r(%eltaBa^itelf atsetf* ^iuifiiEj!tilrcu^iB r uftKt8pc^^ pO)no pat? oca t^ttoou* otiOtrOo $ ttfmttt&&l)avt&artt&'tG%^\ i^^aca^aioenfitaajfl^gpopc 4 ite<^ of amende tsaot? pa* oucom>a?ti5uljJ6ae#.c#M^ J f*bt ttaoz&cu tumi* a^em 68 tjsw^ &ptpmotmCmi%wfth&i i ffjof no?rtBciKHooi:*afffe not tt^tk pe cttflQi SOW* ligrig f ft$tH$ftc fdpilbma* vo$v?t ffiorjttmtiai|o0tjttu/t^aaife * MmmtMtbmbfoitwoiwtbUitt tsgod* of jf tjmvoiimtis pe m^ao^v oipe tfiar of iff t^ mite petSmstoe vtu&asmty ft rDri8nrt&oFlOd^*-pfil?t>a* ton^ttp ai pwp& \tm$$c%8p q* t>otE.% pat^c pm Gpemp tmcteo ftt^com^ ^albcadcpaSPEs i?fr flto- ^t rmm f^apotptpx^mnf mbmg: ttyB,ibm*o6 ptfmtwii$ m wmca* jlind to peiil^Fr {jatrtdo*^ ttCttof pt beam of peauurcof pc Jtftc 06 u- a0tt0gi5 -^fio outt. tfflmcfo^ctai^ciOTaltsijcnot 4^B*c^ia) maitfwal^aitcKipe of w%wcm&mmpi&c(m& J "*0&aD8c i# of oin*t|>mc^ A PAGE FROM THE PLESHY BIBLE (WYCLIF'S). OWNED BY THOMAS OF WOODSTOCK, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER, SON OF EDWARD III. Egerton MSS., British. Museum^ reduced to about one-third linear. 1379] Wyclif the Evangelist, 2 1 3 recent students, after repeated siftings, have still associated with his name, we may be well content to cling for the present to every one, so long as no con- clusive proof is brought forward on behalf of another author. It was in 1865 that Dr. Shirley, then Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, printed his Cata- logue of the Original Works of .John Wyclif of which he enumerated ninety-six in Latin and sixty- five in English. In the following year he proposed to the Delegates of the University Press " to prepare for publication selected English works of Wyclif in three volumes," and with the sanction of the Dele- gates he engaged Mr. Thomas Arnold to edit the selection. Dr. Shirley died soon after this arrange- ment had been made, and he was therefore unable to mature his views with regard to the authenticity and chronology of the writings which had been as- signed to Wyclif. The Catalogue of 1865, whilst it very largely reduced the lists of Bale and Lewis, and showed an advance upon the knowledge of Vaughan, Todd, and others, was confessedly tentative, and there are several numbers in respect of which the compiler was more than doubtful. Acting on Dr. Shirley's hints Mr. Arnold, in the introduction to his Select English Works of John Wyclif (1869- 1871) reduced the list of authentic works to forty- one, whereof he printed the greater number. The tendency of this selection and restriction was evidently on the right lines. Many manuscripts had been dealt with by earlier writers on hearsay only, or with a knowledge of no more than the first few 2 14 John Wyclif. H360- words. Shirley and Arnold examined them more carefully, and weeded out a considerable number, of which it is possible to say definitely that, whoever may have written them, John Wyclif did not. Mr. F. D. Matthew, in 1880, edited for the Early English Text Society The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Un- printed, including (for reasons which appeared sufficient to him) sundry tracts already rejected, or relegated to a " doubtful " class. The three books just mentioned may be said to have prepared the way for a thoroughly critical edition of the English writings of Wyclif. But it is questionable if in any case a canon of authenticity could be set up which would be universally accepted by those who are competent to form an opinion. Mr. Arnold's reduced list of forty-one " probably genuine " English works includes a large collection of sermons on the Sunday Gospels and Epistles, and on the Gospels for saints' days, together with exegeti- cal works on the Canticles and other items of the service-books ; tracts on the heresies and errors of the Friars, on the Eucharist, on the Apostasy of the clergy, on the Schism of the Roman Pontiffs, on Church Temporalities and the condition of the clergy, with sundry letters, statements, and petitions such as will be found quoted or referred to in the present volume. The manuscripts on which we have to rely in the last resort for the authenticity of Wyclif's works are fairly numerous, at any rate for the sermons. Eigh- teen or twenty, in the libraries of Oxford and Cam- bridge, or in public or private libraries elsewhere, 1379 1 Wyclif the Evangelist. 2 1 5 were collated for Mr. Arnold's edition. They are dated (by internal evidence rather than by continu- ous description from their origin onwards) as belong- ing to the later years of the fourteenth century, and various periods of the fifteenth. The same descrip- tion applies to the sixteen or more manuscripts from which the tracts and miscellaneous works are taken manuscripts preserved in the Bodleian and other uni- versity libraries, and in the Harleian and Cottonian collections at the British Museum. The difficulties of deducing positive belief from the evidence afforded by these manuscripts are various. Experts in palaeography can go a long way towards fixing the date of any particular manuscript, so as to make us fairly confident that we know the time of its produc- tion within a few decades. But even when we are assured that such and such a volume of manuscript was the work of a copyist who lived about the close of the fourteenth century, we may not have made any great advance towards a definite conclusion. The volume itself, and the separate tracts of which it is composed, may be without title or preface, and without collateral evidence of any sort ; and there are certainly cases where collections of distinct works were attributed to Wyclif in the fifteenth century though it is manifest on closer inquiry that more authors than one were responsible for them. It is conceivable that either the copyist or the col- lector may have too lightly brought together the writings of different people ; and in this way Wyclif has received credit or discredit for many a produc- tion of his contemporaries or immediate successors. 216 John Wyclif, [1360- The writings of Wyclif have undergone a fate which somewhat curiously recalls the history of Aris- totle's works after his death. Circumstances con- spired to bury the Metaphysics and Politics, and per- haps other writings of Aristotle, in oblivion. After more than two centuries they were re-discovered, brought by Apellicon from the Troad to Athens, and carried thence by Sulla to Rome. Then they dis- appeared again, and for many centuries the philoso- phy of the Stagyrite was preserved for Europe by the scholars of Syria, Arabia, and other Mahomedan lands. Moreover the earlier disciples of Aristotle wrote Aristotelian discourses on a variety of sub- jects, some of which have been or may yet be accepted as genuine works of the master, though it would be idle to expect unanimity of opinion amongst scholars in every particular case. Most of what has been said of Wyclif's English writings will apply equally well to his Latin works. The canon is undetermined, and perhaps, so far as the minor tracts are concerned, it could never be definitely established. As for the philosophical treatise De Esse, the De Compositione Hominis, the De Dominio Divino, De Civili Dominio, and De Eccle- sia, the Trialogus, the De Veritate Sanctae Scripturae, and a few more, in which we find autobiographical details, or on which controversies arose in his life- time, there is no room for question ; but in other cases it is clear that Latin writings have been attribu- ted to Wyclif about the authenticity of which it is impossible not to entertain a doubt. Amongst the English works which have been gen- 1379] Wyclif the Evangelist. 217 erally attributed to Wyclif is one which was first printe din the reign of Edward VI., in the year 1550. It is thus described on the title-page : " The true Copye of a Prolog, zvritten about two hundred years past by John Wycliffe . . . the Original whereof is found written in an old English Bible, betwixt the Old Testament and the New." We do not seem to possess any better evidence of the authenticity of this Prologue than is supplied in the title just quoted ; and it must be confessed that the worthy Reformer who reproduced it was somewhat easily satisfied on the point of authorship. Unquestion- ably, if we could accept this as a genuine production of Wyclif it would possess great interest and value, as being descriptive of his work and method as a translator of the Bible. But neither the style nor the language of the Prologue, of which an extract is here added (with the spelling modified), will war- rant us in agreeing that it is his work. " Though covetous clerks are mad through simony, heresy, and many other sins, and despise and impede Holy Writ as much as they can, yet the unlearned people cry after Holy Writ to know it, with great cost and peril of their lives. For those reasons and other, with common charity to save all men in our realm which God will have saved, a simple creature hath translated the Bible out of Latin into English. First this simple creature had much labour with divers companions and helpers to collect many old Bibles and other doctors, and common glosses, and to make a single Latin Bible fairly correct, and then to study it anew, the text with the commentary and 218 John Wyclif. [1379 other doctors, as he could obtain them, and es- pecially Lire (Nicolas de Lyra) on the Old Testament, who gave him great help in his work. Again he had to take counsel with old grammarians and divines, concerning hard words and hard sentences, how they might best be understood and translated ; and again, to translate as clearly as he could according to the sentence (meaning), and to have many good and skilful companions at the correcting of the transla- tion." The difficulty of assigning this Prologue to John Purvey, as some have done, is almost as great as that of assigning it to Wyclif. It certainly affords a good instance of the facility with which early manu- scripts have at different times been attributed to the Evangelical Doctor. ST. MARY'S, OXFORD. TOWER PARTLY CONTEMPORANEOUS WITH WYCLIF. ^ wj^r ^w# ^^^^^H^I^MlBi # js^ CHAPTER XII. THE DECISIVE STEP. 1 H E great Schism in the Roman Church, followed by a double line of Popes between the years 1378 and 141 5, and the division of Christendom into two camps, with two hostile Supreme Pontiffs and Vicars of Christ, was evidently a more injurious fact for Rome and for Christianity than the long sojourn of the Papacy in its " Babylonian Captivity." The latter /act had in itself been sufficiently discrediting, for, though force took the Popes to Avignon, it was demoralisation rather than force which kept them there. But the Schism was infinitely worse than the Captivity. It only needed a strong and startling situation such as that which was produced by this Schism to strength- 219 220 John Wyclif. U378- en the convictions and courage of the Oxford Reform- ers, and to guarantee the continuance of the revolt against Rome. For twenty-seven years the rulers of the Western Church fought their daily battle against catholicity and authority. The Schism began, con- tinued, and ended in fatal hostility to the unity of Christendom. Gregory, whose bad choice of time and means for the return to Rome was the immediate cause of the disaster,* had inaugurated a persecution which ultimately led up to the secession of the Teu- tonic Churches. The Council of Constance, sum- moned in order to bring the Schism to an end, cemented a new union with the blood of Huss and Jerome, and signalised it by the desecration of Wyclif's grave. Gregory died, as we have seen, within a few months of his ill-timed return to the Holy City. There were sixteen cardinals at Rome, most of them Frenchmen ; but under pressure from the turbulent citizens they elected an Italian to the vacant see. Part of the papal Court had remained at Avignon, and in a fatal moment they resolved to choose a French Pontiff, and to ignore the Roman selection. National jeal- ousies, to which the Popes had so often appealed, declared themselves once more. Urban VI. was recognised by England, most of the Empire,- Hun- gary, Bohemia, and Italy ; whilst Clement VII. se- cured the allegiance of France, the Spanish kingdoms, Savoy, and a few of the German states. The ap- * The Schism might have been averted if Gregory had refused to migrate without the entire body of the College of Cardinals. He allowed himself to be hurried to Rome by Catherine of Siena. 1380] The Decisive Step. 2 2 1 pointment of a French rival drew away from Rome all the cardinals who were of French origin, and Urban immediately created twenty-six more. He is said to have offered the hat to Bishop Courtenay amongst others ; but Courtenay probably remem- bered the fate of Archbishop Langham twenty years ago, and preferred the reversion of the English primacy to a forced residence at Rome. The long and lamentable story of the papal Schism, of the bloodshed and abominations of various kinds to which it gave birth, and of the effect which it produced on the Western Churches, has often been written. It is necessary to a good understanding of any epoch of ecclesiastical history, at any rate within fifty years of the fatal dissension, that the reader should see each particular event in the strong relief created by this pontifical rivalry, as against the lurid and glaring background of a coarsely painted picture. The battles of the Popes and the recriminations of their supporters were daily present in the minds and ears of all men, dominating everything which they thought and said and did. Foxe cites in his own language a passage from one of the many histories which had even then been written on the subject : " As touching the pestilent and most^ miserable Schisme, it would require heere another Iliade to comprehend in order all the circumstances andtragi- call parts thereof, what trouble in the whole Church, what parts taken in every countrey, what apprehend- ing and imprisoning of priests and prelates, taken by land and sea, what shedding of blood did follow thereof. . . what cardinals were racked and miser- 222 John Wyclif. M378- ablie without all mercy tormented on gibbets to death, what slaughter of men, what battles were fought between the two Popes, whereof five thou- sand on the one side were slaine." Whilst the whole Church was scandalised by these disorders, Wyclif was living a comparatively quiet life at Oxford and Lutterworth, and devoting himself to congenial but arduous labours. So far as can be accurately ascertained, he produced a large majority of his works, and nearly all his English works, in the last six years of his life. It was indeed the four years from 1378 to 1382 which in all probability saw the publication of the English Bible, the sermons, one or two of the more interesting Latin works, and a series of English tracts, in which he maintained his unorthodox opinions with greater vigour than ever ; and it was now for the first time that he began to express doubts of the accepted theory of transub- stantiation. This particular error, more grievous to the orthodox people of his day than any other which is attributed to him, was not one of the conclusions enumerated in the papal bulls, as it certainly would have been if he had given his enemies the slightest pretext for laying it to his charge. But in 1382 it was placed, in the front of his fresh condemnation by Courtenay, and he had probably given utterance to it several years before that certainly, as we shall see, in 1381. It was one of the regular diversions of the orthodox in those days, and indeed for two or three genera- tions afterwards, to count up the heresies of John Wyclif; and, as Thomas Fuller drily says, they were ARCHBISHOP ARUNDEL. FROM AN OLD PORTRAIT IN LAMBETH FALACE. 1380] The Decisive Step. 223 like the stones on Salisbury Plain, concerning which there is a proverb that no two men can count them alike. Thus Pope Gregory in his bulls made them come to nineteen. Courtenay advanced upon that number in 1382; and Archbishop Arundel strikes one as remarkably moderate in stopping short at twenty- three errors, of which he reckons only ten as actually heretical. Nevertheless an Oxford.Committee under his auspices, a quarter of a century after Wyclif's death, discovered as many as two hundred and sixty- seven. The Council of Constance enumerated forty- five ; and not long after this Netter of Walden arrives at a round fourscore. The orthodox of Bohemia had a still keener scent, for John Liicke jumped up to two hundred and sixty-six, whilst Cocleus (who wrote a history of the Hussites) detected no fewer than three hundred and three. No one helped so much to build up Wyclifs reputation as the enemies who tried to write him down ; and these lists of his heresies are really very convenient records for such as wish to see the more characteristic opinions of the Reformer concisely stated. If we take Netter's list as it stands, and bear in mind that it is in the nature of a series of allegations made by a writer in the reign of Henry V., who distinctly regarded Wyclif as a mischievous heretic, we shall at any rate know the worst that was brought against him. According to this authority, Wyclif held and taught that it is blasphemy to call any man Head of the Church save Christ alone ; or that Peter had greater power than the other apostles; or that Rome 224 John Wyclif. t137d- was the appointed seat of Christ's Vicar ; or that the Pope is to be considered as the successor of Peter, except in so far as he imitates Peter and Christ. The infallibility of the Church of Rome in matters of faith is the greatest blasphemy of Antichrist. Wyclif called the Pope Antichrist, and " the abomination of desola- tion standing in the holy place " ; but with respect to this common charge levelled against him by his enemies it may be observed that, though he was wont now and then to apply a hard term to the doer of a wrong action, hypothetically and indirectly, he nowhere says " Gregory is Antichrist," or " Urban is Antichrist." What he said, and said strongly because his convictions were strong, every one of his critics must have said if they could have been taken logically over the intermediate steps. But let us continue the record of heresy according to Netter. The benedictions, confirmations, consecrations of churches and chalices, and other such acts of the bishops, [when done at a price, and treated as con- tributing to the incomes of rich men], are mere " tricks to get money." Plain deacons or priests may lawfully preach without having the licence of Pope or bishop. A bishop is not apostolically different from a priest. Absolution [depends entirely on re- pentance, and] may be pronounced by a layman as well as by a priest. The clergy ought not to be pre- vented from marrying [but celibacy is the highest kind of life]. Priests of evil life cease to be effective priests [but Wyclif said : " A cursed man doth fully the sacraments, though it be to his own damning; for they be not authors of these sacraments, but God 1380] The Decisive Step. 225 keepeth that divinity to himself"]. The Church consists only of such as are predestinated. The Church had no immovable goods before the time of Constantine ; and it is no sacrilege for the State to take for its own needs the temporal goods of the Church. There is a savour of hypocrisy in the beautiful buildings and decorations of the Church. Tithes are to be considered as pure alms, and ought not to be extorted by censures ; parishioners would do well not to pay tithe at all to dissolute priests. Whatever is not plainly expressed and enjoined in the Scriptures is irrelevant and impertinent. Many of the ecclesiastical teachers since the completion of the first millennium of Christianity were heretical. It is vain for laymen to bargain for the prayers of priests. There is no superiority in set prayers repeated by a priest ; men should trust rather in personal holiness. The alms of the Church should be refused to persons living in open sin. With regard to the sacraments, it was alleged against Wyclif that he spoke slightingly of the act of chrism, and denied the absolute necessity of bap- tism, which, he said, does not confer grace, but only symbolises a grace given before. It is idolatry to worship the host ; the bread and wine remain just what they were before consecration. God could not make his natural body exist in two places at once. Confirmation is not necessary to salvation. Confession of sins to a priest is superfluous for a contrite man. Extreme unction is unnecessary, and not a sacrament. All kinds of religious Orders confound the unity of the Church of Christ, who instituted but one 226 John Wyclif. [1378- Order, the Order of service. Vows of virginity are a doctrine of devils ; and the worship of saints borders on idolatry. It is needless to visit the shrines of saints; the miracles alleged to be performed there may be only delusions of the devil. It is lawful to appeal in ecclesiastical matters and matters of faith to the secular prince. All dominion is founded on grace, and God divests of all right the rulers who abuse their power. Christ was a man, and his man- hood should receive the kind of worship which is known as " latreia" that is, the worship of service and observance. God loved David and Peter as deeply when they grievously sinned as he does now, when they are possessed of glory. God gives no good things to his enemies ; and he is not more willing to reward the good than he is to punish the wicked. All things come to pass by a fatal neces- sity. God could not have made the world other than it is made; and he cannot make that which is something return to nothing a fatalism which leads up to the paradox that God must " obey" the devil. It is evident in how many points Wyclif set up a standard for the Reformers who came after him, and especially for the Calvinists, Presbyterians, and Puri- tans. The reader will not need to be reminded that some of the opinions ascribed to him by those who considered him a dangerous heretic may be no more than their own interpretation of his casual expres- sion of opinion, whilst all of them, as quoted above, are torn from their context, and not one of them could be accepted as accurate without verification 1380] The Decisive Step. 22 J from Wyclif s own writings. Even without such a deduction in his favour from the allegations of Netter, there is very little in the record which was not frankly adopted and endorsed by the Reformed Church in the sixteenth century ; but, if the common belief of Romanists in the fourteenth century is taken as the standard of orthodoxy, then no doubt Wyclifs opinions must be admitted to have been steeped in the rankest heresy. And, even if we agree with every one of the conclusions attributed to him, our judgment to-day might be fairly expressed in the terms employed by the University of Oxford in response to Pope Gregory's bull that the conclu- sions are true, and essentially orthodox, but framed in such a way as to leave room for misconceptions. The denial of transubstantiation was the special cause of proceedings taken against the Reformer in 1 38 1 and 1382, of which we shall have to speak fur- ther on. It is, however, pertinent to the present phase of his development in the years 1378 to 1380 to quote what was said of him by Wodeford, whose words are cited by Dr. Shirley from a Latin manuscript in the Bodleian Library. " So long as Wyclif was ' sententiariusl and even ' baccalaurins responsalisj* he openly and in the schools main- tained that, although the sacramental accidents rested upon some substance, yet in the act of con- secration the material bread had ceased to exist. * " Sententiarius ," one who lectured on the " Sentences," so as to qualify for the degree of B.D. " Baccalaurhis responsalis" a B.D. of two years' standing. So far as is known, Wyclif was a B.D. as early as 1363. 228 John Wyclif. [1378- Pressed by many questions as to what was the sub- ject of those accidents, he began by replying, for some considerable time, that it was \ a mathematical body.' Later on, in consequence of many arguments urged against this, he would reply that he did not know what was the substance of the accidents ; but he was firm as to their resting upon some substance. Now (that is, in 1 381) in his conclusions and in his confession he expressly declares that the bread remains after the consecration, and that it is the substance of the accidents." Nothing, surely, could be more eloquent of the moral struggle through which Wyclif had been pass- ing, and was yet to pass, on a subject which has in all ages been the most searching and serious that can possibly engage the mind of a devout Christian transcendentalist. He had begun his life, so soon as his reasoning faculties had asserted themselves, with the familiar " late Roman" separation of the acci- dents from the substance or subject. For him, how- ever, the essence of the sacrament was in the words of Christ, and in the act of faith which enabled him to see the body and blood of Christ ; but, if he saw, it was with the eye of faith, and not with the physi- cal sight. That was his first step and already he was a heretic in comparison with those who declared that they saw a physical Christ with physical sight. The man of comfortable faith looked upon the bread and reverently declared : " I see no bread it has gone though it has not disappeared. I see the physical body of Christ, wearing the shape of bread ; but it is only because of my infirmity that it 1380] The Decisive Step. 229 seems to be what it is not seems to be wheaten bread when it is actually and really my Lord and God." To Wyclif, even as a young man, this savoured of idolatry. In vain his friends would assure him that it was no idolatry, but the very sublimity of faith. " I grant," he began by saying, " that the substance is altered. The ' hoc est corpus . enables me to see the body of Christ a spiritual body, seen with spiritual eyes. But what, then, do I see with my physical sight ? I am a realist ; I see a body, with attributes and mathematical dimensions but what body ? No longer a mathematical body, you say, if the consecration has annihilated all the mathemati- cal and physical qualities of wheaten bread ? Then I cannot tell you what the body is, but sure I am that a body is there. To say that it is physically God is idolatry. To say, as some of us do, that what I see and handle are accidents without a sub- ject is only another way of saying that the ' hoc est corpus,' which made Christ visible to the eye of faith, also made that wheaten bread into something infi- nitely inferior in the scale of nature lower than the peasant's bean-bread, lower than the soil in which the grain of wheat germinated ; for they have substance as well as accidents, but this unhappy phenomenon retains its accidents after losing its substance." Such, in part, was to be his reasoning in 1 38 1 , when he had pronounced his " eureka," and committed himself to what was deemed the most pestilent of his heresies. In 1378, when he came back to Oxford to ruminate on the meaning and the riddle of his 230 John Wyclif, C1378- life condemned by the Pope, condemned by the Primate and the Bishop of London, a byword amongst the monks and friars, distrusted henceforth by all who looked to Pope and bishops as authorita- tive exponents of the faith he had not yet brought himself to utter the answer which must have trem- bled on his lips. But there, in the home of his youth and manhood, he nursed the secret of his soul. He taught in the schools with increasing zeal, preached and wrote in English, at Oxford and at Lutterworth, with feverish activity, and passed, perhaps, some of the happiest and yet the saddest moments of his life with the friends who loved him so well with Nicholas Hereford and Laurence Bedenham, with Rygge and Repyngdon, with John Aston and Flem- myng, with John Purvey, William Jamys, and many others. They used to call him Johannes Augustini, as well as the Evangelical Doctor, and they were brave enough to bear with him the suspicion and obloquy which were his lot. But the worst days of his persecution were yet to come. It is told of Jamys that in a sermon before Chan- cellor Berton somewhat later than the time we are now considering he made use of the expression, " There is no idolatry if not in the sacrament of the altar." Whereon the Chancellor broke in with a sar- castic comment. " Jam loqueris ut philosophus ! " " Now you are talking like the philosopher ! " And if Wyclif was present, doubtless the eyes of all were turned upon him, for they knew whose feather had impelled that shaft. The story is sometimes told as referring to Rygge instead of Berton, in which 1380] The Decisive Step. 231 case the Chancellor's remark would bear another meaning. But it is unlikely that a Chancellor would have broken into a public discourse with emphatic approval of a statement which must have given offence to many of the congregation. It was in every way a stirring and creative time. The papal Schism had thrown all Christendom into extraordinary ferment, and men had scarcely ranged themselves on their respective sides. It was not until near the end of 1379, eighteen months after the Neapolitan Archbishop and the French Cardinal had placed their rival claims before the Western Churches,that England definitely declared for Urban ; but to support the pretensions of one Pope in prefer- ence to those of another was not sufficient to set the mind at rest concerning the very disturbing fact of the Schism itself. Wyclif, in common with many a devout Christian at that crisis, was very deeply affected by the events which were occurring day by day. In connection with the sympathy felt for Wyclif by his own University, it would of course be a mistake to suppose that he was primarily or principally re- sponsible for Oxford's departures from orthodoxy in the fourteenth century. To think that would be to make nothing of the influence of other inquiring minds amongst the Schoolmen, the lay graduates, and even the friars. We have seen already that there were some very liberal-minded men amongst the Franciscans in particular ; and as a matter of fact we find traces of " grievous errors " at Oxford before Wyclif came to maturity, and even before he John Wyclif. [1378- was born. If some of these errors were identical with errors that Wyclif subsequently held, the fair conclusion is that he imbibed them at Oxford as part of the mental sustenance which had proved to be best adapted to his intellectual growth and needs. - Archbishop Langham(i 366-1 368), who had been a monk, and was notoriously hostile to the mendicant Orders, wrote in the course of his primacy a disciplin- ary letter to Oxford in which he drew attention to the unsound views at that time current in the Uni- versity. He mentioned a number of these as that the baptism of infants is not a necessity for salva- tion ; that no one could justly suffer damnation for original sin alone, without the re-inforcement of wilful sin after birth ; that there is a sufficient "remedy in nature " for the sins of true believers; that no one could be justly deprived of his heavenly inheritance for sins committed without a clear vision of God ; that every human being has at least one clear vision of God before his death ; that mere pro- hibition of an act is not sufficient to constitute the commission of that act a sin ; that the Father in him- self is finite, the Son finite, and the Holy Ghost alone infinite ; that God cannot annihilate his creatures, or make something into nothing ; that God cannot be a tormentor ; that even Mary and the saints are still liable to sin and damnation ; that, conversely, the damned are capable of salvation ; that future punish- ments will not be everlasting; and that God could not create an absolutely impeccable being. It is manifest that some of these tenets, sound or unsound, are at least as old as Christianity, whilst 1380] The Decisive Step. 233 one or two belong to the class of what may be called logical hyperbole. Certainly Wyclif held many or most of them, but it is equally certain that he would have condemned others. There is indeed a strain of greater optimism in these earlier Oxford heresies than Wyclif's mood and experience permitted him to en- tertain. He was a predestinarian, a believer in that " foreknowledge " of damnation which so easily be- comes foredooming to damnation. He believed so strongly in the potency of evil that he thought God himself was constrained by it, and accordingly he could scarcely hold that punishment was other than everlasting. These important points of divergence should be borne in mind by and by, when we come to the melancholy stage at which many of the Re- former's disciples fell away from him. Wyclif's return to Oxford in 1378 coincided, by a curious chance, with a discovery made by certain devout Christians at Dundalk, that the bones of his old friend and master Fitzralph were endowed with the power of working miracles. He had expressed a general opinion that miracles of this kind, wrought at the tombs of the saints, were not unlikely to be delusions of the devil ; but we may be sure that if he thought them possible in any case he would be disposed to accept the testimony of the pious in re- gard to the doughty old Archbishop of Armagh the Armachanus who was already a great authority at Oxford when Wyclif went up, and who certainly left his mark on Wyclif's character and opinions. Wyclif speaks of him with affection and reverence, and evidently accepted from him as a bequest not 2 34 John Wyclif. [1378- merely his ideas of divine lordship but also his con- troversial antagonism to the friars. The report of the Dundalk miracles, then, would come just in time to stimulate old enmity, to add fuel to the fire which had been kindled afresh by the papal bulls. The friars are said to have been much troubled by the report in question, for everyone knew how bitterly Fitzralph had opposed them, even at the Court of Avignon ; and clearly, if he were accepted as a saint and a miracle-worker, there would be an ugly inference against themselves in the minds of the faithful. Of course they did not believe in the miracles, and it may be that they expressed themselves a little too plainly on the sub- ject of their old enemy. Still nothing of this sort was needed to widen the breach between the four Orders and the man whom they had twice so nearly succeeded in crushing. An opportunity came which they might have turned to good account by effecting at least a partial reconciliation with their antagonist ; but they attempted to get too much out of it, and the only consequence was that they made matters worse than ever. Early in 1379 Wyclif had a severe and even danger- ous illness. It may have been the result of the great mental and physical strain which had been put upon him in the previous year ; and perhaps it was attended by certain premonitory symptoms of the collapse which was soon to overtake him. However that may be, he was thought to be at the end of his tether; and when the friars knew how hard it was going with him they resolved upon a curious course of proceeding. 1380] The Decisive Step. 235 Each of the four prominent Orders, Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Augustinians, nomi- nated a friar, being also a regent or doctor in di- vinity, to take part in a deputation to the dying heretic ; and they took with them, not the viaticum, or any other of the consolations of religion, or even a skilled leech, but simply four aldermen of the city of Oxford. It is certainly not easy to understand the presence of those aldermen, unless they came with a genuine message of condolence, and the co- incidence of their visit with that of the friars was merely accidental. They began by wishing the sick man good health and a speedy recovery and then told him that he was on the point of death, and asked him for a retractation of the hard things which he had said against them in his lifetime. It is impossible to fill in the details of what must have been a highly dramatic interview. If we even knew the names of the friars, it might assist us to a better understand- ing of the real object of their visit. It is doubtful if Wyclif was in a condition to answer them in the first instance, for he was too weak to raise himself in his bed. His visitors were thus able, without let or hindrance, to remind him of the heavy blows which he had dealt them, by word and writing ; and they entreated him in his last moments, in presence of these worthy aldermen who might attest what he said, to display his penitence by formally withdraw- ing his charges against the Orders. It was a bold thing to ask, even of a dying man ; but it seemed to be just the stimulus which Wyclif 1$ John Wyclif. ti37S- wanted to enable him to throw off his lethargy. The emaciated frame and the lustreless eyes must have taken sudden fire from the soul within, for we are told that he called his servants to his side, ordered them to raise him on his pillows, and then cried out with unexpected vigour, " I will not die but live, and I will show up the evil deeds of the friars ! " He did live, for more than five years thereafter, and both he and the Orders gave and received many hard knocks. His first and main quarrel was with the false teaching and usurped authority of Rome ; but he could never come to terms with the religious professors who had forsaken the rule of poverty in order to live delicately, to exercise dominion, to amass wealth, and to keep for themselves what had been given to them in trust for the poor. This is the note which prevails throughout his writings in rela- tion to the mendicant Orders, and which he enforces in a hundred different ways. Much of what Wyclif wrote, especially in his longer and more argumentative works, is almost un- readable for men and women of the present day, and serviceable perhaps for nothing so much as the elucidation of his character and work. After the lapse of five complete centuries, in every year of which the effect of his stainless and courageous life has been continuously operative in the cause of re- ligious freedom, what the world wants to see and feel is not so much the quality of his controversial logic, or the exact conclusiveness of his somewhat ponderous and involved arguments for which at 1380] The Decisive Step. 237 best we are dependent on manifestly corrupt texts, as the moral lineaments and effective force of the man himself. We want to know and be familiar with the John Wyclif who, in the days of our child- hood was little more to any of us than the shadow of a great name: the John Wyclif who was Chau- cer's contemporary under the Plantagenet kings ; who in the Middle Ages of history moved as a star across the dark firmament of western Europe; a Schoolman, and yet a teacher of the most accepted Christianity of to-day. We want to feel sure, and we are only just beginning to feel it, that the man to whom every lover of truth is so largely indebted stands before us as a recognised presence and iden- tity, in his form and substance as he lived ; the bril- liant Oxford man who paced the pavements of the schools, or haunted the streets and meadows be- tween his college and the silver streams, passing the very spot where, two centuries later, bishops such as his soul would have loved were to light a candle for the faith as he believed it ; the eager, busy optimist who threw himself into the eddies of English poli- tics, hoping against hope that the secular arm would strike effectively where he saw such urgent need ; the pale, weak priest, with firm-set lips and undaunted eyes, to whom the re-discovered truth was a master- ing reality, far above the authority of Rome or the claims of tradition. To read the controversial works of Wyclif without some such intimate and sympathetic realisation of his character is to make no near approach to a knowledge of the man, and very little towards the 238 John Wyclif. [1378 comprehension of his life-work. To the merely critical mind, for instance, which is governed by our actual canons of literary taste and amenity, and for- gets to transpose the language of the fourteenth century into the same key with that of the nine- teenth, the tone occasionally adopted by Wyclif in his later years against the Papacy and the religious Orders may well seem to pass the bounds of moderation. One or two quotations have already been given from the sermons of Wyclif in which the unworthi- ness of Christian professors was severely castigated. Other discourses will be found in the same collection which were written after the Schism, in some of which the writer declares his belief that the friars are mainly actuated by greed, and that they would easily change from Urban to Clement if such a course were likely to be more profitable. In another sermon he charges them with obstructing the Poor Priests, who interfered with their gains. In the Vae Octuplex, which is found in all the best manu- scripts of Wyclif s sermons, and has always been attributed to him, the eight woes pronounced against the Scribes and Pharisees are brought home to the Church of the second millennium, and especially to the friars. This indeed is Wyclif's prevailing note in all his denunciations that the errors of the Church have invaded her only " since the fiend was loosed." Under the lash of such a tongue, no wonder if the friars, the monks and the wealthier clergy had be- come at first restive, then indignant, then bitterly 1380] The Decisive Step, 239 and vindictively hostile to the most uncompromising of their cen ors. His invective was certainly not of the mildest kind, and even his friends have occasion- ally lamented the stern and sweeping character of the charges which he brought against the regular and higher secular clergy. Wyclif himself would have admitted that there were priests, regulars, and perhaps even bishops who did not deserve to be branded as corrupt. A man of milder (perhaps less effective) temperament might have dwelt upon these exceptions, and have been more on his guard against the misconceptions which arose out of his too com- prehensive reproaches. Possibly it never occurred to him to say anything so fatuous as that the censure of greed and hypocrisy must not be held to apply to such as are neither greedy nor hypocritical. The fourteenth century, it must be remembered, was not a time of mincing words, halting controversies, and compromises which sacrifice nine points of a just demand in order to secure the tenth. Wyclif was thoroughly a man of his century a leader and a pioneer, it is true, but still a man of limited knowl- edge, only half liberated from the scholastic yoke, conventional in his dialectical methods, and one who was too much attached to logical precision and per- haps to logical hyperbole to think much of the weaker and illogical minds which would be disturbed by his confident conclusions. It is natural that a secular clergyman holding such views as Wyclif held, and expressing them with in- creasing freedom during the last few years of his life, should have been charged with the very offences 240 John Wyclif. [1378- against which he most indignantly protested. His enemies did not fail to say that his rage against the monks and friars was not very pronounced until Archbishop Langham in 1366 had deprived him of the wardenship of Canterbury Hall, and put back the regulars in place of the seculars events which, in all probability, had no reference at all to our John Wyclif. In any case the question would seem to be not so much when Wyclif's rage was hottest as whether he was hot with good reason. Another accusation brought against him by the friars and their friends, after he was dead, repre- sented him as having tried in vain to secure a nomi- nation to the see of Worcester the inference being that his attacks upon the wealthy clergy who mis- used their wealth, and upon the rapidly increasing endowments of the Church, grew out of this check to his worldly ambitions. No candid reader of the life and writings of Wyclif will give a second thought to these charges of hypocrisy and greed, stamped as they are by their patent absurdity. To admit that the Reformer's hostility to the abuses of the monastic system, and his condemna- tion of a wealthy priesthood, were not openly dis- played until he had felt the smart of personal disappointment would be to ignore the note of continuity which is manifest throughout his intel- lectual history. If there is any force at all in what has been said of Wyclif's mental and moral descent from the liberal Schoolmen, and especially from his immediate predecessor William of Ockham, it fol- lows as a matter of course that he began his career 1380] The Decisive Step. 241 as a clergyman with a profound belief in the doctrine of evangelical poverty, and did not wait until he was more than forty years old before he gave it public utterance. At any rate his tongue was specially unloosed against the friars after the death of Fitz- ralph in 1360; and though, like the Archbishop of Armagh, he had never held the extreme doctrine of evangelical poverty as it stood condemned in the decretals based on the assertion that Christ himself had begged instead of working for his living still his advance on Fitzralph's position was enough to prove that Wyclif was not fishing for preferment. To say, as his greatest enemies said, that he inherited the damnable doctrines of Marsiglio was to say that he was in sympathy with the Fraticelli and the Brotherhood of Munich, that he accepted from his boyhood the whole theory of a spiritual Church, free from worldly titles or claims, and that the logical indefensibility of Church endowments was one of the grounding principles of his belief. If other reasons were needed to show how unten- able is the notion that Wyclif began to condemn en- dowments in 1363 or 1368 the see of Worcester fell vacant at both these dates, because he had angled for a bishopric without success, it might be enough to point out that his actions and utterances, so far as we are acquainted with them, were consis- tently of such a character as to militate against the chance of his receiving any sort of preferment in the Church ; that his association with John of Gaunt, who had been credited with a desire to spoliate the Church, would have been the last thing to suggest 16 242 John Wyclif. [1380 itself to an orthodox clergyman in search of a mitre; that, on the other hand, his attendance upon the King, the repute of his preaching in London, his deal- ings with the Duke of Lancaster and the Prince of Wales, the frequent recourse of Parliament to his opinion and advice, say between 1366 and 1380, would have sufficed to obtain him a bishopric if he had been laying himself out to secure one if he had economised his liberalism instead of speaking his mind and eventually disregarding the wishes of the Duke on a question of principle ; and that, in point of fact, when the sinecure prebend of Aust was con- ferred upon him in 1375, on his return from Bruges, he conscientiously declined it. The friars, as we shall see, had by no means shot their last bolt ; but up to the year 1380, at any rate, Wyclif had the best of the argument in every sense. The comparative success of his attack upon the Roman system in England, as well as upon the alien Orders and the national hierarchy, is sufficiently accounted for by the organic weakness of Rome in the fourteenth century, by the patriotic resistance of Englishmen to encroachments from a vassal of France, and by the revulsion of public feeling against ecclesiastical and monastic scandals. Historians who were prejudiced in favour of the papal cause and it is to be remembered that men like Netter, Harpsfield, and even the Dominicans who confuted Wyclif after his death, had the making of his history in their own hands admit that the provisions and other exactions of Rome went a long way towards ensuring him the measure of success which he actually gained. CHAPTER XIII. CONDEMNED AT OXFORD. HE time had come when Wyclif had reached his last stage of heresy, and he made up his mind to declare boldly against the miraculous and non-natural element in the sacrament of the altar. After many meanders, as we have seen above, the Reformer found himself at the centre of the labyrinth, with his doubts resolved and his resolution taken. According to Netter of Walden, he began to lec- ture at Oxford against the docrine of transubstantia- tion ( " incepit determinate materiam "J in the summer of 1 38 1 ; but the actual date of the inquiry which was held in this year by Chancellor Berton, at the instance of the archbishop and bishops, is somewhat in doubt. Easter, as Dr. Shirley points out in deal- 243 244 John Wyclif. [1381 ing with this subject, fell in 1381 on April 14th ; and the Confession which was written by Wyclif after the inquiry had been held bears the date of May 10th. Perhaps the four weeks between these dates leaves time for all that is recorded as having happened. The inquiry itself was very much in the nature of a foregone conclusion. The issue of the condemna- tion under the Chancellor's seal, its promulgation in Wyclif's presence, the appeal to John of Gaunt and his response, with the writing of Wyclif's rejoinder, may certainly have happened within a month, and are scarcely likely to have been dragged out over thirteen months. The articles attributed to Wyclif, for which the Chancellor called him to account, were these : 1. The consecrated host which we see upon the altar is not Christ, nor any part of him, but an efficacious prefigurement of him. 2. No partaker can see Christ in the consecrated host with his physical eyesight, though he may do so with the eye of faith. 3. The faith of the Roman Church was expressed of old in the declaration of Berengarius, that the bread and wine which remain after the benediction are the consecrated host. 4. By virtue of the sacramental words, the eucharist contains the body and blood of Christ in a true and real sense, down to the minutest particular. 5. Transubstantiation, identification, and impana- tion terms which have been given to the eucharistic symbols have no foundation in Scripture. 1381] Condemned at Oxford. 245 6. It is contrary to the opinion of the holy fathers to maintain that there may be an accident without a substance in the host. 7. The sacrament of the eucharist is in its nature bread or wine, containing, by virtue of the sacra- mental words, the true body and blood of Christ, down to the minutest particular. 8. The sacrament of the eucharist is in figure the body and blood of Christ, existing by conversion of the bread or wine, whereof something definite re- mains after consecration, although, so far as concerns the faithful, it has been exhausted (" sopitum" ). 9. There is no foundation for saying that an acci- dent exists without a substance, for in that case God is reduced to nothing, and a distinct article of the Christian faith disappears. 10. Every person or sect is infected with heresy who obstinately maintains that the sacrament of the altar is mere bread (per se existens), decidedly lower in nature and less perfect than u pants equinus." 11. Everyone who obstinately maintains that the said sacrament is an accident, a quality, quantity, or the aggregate of these, falls into the like heresy. 12. Wheaten bread, with which alone it is lawful to celebrate, is decidedly more perfect in nature than bread made of beans or rats' flesh, either of which is more perfect in the scale of nature than a simple accident. In addition to these contentions, Wyclif was charged before the Chancellor with maintaining that the body of Christ could not be multiplied in re- gard to its dimensions or its limits, though he ad- 246 John Wyclif. [1381 mitted that it might be multiplied in a virtual sense, as He can be said to be present in every part of his kingdom. It was quite possible, he said, that the bread might be converted and yet remain the same bread just as the paschal lamb remains a lamb when it is made a sacrament and figure of Christ. The bread becomes Christ figuratively, virtually, and tropically, but not corporeally, or even with the body which Christ now wears in heaven.* It is more accu- rate to say that Wyclif defined transubstantiation than to say that he denied it. That some of these ideas, or the manner in which they are stated and illustrated, should have shocked both such as had not thought the question out and such as, having thought it out, would have preferred that Wyclif should have shown himself a little more squeamish in dealing with it, is not to be wondered at. Amongst the latter may have been Dr. Rygge if this member of Berton's Council is to be identified with the future Chancellor; which seems, indeed, a little improbable. But, if it were so, he would not by any means be the only prominent man of his day whom Wyclif contrived to win over from the ranks of his enemies. The inquiry into Wyclif s new teaching was held by the Chancellor and twelve doctors in the Augus- * Wyclif, said S. T. Coleridge, "was much sounder and more truly Catholic in his view of the Eucharist than Luther. And I find, not without much pleasure, that my own view of it, which I was afraid was original, was maintained in the tenth century that is to say, that the body broken had no reference to the human body of Christ, but to the kara noumenon, or symbolical body, the Rock that followed the Israelites." (Table Talk.) 1381] Condemned at Oxford. 247 tinian schools, where Wyclif himself attended, and maintained his opinions with his usual vigour. The doctors in question were Lawndreyn and Rygge, professors of the " sacred page," Mowbray, a doctor of canon and civil law, Gascoyne, a doctor of decre- tals, Crump, of the Benedictines, with John Wells from the abbey at Ramsey, three Preaching Friars, Chessam, Bruscombe, and Wolverton, the Francis- can Tyssyngton, Shipton of the Augustinians, and Lovey of the Carmelites. The Chancellor's decision was given with the unanimous consent of his twelve advisers. It does not contain Wyclif's name, but selects for special condemnation these two contentions that the sub- stance of material bread and wine remains after con- secration, and that the body and blood of Christ are not essentially, substantially, and corporeally present in the sacrament, but only figuratively or tropically. These " pestiferous " errors the judgment emphati- cally condemns, and a solemn monition primo, secitndo, tertio, et districtias is launched in the usual canonical terms, to the effect that no man thereafter should openly teach or defend those con- clusions, or either of them, in the schools or outside, within the University of Oxford, under pain of im- prisonment, suspension from all his offices, and the major excommunication. Wyclif is said to have been disconcerted by this condemnation and threat ; but no actual sign of confusion is mentioned. On the contrary, he sat in his chair and listened to the decision, and after it had been read out he contended that neither the 248 John Wyclif. [1381 Chancellor nor any of his colleagues had been able to break down his argument. Truly a pertinacious heretic, as Netter says of him in this connection ! Nevertheless it must have been a very unwelcome fact for the Reformer and his friends that he should have been condemned, even in this indirect fashion, by the Chancellor of the university with which he was so closely associated, and where he was held in such high honour by a majority of masters and students. The effect of the condemnation must have been greatly weakened by the evident unfair- ness of putting six friars and two monks on a com- mittee of twelve, selected by a secular clergyman, to inquire into the orthodoxy of a man who on independent grounds had had so many passages of arms with the regular clergy. The University at large appears to have taken this view somewhat decidedly ; and thereafter, for at least another twelve- month, the authority of Wyclif amongst his Oxford adherents was greater than ever. Some of them, no doubt, fell away from their allegiance when they found that the authorities were going against him, but he clearly had a strong party up to the middle of 1382. The successor of Berton in the chancellor- ship was a friend of Wyclif's, Robert Rygge, and no doubt the state of public feeling influenced the selection of a Wycliffite. It should be mentioned that Berton was subsequently credited with having approximated in some measure to the position of the man whom he had condemned. Wyclif himself had no idea of sitting down calmly under a condemnation pronounced by his personal 1381] Condemned at Oxford. 249 enemies, and by a Chancellor who had plainly gone beyond the sentiment of the University. He did not affect to treat the decision as impersonal, and therefore one that might be safely ignored. He took it home to himself, and went to the length of address- ing a direct appeal to the Crown. It was the natural and proper appeal under the circumstances. Berton had conducted the inquiry and pronounced his decision as Chancellor, and in the exercise of his authority on a question of univer- sity teaching and discipline. His judgment, indeed, was scarcely equitable, and at any rate it strangely jumbled together the academic and the ecclesiastical functions. Berton, like Wyclif, was a secular priest and a regent of divinity, but in both respects the Reformer was senior to the other by several years. The talk of excommunication, however, was only a threat ; the effectiveness of the judgment was in its prohibition of certain teaching ; and it was against this prohibition that Wyclif rightly appealed from the Chancellor to the Crown. He was, in fact, simply acting in conformity with the royal decree of 1366, and with the consistent claim of the University to be independent in its own sphere of bishops as well as of popes. At any rate the appeal reached the King's Council ; and it is stated by one authority that John of Gaunt himself brought the answer down to Oxford. What was the answer? Was Wyclif still so far potent with the Court as to obtain a technical victory over Berton and the twelve doctors ? That would make it easier to understand the temporary removal or withdrawal 250 John Wyclif. [1381 of the Chancellor, and the elaborate treatises in which Berton himself, Tyssyngton, and others proceeded to combat the views of Wyclif when the Committee of Doctors had failed to silence him. Either the suc- cess or the rejection of the appeal would be consistent with the action of the Duke of Lancaster, who is said to have enjoined his friend not to speak further of the new question which he had raised. It is impossible to help smiling at the magniloquent phrase which Netter, the confessor of Henry V., applies to the grandfather of his monarch in this connection. Hitherto he has had no good word for John of Gaunt, but rather the contrary. Now that the Duke has begun to grow cool towards the heresiarch, he is styled nobilis dominus dux egregzus, et miles strenuus, sapiensque consiliarius Dux Lancas- tricz, sacrce ecclesice filius fidelis. The corrector of William Courtenay and William of Wykeham would scarcely have recognised himself under such a legend. There is no doubt that by this time John of Gaunt was exhibiting far less zeal in the cause which he formerly had so much at heart. He may have found the Church .directly and indirectly a good deal stronger than he expected. He may have foreseen that he would need the help of the hierarchy in other and more attractive schemes which were forming themselves in his mind. And observe, by the way, that it was the influence of the Church which set the crown on the head of his son in 1399, and would have set it on his own head if he had lived to the age of sixty. At all events he must have found that to govern through the mother and the Council of the 1381] Condemned at Oxford. 251 young King was by no means so easy as it had been to govern in the name of his doting father. Be the reason what it may, he had begun to conciliate and flatter the prelates, without in any way regaining thereby the popularity which he had lost amongst the masses of Englishmen. So far had he gone back upon his old policy that, nine years after the exclusion of the clergy from the. higher offices, less than three years after he had undone the work of the Good Parliament, and stripped Wykeham of his temporalities, we find him contriving the nomination of Archbishop Sudbury as Chancellor apparently in order to make him and the Church in part re- sponsible for the obnoxious poll-tax. However little sympathy Wyclif might have had with the oppressed labourers and serfs and we know that his sympathies for them were keen he would certainly be revolted by this double retrogression. He could not but recognise that he was passing out of touch with the King's uncle ; and it may well have happened that this knowledge strengthened and confirmed his independence. So, when the Duke came down to Oxford (if indeed he came in person) and bade him suppress his con- science, and leave what he considered the idolatry of the mass unchallenged, he positively declined to fall in with the suggestion. Not only so, but he thought it necessary to make his position in the matter still more plain. This he did by means of a Confession, addressed apparently ad siws Oxonienses, and dated on the feast of Saints Gordian and Epimachus (May loth), in the year 1 38 1. 252 John Wyclif. ri38i In the course of this dignified and moderate docu- ment, one of the last of his Latin treatises (for he still shrank from disturbing the belief of unlettered persons on so critical a point of faith), Wyclif fully- admitted that there was a sense in which Christ's body was really present in the host. But he " could not venture to say that the consecrated bread was essentially, substantially, corporeally, and identically the body of Christ." There were, he said, three modes of presence in the host virtual, spiritual, and sacramental. The second mode implies (prceexigit) the first, and the third implies the other two. Christ's body was more really present in this than in the other sacraments ; but it was still more really present in heaven. And this declaration he makes in agree- ment with the true meaning (logicam) of Scripture, of the holy doctors, and of the canon of the Roman Church. It was only such as could not believe on all this evidence who started the idea that an accident might be the body of Christ. We may well hold that " by virtue of the words of Christ, the bread becomes and is, in miraculous fashion, the body of Christ," in the sense that the parts of that body are spiritually and severally in the consecrated bread and, if the parts of the body, yet more certainly those of the soul. Yet foolish persons continue to raise the old question (idiotce remurmurant ) y asking how this could possibly be, unless Christ were present in very substance, and in the natural sense. To which Wyclif replies that he explains it precisely as the Roman doctors explained the incarnation. 1381] Condemned at Oxford. 253 Wyclif's conclusion is clearly stated. The conse- crated host is naturally bread and wine ; but sacra- mentally it is the body and blood of Christ. The sacrament which we worship is not the substance of bread and wine, but the body and blood of Christ. But the "worshippers of accidents " adore it not even as the simple accident, without the substance ; they worship the actual sacramental sign the bread and wine as being the actual body and blood of Christ. We hold to Christ's very words : " This is my body." And so we worship the body, no longer the visible bread and wine. Then he quotes in his support the old doctors of the first millennium, Ignatius, Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Nicholas II., and the custom of the Church. With these Wyclif contrasts the moderns, who dishonour Christ's body. And he ends with stern words against those who receive the testimony of Innocent and Raymundi rather than the sense of Scripture, and the later rather than the earlier doctrine. "Above all and once again, woe to the obstinate tongue of the apostate who buries the Roman Church beneath a pile of false utterances, whereby he pre- tends that the later Church, when opposed to the earlier, has rectified the faith, declaring that this sac- rament is an accident without a subject, and not actual bread and wine, as both the Gospel and the canon of the Church affirm. For Augustine is our witness that no priest of Christ can make an accident without a subject. Yet these priests of Baal, falsely after the pattern of their father, so highly extol the 254 John Wyclif. ri38i sacredness of this accident that they hold every other form of mass unworthy of being listened to, and pretend that all who dissent from their falsehoods are ignoramuses, I suppose, from some university in the realms of darkness. But I believe that the truth will finally bring them into subjection." There seem to have been many rejoinders to this Confession. John Tyssyngton, a friar of the Order of Franciscans, wrote a terribly long-winded treatise in order to confute Wyclif s views on the sacrament, which Netter has preserved amongst the " wheat " of his promiscuous gleaning (in the Fasciculi Zizanio- rum cum Triticd) ; and an Augustinian friar, Thomas Wynterton, wrote still more at length in his tract Absolutio. Berton and Sutbraye, too the latter a monk of St. Alban's, and both of them members of the Synod which met at the Blackfriars priory in the following year took up their pens against the irrepressible heretic; and a certain " Duneltnensis" followed suit. It is clear that the persistent courage of Wyclif, which inspired him to stronger utterance after each successive attempt to crush him, gave abundant provocation and stimulus to the zealous orthodoxy of his contemporaries amongst the regu- lar and secular clergy. According to Henry of Knyghton, canon of Leicester, who wrote and died in the reign of Richard II., and was therefore a contemporary of Wyclif, as well as a near neighbour, the Rector of Lutterworth made his peace with the Church on this occasion, in order to avoid death, and " abandoned his defence not of divine wisdom but of his hollow 13811 Condemned at Oxford. 255 professions." Here is the Confession as given by Knyghton and apparently by him alone. " I knowleche that the Sacrament of the autar is verry Goddus body in fourme of brede : but it is in another maner Goddus body then it is in hevene. For in heven it is sene fote (seven feet high) in fourme and figure, of fleshe and blode. But in the Sacrament Goddus body is be (by) myracle of God in fourme of brede, and is he nouther of sene fote, ne in mannes figure. But as a man leeves for to thenk the kynde of an ymage, whether it be of oke or of asshe, and settys his thought in him of whom is the ymage, so myche more schuld a man leve to thenk on the kynde of brede, but thenk upon Christ, for his body is the same brede that is the Sacrament of the Autere, and with alle clennes, alle divocion, and alle charite that God wolde gif him, worshippe he Christ ; and then he receyves God gostly, more medefully than the Prist that syngus the Masse in lesse charite. For the bodely etyng ne profytes nouth to soule, but in als mykul as the soule is fedde with charite. This sentence is provyde be Crist that may nought lye. For as the Gospel says, ' Crist, that night that he was betraiede of Judas Scarioth, he tok brede in hise hondes, and blesside it, brak it, and gaf it to hise disciplus to ete.' For he says, and may not lye, ' This is my body.' " Clearly, however, this is no retractation at all, but only a statement of belief in general terms, such as might be used by men almost as opposite in their ultimate conclusions as Wyclif and Courtenay. It is not so much on the symbols of faith that devotees 256 John Wyclif. n38l have been wont to quarrel with and burn each other as on their interpretations of the symbols, or rather on the words in which they have attempted to express their interpretations. Mr. T. Arnold has hazarded a suggestion that Knyghton and his friends, in their zeal for orthodoxy, may have put this short English statement into circulation as though it were the substance of the Confession, or the actual Con- fession, made by Wyclif at Oxford. One would imagine that if his enemies could have brought themselves to such a point of dishonesty they would have taken care to make a better bargain with their consciences. There are other possible explanations. If the " I knowleche " paper is a genuine production of Wyclif's, and if it was at any time written or ac- cepted as a confession, in order to protect the writer from an unpleasant alternative, the immunity was certainly purchased cheap. But it might have been so. There would have been nothing dishonourable in Wyclif s saying, " If this paper will satisfy you, without elaboration and comment, I am willing to sign it, for it expresses my honest belief." And there would be nothing very extraordinary in Cour- tenay's accepting it on those terms, for it may have saved him at some particular moment an infinity of trouble, and still have given him the appearance of a triumph, which he could trust the friars to make the most of throughout the country. This hypothesis, indeed, is scarcely more satis- factory than the other. The last thing which Wyclif would be likely to do of his own free will would be 1381] Condemned at Oxford, 257 to give his astute foes the opportunity of proclaim- ing that he had retracted his mature and deliberate opinions. It is possible enough that he may have written such a paper in order to hand it in at the beginning of Berton's inquiry in 1 381, or of one of the inquiries held by Courtenay in the following year, as an abstract or text for elucidation. In that case it is easy to understand h'ow the document might come to be called, as it is by Knyghton, a " refngium mortis." That Wyclif, however, was not merely the obsti- nate old man who clings to his opinions with senile perversity, and because he has lost the spirit of con- ciliation, is proved by an admission which he makes in the Trialogus, written after his withdrawal to Lutterworth. " I have undertaken," he says, with- out indicating when or to whom the promise was made it may have been either to John of Gaunt or to Courtenay " not to use out of the schools the term ' substance of material bread and wine.' " It must have cost him dear to make even this condi- tional promise, which of course is a very different thing from a retractation. CHAPTER XIV. WYCLIF S POOR PRIESTS. HOUGH much that is interest- ing and comparatively new remains to be said about the Peasants' Revolt in the four- teenth century, we have no more to do with it in the present volume than may be necessary to show how much or how little John Wyclif contributed to bring it about, and in what manner it affected his own life and the development of his ideas. In this sense it is at least as important as any other chapter of events in the history of the early reformation ; for there can be no doubt that the panic produced amongst the governing classes by the uprising of the serfs was for the religious reformers a final check to the hope of speedy victory. 258 JOHN WYCLIF. ENGRAVED BY E. FINDEN, FROM A PORTRAIT ATTRIBUTED TO ANTONIO MORO AN H^RLOOM IN THE RECTORY OF WYCLIF-ON-TEES. 1381] Wyclif s Poor Priests. 259 That Wyclif was in some degree, however indi- rectly, responsible for the popular discontent is probably quite as true as the charge of direct com- plicity and encouragement is ludicrously false. It was alleged against him by his enemies that he de- liberately prepared the way for an outbreak, and that certain of his utterances on lordship, and on the rights of subjects as against their rulers, were dis- tinctly subversive in their character. If these utter- ances had been written and spoken in English, instead of Latin, there would have been a great deal more force in the accusation. But, even as it was, the doctrine was there ; it had been written and preached ; every disciple of Wyclif, and every Poor Priest to whom he gave his commission, had learned it, was proud of it, and would naturally teach it on the village greens and on the roadside. The germs would spread and grow in fertile soil ; the crop would inevitably spring up, grow rank, and whiten to the harvest. Is anything gained by denying that principles which would justify revolution in one order of government must be held to justify it in another, and that Wyclif himself did not simply argue from divine to civil government, but drew his inferences from the general to the particular, and claimed that the Church might correct the Pope because the nation might justly correct its own leaders ? It was afterwards stated that John Ball, on the eve of his execution, declared that he and his friends had been misled by the teaching of Wyclif and his followers. Even if it were so and we may see 260 John Wyclif. ri38i reason by and by to regard this statement with par- ticular caution so far as Ball is concerned it maybe fully admitted that the teaching of the Wycliffites must have 'helped to breathe spirit and resolution into the rural classes. It is well that this accusation should be taken out of the mouths of Wyclif's ene- mies, who not only gave him the treatment of a malefactor in his lifetime but burned his bones and corroded his memory when he was dead ; but it is better still that the admission should come frankly from the mouths of his friends, who can have no object in denying that he was both a reproach and a danger to the authorities of his day. Wyclif taught, as we have seen, that the ultimate power and authority resided in the people at large. " The right to govern depends upon good govern- ment ; there is no moral constraint to pay tax or tithe to bad rulers, either in the Church or in the State ; it is permitted to put an end to tyranny, to punish or depose unjust rulers, and to resume the wealth which the clergy have diverted from the poor." No further argument would be needed to justify starving peasants in refusing to pay an op- pressive poll-tax, when their only means of paying it was to take the food out of the mouths of their wives and children. Wyclif may not have expected that the seed which he sowed would bear fruit in this particular fashion, and with such raw haste. On the other hand, he was not a man of delays and misgiv- ings, wherever he was clear and convinced in matters of principle. It is true that he recognised the necessity of caution, and more than once exposed the 1381] Wyclif s Poor Priests. 261 folly of precipitate action as on the noteworthy occasion when he declined to advise the abolition of Peter's pence. But there are times when the day of caution seems to have passed, and nothing but immediate action is likely to serve the turn. It is hardly possible to doubt that in ecclesiastical affairs, at any rate, Wyclif believed that such a time had arrived. He might have been a Cranmer, a Knox, not to say a Cromwell, if the opportunity had arisen for him to strip the corrupted Church of her mere- tricious robes and jewels. He would have done it. He would have helped John of Gaunt to do it, with the supreme confidence of an honest man that only in this way could the Church once more deserve her majestic title as the bride of Christ. Where the State was concerned apart from the Church, Wyclif evidently recognised that he had not the same warrant to lay down a law of conduct for his fellow-creatures. In any case he did not press his arguments with the same force and directness. They went just as much to the root of the matter for one form of government as for another ; but Wyclif displayed a reserve and a reticence when speaking of the existing civil organisation which were not apparent when he spoke of the Christian community. In a volume like the present it would be out of place to examine in detail the scheme of the two Latin works which Wyclif wrote in middle life on The Lordship of God and on Civil Lordship. The reader who will be satisfied with an abstract of these treatises which are based in large measure, as has 262 John Wyclif. [1381 already been indicated, on the works of Marsiglio, Ockham, and Fitzralph may be referred to the account which has been given of them by Mr. R. L. Poole ( Wycliffe and Movements for Reform). It is in the Civil Lordship that we should look for Wyclif's more deliberate views on the relations of government and the governed ; and it is there, in fact, that we find the most direct statement of what has been called his " subversive doctrine." He con- siders two distinct phases of lordship, the natural and the civil, the latter being essentially based upon the former. Like other writers of his age on kin- dred subjects, he takes his illustrations and his paral- lels from the feudal system, and especially from the mutual relation of lordship and service, upon which the whole edifice of that system rests. In natural or religious lordship he finds the grand peculiarity that the lord paramount is the only absolute lord, of whom each individual holds directly, and to whom alone every individual owes his service. But civil lordship, as Mr. Poole interprets his argument, is " transitory and liable to modification according to the changes of human society. It becomes there- fore to Wycliffe a matter of slight importance what particular form of government be adopted in any given country, since its only claim to excellence depends upon its relation with ' natural lordship,' in other words with the precepts of religion." Yet the Reformer's ideal is certainly not what we should understand under the name of theocracy. Logically followed out, his argument would land us in a sort of communism, practical enough, perhaps, 1381] Wyclif 's Poor Priests, 263 if all mankind had first attained to counsels of per- fection. Kings, then, are responsible to the lord paramount from whom they derive their lordship ; but they are lords only in as much as they are stewards for God, and by virtue of their service. And their service is due not only to God but to their fellow-men. As all things are God's, they cannot b'elong to the stew- ard more than to anyone else, and, so far as there is any property in them, they must belong in common to all. Wyclif, says Mr. Poole, " had not yet learned the effect of his doctrine in practical life, as dis- played in the rebellion of 1381 ; but he seems con- scious of the danger of excusing by implication des- ultory attempts of this nature, when he warns his hearers against resort to force except it be likely to put an end to tyranny." The reasoning of these Latin treatises, however, was too subtle and too academic to reach the minds of the serfs, except as interpreted to them in their own language ; and the interpretation probably went in some cases beyond the intention of the original text. The arguments just cited are clearly not the conclusions of a visionary, but rather the opportunism of a reasonable man, who desired the gradual development of the State, and not asocial cataclysm. Wyclif did not fear a revolution in the Church itself. He doubtless thought that it would be highly beneficial ; but there is nothing to show that he desired or even anticipated a national revolu- tion in the political order of things. If, notwith- standing this, the tendency of his teaching was 264 John Wyclif. [1381 towards such a revolution, who will say that he was personally and morally responsible for the evils which attended the Peasants' Revolt ? The question is of so much importance, both in the history of the period and in the biography of Wyclif, that it would be misleading to go on to the details of this Revolt without making some further effort to appreciate the relations of the Reformer himself, and of his disciples and interpreters, towards the men who actually rebelled and revolted against the intolerable conditions of their existence. Of the exact manner and degree in which Wyclif impressed his own personality, socially and reli- giously, on the poorest of his fellow-countrymen throughout his laborious life, whether as parish priest in his three successive livings or as a man of wide sympathies and self-sacrificing benevolence, we have unfortunately very little direct evidence. It is true that we cannot require much evidence of this kind for the mere purpose of proof, when those who think least favourably of his actions are most dis- posed to magnify their influence with the common people. All that we know of this single-minded de- votee of truth and " Goddis law " (the term became a symbol and watchword of the Wycliffites*) points one way as to his absolute superiority to personal aims and self-seeking. It was one of the central points of his teaching that not a penny should be taken from the trust-funds of the Church, which are the patrimony of the poor, either for " covetise of * Henry of Knyghton says : " They used such an expression in all their speech, always asserting the law of God, ' Goddislawe.' " 1381] Wyclifs Poor Priests. 265 priests " or to support the pomp of Rome. He steadfastly refused to be a pluralist ; and even if he supplied his necessities from the proceeds of his benefices at Fillingham, Ludgarshall, and Lutter- worth which is doubtful we may be sure that he spent all the remainder upon his parishioners. He could not have preached the doctrine of poverty as he did whilst lavishing on himself what he did not need for his sustenance. If he had been inconsistent on that one point, above all others, his enemies would have made England ring with it, and the books of the friars, which denounce him so fiercely on the score of his heresy, would have abounded in gibes and sneers at his hypocrisy. The fact that Wyclif was King's chaplain, and occupied a position as lecturer or professor of di- vinity at Oxford, at the same time that he held a living in the Church, is nothing to the contrary of what has been stated above. The ordinary pluralist took his two or more benefices, his two or more pre- bends simultaneously, as favours or rewards, though he was rarely capable of performing all the corre- sponding duties, and was generally content to hold sinecure orifices. Wyclifs chaplaincy and lecture- ship, however they may have been paid, could not be enjoyed without the full performance of stipu- lated work. Clearly the absence of a country rector for part of the year in London, and another part of the year at Oxford, especially in those days of slow travelling, must have interfered to some extent with his parish duties; but we know that Wyclif main- tained assistants on whom he could rely, men whom 266 John Wyclif, [1381 he trained to preach and to translate the Bible, as well as to explain and illustrate it by precept and example. Chaucer's picture of the secular priest may well have been thought of and mentioned in connection with Wyclif ; and as we are trying to realise what he must have been to his poorest neighbours, and what his Poor Priests must have been to the serfs through his influence, it cannot be idle to recall the picture here. Might it not be reasonable to suppose that the old Rector of Lutterworth, but recently dead when the Canterbury Tales were completed, had unwittingly sat for the portrait of the " good man of religion " ? We may recognise here the moral lineaments of Wyclif s character apart from his controversies and logomachies at least as con- fidently as we can see the actual features of his face in the Denbigh portrait. ! A good man was ther of religioun, And was a pore Persoun of a toun ; But riche he was of holy thought and werk . He was also a lerned man, a clerk, That Christes gospel truly wolde preche ; His parischens devoutly wolde he teche . . . But rather wolde he geven out of dowte Unto his pore parischens aboute, Of his offrynge, and eek of his substance. He cowde in litel thing han suffisance . . . This noble ensample unto his scheep he gaf, That ferst he wrought, and after that he taught. Out of the gospel he the wordes caught, And this figure he added yet therto That if gold rust, what shulde yron do ? For if a Prest be foul, on whom we trust, No wonder is a lewed man to rust . . . t38il Wyclif's Poor Priests. 267 To drawe folk to heven by fairnesse, By good ensample, was his busynesse. But it were eny person obstinat, What so he were of high or low estat, rtim wolde he snybbe sharply for the nones . . . . . . Christes lore, and his apostles' twelve, He taught, and ferst he folwed it himselve." As to Wyclif's political sympathies with his poor- est fellow-countrymen there is no question. He protests strongly in his later writings against abuses and oppressions to which Englishmen were exposed, such as the inequality of the law, the venality of the lawyers, the falsification of legal documents, the subornation of perjury, the perversion of justice, the manifold extortions and fraudulent enforcement of serfdom and labour. It has been urged that he was secured as a popular champion in 1381, and that his greater popularity from this time forward was due to a political (as well as a religious) new depart- ure in the year just named. At any rate the actual revolt of the peasants may well have stimulated his political sympathies. It is no more possible to fix a precise date for the first commissioning of Wyclif's Priests than it is to say when the earliest of his extant English sermons was preached, or when he began to translate the New Testament. It has already been said that the plan of some of his Sunday Gospel sermons is such as to suggest that they were mere skeletons prepared for the use of the disciples whom he sent forth to the byways of England, to win the souls of the poorest hinds, and to tear away the veil of ignorance or prejudice which had hitherto hidden the Scrip- 268 John Wyclif. [1381 tures from them. His complete version, as we know, occupied the last few years of his life, but we cannot say when the first manuscript of his first translation began to be copied out and distributed. It seems to be a reasonable belief that the earlier copies were made for his first missionary priests, and that these missionaries volunteers, it may be, who asked nothing better than to put his precepts into prac- tice set out from Oxford, or Lutterworth, before anything like a systematic mission could be said to exist. There is no ground to suppose that Wyclif in- tended or desired to create an Order, in any sense of the term. He had seen too much of the perversion of good intentions of that sort to allow him to enter- tain such a design. But unless the mission of the Priests had been in some measure systematic, it is unlikely that his contemporaries, friends and enemies alike, would have mentioned it as one of the salient facts of his career. It is easy to believe that Oxford supplied Wyclif with many an enthusiast willing to don the sheep- skin and sandals, and to abandon all ease and cul- ture and genial companionship for his regimen of apostolic poverty. It is indeed impossible not to believe that such a cause, at such a moment, at- tracted scores of men in that home and nursery of fervent enthusiasms, which for seven hundred years has never failed to furnish either pioneers for a haz- ardous enterprise or leaders for a forlorn hope. But undoubtedly a certain number of the Poor Priests were humble and unlettered men, who had been LUTTERWORTH CHURCH. PARTLY CONTEMPORANEOUS WITH WYCLIF. 1381] Wyclif's Poor Priests. 269 touched by the fire of their master's zeal in his rural home at Lutterworth. Their plain speech and lack of refinements would be amongst their most hopeful qualifications for the task entrusted to them. They went forth to speak and associate with their kind, clad in a distinctive robe of undressed wool, brown and rough as the russet apples in their homely gar- den plots, relying for food and shelter on the good- will of their hearers, forbidden to thrive by their calling like the mendicants of an Order that was no longer poor, and rich only in their knowledge of the word of God, or haply in the possession of a roll of Scripture in their mother-tongue, and a few of their master's sermons. The monks and friars and secular clergymen who came at times to listen to these uncouth wayfarers, and to deride their appearance and their ignorance before the simple folk whom they had gathered to- gether, applied to them a term of contempt which had long been in use on the continent for religious fanatics of the humbler sort. The English "loller" of Langland's day was, indeed, a mere loafer and idler, not necessarily religious, or a babbler of any kind. Thus, in the Vision of Piers Plowman M All that have their health And their eyen-sight, And limbs to labour with. And use the loller's life, Live against God's law, And love of holy church." " Lollard " and " loller" in fact, did not mean quite the same thing, though the words descended from 270 John Wyclif. 11381 a common ancestor. The English loller was a sturdy beggar who lived on his fellow-men, and in this sense the term would have suited many of the mendicant friars " great lubbers and long, that loth were to swynke," as Langland calls them. But the foreign congener of the loller was a religious enthusiast who seems to have obtained his nickname from the friars themselves a fourteenth-century ante-type of the modern revivalist, or Salvation Army preacher, who would have nothing to say to the regular Orders. An authority quoted by Ducange, referring to the year 1309, speaks of " quidam hypocrites gyrovagi, qui Lollardi sive Deum-laudantes vocabantur." The Praise-Gods of Wyclif's time accepted and kept the name for themselves, and have been known to history as Lollards ever since. Sundry references are found in Wyclif's later works as in the Trialogus and the De Ecclesia to the institution of the Poor Priests. " It seems to be a meritorious thing/' he says in one place, " to associate good priests together, since Christ, the pattern of every good work, did likewise. But when they ask for alms let these priests be par- ticularly cautious in these three respects. First, let them move from place to place, and not become established (hceredati), for they are not confirmed without regard to their good behaviour. But if they live worthily and uprightly, let them enjoy temporal gifts in moderation. Secondly, let their number, their locality, and the time of their appointment be well considered, for both excess and deficiency in these points introduce an occasion of error, according THE PRIESTS' DOORWAY, LUTTERWORTH CHURCH, THROUGH WHICH WYCLIF'S BODY WAS TAKEN. 1381] Wyclif 's Poor Priests. 2 7 1 to the opinion of discreet men. Thirdly, let them be given to the duties which befit the priesthood, for want of habitude as well as indolence unfits men for this work ; and it is not every occupation, as the keeping of a booth, or hunting, or devotion to games or to chess, which is becoming to a priest, but studious acquaintance with God's law, plain preaching of the word of God, and devout prayerfulness." Especially they should be good preachers, for in this way Christ conquered his kingdom ; " but let him who does not preach publicly exhort in private. . . . And if anyone is specially skilled in training priests on this model, he has a power which comes of God, and possesses merit through grace when he accomplishes such a work." However obnoxious the Poor Priests, and the independent Lollards, of whom John Ball was a type, may have been to the secular and religious clergy, they were far from being universally unpopu- lar amongst the higher classes. Walsingham says, and there is no reason to doubt him, that " lords and the highest men in the land, as well as many of the people, supported them in their preaching, and favoured those who taught erroneous conclusions and very naturally, since they assigned such great authority to laymen, even the authority to deprive ecclesiastics and religious corporations of their tempo- ralities." Courtenay refers to them in a letter to the Carmelite friar Peter Stokys of Oxford, in 1382, as " wolves in sheep's clothing," sons of perdition, preaching their false conclusions under a cloak of great sanctity. 272 John Wyclif. [1381 No name was too bad for them in the mouths of regulars and seculars alike, especially after the Revolt. So long as the bishops and monks had no charge to bring against them except one of unsound doctrine, the men of that comparatively liberal age paid little attention to the ecclesiastical censure ; but so soon as suspicion and prejudice attached to them in con- nection with the outbreak of the peasants, the Arch- bishop was able to deal them some shrewd and effect- ive blows. Nevertheless we shall see that the later English Lollards that is, Wyclif 's Poor Priests and their converts were stronger than their persecutors, more enduring than the Wycliffite school at Oxford, and sufficiently pertinacious to bridge the darkness of the fifteenth century with an unbroken line of light. We have been at such pains to establish the con- nection between the early Reformation and the Peasants' Revolt that we may have lost sight for a moment of the main and prevailing causes of this half-abortive revolution. But if anyone could be found in those days capable of maintaining that Wyclif and his disciples were primarily responsible for the Revolt, it would be enough to ask in reply what would have been likely, and indeed certain, to happen at the close of the fourteenth century even if the last of the Schoolmen, the first of the English Reformers, had never written, preached, or lived. Assuredly we might account for and justify the rising as every historian worthy of atten- tion has held it to have been justified without bringing Wyclif into the reckoning at all. Let us consider for a brief space what were the principal 1381] Wyclif's Poor Priests. 273 causes of the outbreak which alarmed all England at this important and most interesting crisis an outbreak which, if organisation had been possible, and if competent leaders had been forthcoming, might have still more deeply modified the whole future history of the country, even if it had not then and there set up a durable commonwealth on a broad basis of enfranchisement. First and foremost amongst these causes must be reckoned the obsolescence and gradual decay of the feudal system, owing not so much to the Anglo- French dynastic wars which were but one chapter of a long story as to certain natural and logical developments of feudalism, sure to take place sooner or later, and already in operation when the four- teenth century began. Feudalism could not endure more than a century or two, at any rate in its origi- nal form, in any country not perfectly secure against the risk of foreign wars. It arose out of anarchy and general insecurity, and was the best attainable device for supplying the two great needs of human- ity under such conditions, protection for the weak and military aid for the ruler. But its deterioration as a system began at the very moment of its estab- lishment, and sprang from the same causes which had called it into existence. Moreover this deteri- oration proceeded most rapidly in a country where feudalism had been imposed on a subject race by their conquerors. . The combination of the weak gradu- ally made them strong, and the dependence of the rulers on the lower grades, both for men-at-arms and for supplies of money,. gradually made them weak. 18 2 74 John Wyclif. 11381 When this inevitable process had set in, the decay of feudalism was a mere question of time. The lord paramount had to sell his authority fragment by fragment for the service which he required ; the mesne lords passed from the attitude of guaranteeing protection to that of relying on those who fought, worked, and paid for them. The ultimate essentials of human society the valour, the sinews, the taxes of the multitude assured for them the final mas- tery. That seems to be the central law of historical development, under every species of government from the highest to the lowest; and to struggle against it save for purposes of delay is as futile as it is puerile. Before the end of the thirteenth century, Englishmen had seen this process in active operation. De Montfort and his friends may not have been philosophers, and may not have felt the full significance of their acts ; but at the moment when they created a new instrument of government out of the English Commons they were giving effect to the fundamental law, under which the power of feudalism was now rapidly dwindling away. It has been pointed out that the growth of the farming and merchant classes, the expansion of the towns, the increasing powers of chartered govern- ments and guilds successively effects and causes of feudal decay brought into existence a middle class of new-rich men, whether rising from below or descending from the classes of barons and knights. City men like the Fitzwarrens, Fitzwalters, Whitting- tons, Philipots, and Walworths, and their parallels in the sea-ports and manufacturing towns, gradu- I38r Wyclif's Poor Priests. 275 ally amassed wealth, and, when opportunity offered, bought up the interests of such of the older barons and knights as were compelled to part with their estates and manors. They bought, of course, the vil- leins and serfs together with the land, or at any rate they bought the power to exact service from these weakest units of the population. The amount and kind of service due from each, or the rent paid in lieu of service, was set forth in the transferred title-deeds, which were proof and evidence of hereditary servi- tude. The villeins, free labourers, and smaller farm- ers who had gradually risen above the class of serfs, whether by redemption or by free grant of immunity, often continued for a long time to render some ac- knowledgment to the lord of the manor, in the shape of work or its equivalent ; and a sentiment of personal loyalty would maintain the custom of this acknowledgment even in cases where it had ceased to be legally due. But when the baron or manorial lord had brought himself into difficulties, by luxury, travel, war, or chivalry, and his estate had been sold to a new-comer, sentiment had no more to say in the matter, and the subordinate folk stood towards the stranger on their legal or moral rights. The feudal link was in these instances finally severed, and only the serfs and the more subservient labourers remained thus closely addicted to the soil. Towards the middle of Edward's reign the serf, the villein, the large manor-farmer himself, eager to establish complete independence, or occasionally fired by mere ambition or greed, was ready for the first opportunity of cancelling every record of ser- 276 John Wyclif. [1381 vice; and the chance of doing this simply, safely, and effectively was one of the more immediate in- ducements of the great mobilisation of 138 1. Beyond the causes already mentioned which had tended to weaken the barons and knights, and to strengthen the labouring classes, there was one which did not come into operation much before the middle of the fourteenth century, when its effect was sud- den, remarkable, and decisive. This was the nota- ble decrease of the population, brought about by two entirely distinct occurrences war and plague. In estimating the effect of these occurrences, statis- tics are not wholly to be relied on. There were no means in those days of taking them exactly, or there is no evidence that the available means were scrupu- lously employed. The whole tendency of the time would be towards wild exaggeration. The word " million " in the mouth of a fourteenth- or fifteenth- century chronicler must be taken as an easy approxi- mation, not as a verified figure. It has been said that more than half the population of England perished by the plague in 1 348-1 3 50 a statement which is certainly not proved by the partial computations made for London, Bristol, and Norwich. The ques- tion, however, need not be argued here. It is enough for the purpose to allow that the repeated visitations of the Black Death, the worst of which occurred in the years just mentioned, in 1 361-1362, 1368, and 1374, supplemented by the French and Scottish wars, made great havoc throughout the country, and in the more unfortunate districts very seriously diminished the population. 1381] Wyclif's Poor Priests. 277 It has been urged, and it is doubtless partially true, that this depletion of men improved the condi- tion of the free labourers who were left, and who were now able to command a higher price for their labour. Of course it must have been so in many instances. The figures adduced by Mr. Thorold Rogers in his History of Pricey irrefragable as statistics, but perhaps safer within particular areas than for general application sufficiently attest the fact. It is hardly necessary to say that nothing like a universal or even a general amelioration of the con- dition of the poorest classes can have taken place in England in consequence of the shrinking population. Still less could any such amelioration have lasted up to 1380. The evils of plague and war far outweighed their advantages to the survivors. If wages in- creased, so also did the price of various commodities and necessities of existence ; and the attempt of the free labourers to sell their work for anything more than the indispensable requirements of life was promptly met by royal ordinances (on the advice of Parliament) in 1349, 1350, and succeeding years, strictly limiting the remuneration of labour. Moreover the scarcity of labour was counteracted by the dereliction of farms and we need not travel from our own generation to appreciate the fact that a large efflux of labourers from the country is not enough of itself to raise the wages of those who remain. The various causes which were at work acted and reacted on each other. Landlords and even clergymen quitted their posts and crowded into the capita-!.- Serfs risked the penalties of outlawry and 278 John Wyclif. ri38l roamed about in quest of high pay or more abun- dant food, thus rapidly bringing down the rate of wages even below the price which had been fixed by law. And then the stewards of the manors, in order to check the migration of free labourers as well as of the serfs, committed in many cases the crowning injustice of falsifying their service-rolls, destroying some records and perhaps inventing others, so that the sons of men who had bought their freedom with a price found themselves claimed and held to labour after a life of comparative lib- erty. It is more than probable that the rural classes were in a worse condition in 1380 than they had been in 1340. It is only when we keep in mind these various predisposing causes, and consider how long and systematically the English peasant had been pre- pared for his revolt, that we can appreciate the effect of the taxation laid upon him in the reign of Richard II. In an evil hour, in the first year of Richard's reign, the King's Council determined to raise money by means of a capitation tax taxa hactenus inau- dita, as Walsingham describes it which was gradu- ated according to the position and age of the contributor, down to a minimum of a groat for every child above the age of sixteen. This first poll-tax was proposed in 1377 or 1378, and levied in 1379.* It was intensely unpopular, and the amount * The record of dates is a little confusing ; but it is useful to re- member that a poll-tax in the fourteenth century took longer to col- lect than an income-tax in the nineteenth, so that the whole field of production might not be covered by the King's officers for a year or 1381] Wydif's Poor Priests. 279 which it produced was not sufficient to cover the estimate of the King's advisers. In 1380 they re- peated the levy, making it still more stringent by lowering the minimum age to fifteen. It was in the midst of this fatal political blundering that John of Gaunt, who seems to have been largely responsible for it, thought it wise, as no doubt it was from his own point of view, to associate the head of the English Church with his financial policy. On the 4th of July, 1379, Archbishop Sudbury was nomi- nated to the Chancellorship ; and in accepting this post the unlucky prelate, who had so faithfully ad- hered to the fortunes of the Duke of Lancaster, signed his own death-warrant. He held office in the Parliament which granted the second poll-tax, and at a subsequent meeting of the King's Coun- cil he had the courage to oppose the suggested withdrawal of the tax in face of the resistance of the people. It is clear that he shared with the Duke, and with Sir Robert Hales, the Treasurer, a burden of fierce hatred from the exasperated tax-payers. Hitherto the taxes had been levied on land, on knight's fees, movables, wool and leather, which affected the serfs not at all, and the free labourers very little. Talliage, indeed, had fallen on the demesne lands as well as on the towns, and this was virtually a poll-tax ; but it had scarcely touched the labouring classes. Nevertheless its unpopularity was so great that it had been finally abolished in the more after a particular tax had been authorised. We are expressly told that the tax imposed by Parliament in 1380 was still being col- lected in June, 1381. 28o John Wyclif. [1381 reign of Edward. A poll-tax of universal incidence had been proposed before 1377, but never actually levied. The impost in the year 1379 was the first which had fallen directly upon the poorest classes in the realm ; and it sufficed to light up the smoulder- ing fire which was only waiting for a wind to puff it into flame. CHAPTER XV, THE HEADLESS REBELLION. HE true fascination of history, whether it be the history of a race or of an individual, of a national government or of a moral revolution, is never real- ised until we have made a pro- longed and laborious effort to reconstruct what time has bur- ied in the dust. When at last, with patient toil and keen imagination, the student has succeeded in reaching a point from which it is possible to see, not the sheer realities, but the types and tendencies and probabilities of a half- forgotten age, he begins for the first time to un- derstand the satisfaction of the traveller who has struck into an unknown land, or of the explorer who has laid bare the tombs and temples of an ancient civilisation. 281 282 John Wyclif. [1381 If we could penetrate more deeply into the his- torical sources of human action, and trace each visible effect back through its proper channel to the centre of its causation, how dazzling would be the light which would thus be shed on the course of every national and personal development. How interesting, for example, it would be if we could recognise the exact measure of the survival of race antagonism between the English serf and the feudal and manorial lords, who had inherited three cen- turies of mutual enmity. How more than interest- ing to mark the descent from the political philosophy of Greece or it may be only the separate and tran- sitory re-creation of that idea of universal equality which was the very motive and mainspring of the Peasants' Revolt ! But to pursue such inquiries as these would be a task out of proportion with the scope of the present work, much as it might help us to comprehend the last few years of Wyclif s life. It would be difficult to say for how long a period in the reign of Edward III. the serfs had been in a state of masked revolt. Oppression and over-taxa- tion, callous injustice and blind revenge, grinding servitude and malignant hate, disorders of a hundred kinds, robbery and violence on the highways by men whose demoralisation arose out of resistance to intolerable wrongs, seditious talk and seditious plots, clamourings for leaders and abortive attempts to lead, attacks on the houses of the barons and on the King's officers, no security for innocence and no encouragement for loyalty, all the essentials of revolt short of the massing of the people for concerted 1381] The Headless Rebellion. 283 action these signs and warnings of revolution had preceded the death of Edward. But it was the poll-tax which finally exasperated the common people, and stung them into open rebellion. No doubt, as Hollinshed tells us, it was paid "with great grudging and many a bitter curse." Early in 1381 the massing began; but even now it would be idle to speak of concerted action. The distinguishing marks of this great uprising of the serfs were its spontaneity throughout the south-eastern counties, its lack of organisation, and, so far as one can see, the complete absence of recognised leaders to whom men could look for guidance and direction. The seething irresolute mob, so recently inarticulate, if not absolutely unvocal, had raised its huge limbs without a brain to control them, and had found a voice which proclaimed that forced labour and servi- tude of any kind should come to an end in England. What might not a capable leader have done in that critical year, with such a host behind him, ready to carry out his behests? But indeed the thing was impossible. There was no discipline there had been no chance of organisation. Possibly a strenu- ous man some English Spartacus with a genius for command might have pitched his camp on a Kentish plain, in the neighbourhood of Maidstone or Canterbury, or even on Blackheath, and there in the course of a few weeks he might have made an army out of a mob. But the mere suggestion of the idea is enough to show its futility : the lapse of time would have enabled the authorities in London to make far more effectual preparations. 284 John Wyclif. [1381 The serf, in fact, was better off without a leader, without genius, without arms or provision of any kind. His cause was enough for his need ; the mute and stolid protest of these swarming thousands of self-emancipated slaves was all that was necessary and it was necessary to break their chains. The slaughter of the lawyers and manor stewards, the burning of the court-rolls and service-lists, the be- heading of the Archbishop and Treasurer, the destruction of buildings in London these incidents of the brief servile war were not sufficient in them- selves to stamp it with the bloody mark of many a better organised revolution. The true character of the movement is seen in the perfect, almost childish, loyalty of the serfs to their King, in the admirable behaviour of the crowds which quietly dispersed when he had personally promised them redress, and in the equally admirable behaviour of the young monarch so long as he was under the influence of his mother. The plain significance of these facts was that the demands of the serfs were natural and right ; and Richard and his best advisers saw them to be right. If only all could have ended there if Walworth had never cut down the defenceless spokesman of the rebels during his colloquy with the King, if the hangings and quarterings which followed had been confined to men who were proved guilty of murder, and if Parliament had held itself pledged to grant the redress which Richard had promised, things might have gone better with England for the next hundred years, As Fuller says in his familiar 1381] The Headless Rebellion. 285 way, " Jack Straw would have been John of Gold had this treason taken effect." John Ball, Jack Straw, Wat Tyler, William Grindecobbe, would have been heroes every one, and the consolidation of English society would undoubtedly have been hastened by many years. The treason of the serfs was practically summed up in thei'r demand for the abolition of serfdom. The boon was guaranteed at Mile End, Smithfield, and the Tower, only to be cancelled (so far as that was possible) when authority got the upper hand again. Historians have almost ceased to talk about "the rebellion of Wat Tyler." The term is quite inade- quate as a descriptive title, and it was only the accidental meeting of this man with the King and his retinue in Smithfield which gave his name such undue prominence. There were, in fact, two or more Tylers amongst the leaders of the peasants, and the Tyler of Dartford who avenged his daughter on the collector of poll-tax was not the same man as Wat Tyler, or Walter Helyer (either name would be an easy corruption from the other) whom Walworth slew. The last mentioned seems to have been an Essex man, who came to Blackheath by way of Kent, who acknowledged Ball for his leader, and whose best known companions were John Straw, John Kyrkeby, Alan Threder, Thomas Scot, and Ralph Rugge. It would be nearer to the truth if we were to speak of " the rebellion of John Ball." Harpsfield saw fit to call Wyclif the whetstone of revolt (cos hujus sedi- tionis). That is a title to which Wyclif can lay but 286 John Wyclif. H381 little claim, whilst it is very appropriate to Ball. This Yorkshire priest, who came to live at Colches- ter soon after the year 1360, had been excommuni- cated by Archbishop Islip, and was apparently four times condemned and imprisoned by Islip and his successors. Langham wrote to the Dean of Bocking to denounce "one John Ball, pretending that he is a priest," who persisted in " preaching manifold errors and scandals." He called upon the Dean to admon- ish the said Ball, with " other and singular rectors, vicars, and parochial chaplains who adhered to him." Ten years after he was once more proceeded against, this time by Sudbury, and imprisoned in Maid- stone jail. He was there again in the spring of 1 38 1, when the men of Essex began the universal strike. On the occasion of his last committal he is said to have told the Archbishop, on receiving sentence of imprisonment, that he would be set free again by twenty thousand of his friends ; and it would seem to have been anything but a coincidence that the men of Kent, when they presently rose at the insti- gation of their brethren in Essex, marched straight to Maidstone, broke into the Archbishop's prison, and carried John Ball in triumph to Canterbury. Sudbury in the meantime had gone to London, where Ball may have seen him beheaded a few weeks later. There is no necessity to infer that Sudbury's death was in anyway due to the personal vengeance of the man whom he had subjected to ecclesiastical disci- pline ; but all the circumstances constrain one to be- lieve that the Colchester priest had been planning 1381] The Headless Rebellion. 287 the revolt against serfdom for some time past, that he had determined to take advantage of the exasper- ation produced by the poll-tax, that he had been arrested and condemned in the midst of his prepara- tions, and that he believed the strike would be begun by his friends in Essex at the time agreed upon, notwithstanding his incarceration. This would account for the course of events during the earlier days of the rising, and for the special prominence of Ball at Blackheath, whither he had marched with the men of Kent, instead of trying to cross the Thames in order to be with his more intimate asso- ciates who would probably have started for London before he arrived at Rochester. The English History of Walsingham fully vouches for the fact that the first massing, and the signal to move upon London, were due to personal initia- tion within the county of Essex. The chronicler says that " the authors and prime movers of this calamity " were Essex men ; and they may doubtless be identified with John Ball and his friends. It is recorded that they sent round to every little home- stead, and commanded all the men, veterans and raw lads included, to leave their occupations and their women-folk, to arm themselves in any way they could, and to assemble without fail at the appointed places, on pain of death. Accordingly some five thousand were gathered together, about the time of the spring ploughing and sowing, "of the lowest common people and the rustics," armed with sticks, rusty swords, and scythes ; a few of them (probably old soldiers who had fought in France) carrying 288 John Wyclif. [1381 worn-out bows many a bowman having but a single arrow, and many an arrow winged with a single feather ; and " thus they went forth to conquer a kingdom." There is a poetical touch in this descrip- tion which warrants us in treating it with some de- gree of qualification. Poor as the organisation must have been, the forces of " the Commons," as they delighted to call themselves, were probably better than the mere riff-raff of the country-side. The men of Kent, " hearing of this thing which they had so often prayed for," immediately roused the whole county, blocked the roads, and, stopping every traveller, made him swear " That he would be loyal to King Richard and to the Commons ; that he would have no King of the name of John ; that he would be ready when sent for to come and join them ; that he would persuade all his neigh- bours and acquaintance to hold with them ; and that he would not agree or consent to the raising of any taxes in the kingdom thenceforth except only the fifteenths which their fathers and ancestors had known and agreed to." Then they liberated John Ball at Maidstone, as already stated, and proceeded by way of Canterbury and Rochester along the northern road to London. The news spread to Sussex, Hertfordshire, Cam- bridgeshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk, and all men's minds were divided between hope and dread. " Men com- monly said to each other that there would be a division of the kingdom owing to these occurrences, and that England would be devastated and de- stroyed." And when the number of the rebels daily 1381] The Headless Rebellion. 289 increased, until they were past counting, and they no longer feared resistance, they began to show what they had in their minds. " Every single man who knew anything about the law of land-holding, whether clerks or venerable justices, and all the jurators of the land whom they had any reason to fear, they slew without compunction, declaring that the land could never enjoy freedom until these had been put to death. That kind of talk pleased the rustics immensely ; and, passing from small things to greater, they determined to set fire to all the rolls and ancient records in the court-houses ; so that, when they had wiped out the memory of the olden time, their lords would not in future be able to establish a claim over them." They also took special care to burn the tax-rolls, on which their assessment for poll-tax was recorded. So, for some time, the leaderless mobs hung about in their several counties, whilst the lords and men of substance concealed themselves in their dwellings, or fled to a distance, or paid ransom in one form or another. Meanwhile " the Kentishmen and the Essexmen drew together and formed an army, of about a hundred thousand common people and rus- tics." That is all that Walsingham can tell us of the creation of the first army which marched on London by way of Blackheath. It is probable, how- ever, that Blackheath was simply the common ren- dezvous for the south-eastern counties, whilst the men of the eastern counties met at Mile End. The Essex men would naturally make direct for the eastern gate of the city, though some of them may 290 John Wyclif. tl38l have been drawn to Blackheath in order to meet John Ball. One of Ball's lieutenants, Jack Straw, seems to have crossed the Thames at an earlier date, with a few companions, for the purpose of rousing the southern shire and opening the gates of Maidstone jail. On Blackheath there was a more or less orderly- muster. Wat Tyler, who had served in France, was at the head of this contingent, and seems to have kept it well in hand whilst the fiery priest from Essex harangued and inflamed it. Commissioners from the King came to hear the demands of the peasants, and they were sent back with fair treat- ment and a moderate request from the leaders that they might have speech with their monarch. In the Council to which this message was reported Sudbury made the fatal mistake, in which he was supported by the Treasurer Sir Robert Hales, prior of the Hospital of St. John, of urging that the King should not receive the representatives of the rebels. The story of the next few days need not be re- peated here in detail ; but so far as the spirit of the movement can be gathered from the words and acts of John Ball who must certainly be classed as a Lollard, whether he was a professed disciple of Wyclif or not it is worth while to take note of the general course of events. The famous speech of Ball on Blackheath has been cited by the chroniclers and others as a dis- tinct encouragement to violence and bloodshed. The simple question is whether we are to accept the testimony of his enemies, written down at the time when passion ran high, and by men who considered 1381] The Headless Rebellion. 291 him one of the worst and most dangerous culprits. At Blackheath, the chronicler tells us, there were two hundred thousand of the people gathered to- gether, and the excommunicated priest improvised a pulpit and preached to as many as could hear him on the standing text of communism in all ages " When Adam dalf, and Eve span, Who was then a gentleman ? " For all, said he, were made equal by nature from the beginning. Servitude was brought in by the unjust oppression of wicked men, against the will of God. If God had pleased to create slaves, he could have settled from the very beginning of the world who was to be a slave and who a master. Now let them remember that at last an opportunity had been given them by God to throw off the yoke of daily servi- tude. The time had come for them to enjoy, if they would make up their minds, the liberty for which they had craved so long. " Be stout of heart," he said, " and, with the zeal of a good husbandman who tills his farm, rooting up and cutting down the noxious weeds which choke the crops, set to work now and do the same thing yourselves. First of all, you must kill off the great lords of England ; then the lawyers,* the justiciaries, and jurators must be put an end to ; and last of all, cast out of your land all whom you think likely to hurt the Commons here- after. In this way you will be able to obtain peace * So in Shakspeare's Henry VI., Part 2, Dick the Butcher says 1 to Cade : " The first thing we do, let 's kill all the lawyers." 292 John Wyclif. [1381 for yourselves and safety for the future. When all the great men are carried off, there will be equal lib- erty for all. Everyone shall be a noble, no one shall have greater dignity than another, and the power of all shall be the same." If John Ball had been an agitator in the present century, and this account of his speech had been put into circulation by his enemies, he would have been able to write to the newspapers and challenge its accuracy or its veracity. As it was, he had no opportunity of checking the reports which were given of his sermons and speeches. If such oppor- tunity had been allowed him in the Archbishop's court, he had learnt too surely that his levelling theories were opposed to the political and religious orthodoxies of his day, and that the more logically and even moderately they were put, the more in- sidious and dangerous they would appear. In that sense the " mad priest " was hopelessly out of court, born before his time, and (according to the ideas of his day) rightfully condemned. But it is only fair to him to say that there is no trustworthy evidence that he incited any man to slaughter, or that he in- tended the march on London to be anything more than an overwhelming demonstration of the popular grievances, which (he fondly thought) was to secure the triumph of right without striking a blow. That the mobs in many instances broke from the control of their leaders is perfectly true ; and it is equally true that the leaders did what they could to restrain the violent. Thus when Lancaster's palace at the Savoy, which had narrowly escaped four years before, 1381] The Headless Rebellion. 293 was set on fire, the peasants seized a pillager who was making off with his booty and flung him into the blazing pile. " We have no mind to be thieves," they are reported to have said. Hate was far stronger in their breasts than greed. It is recorded that they pounded the Duke's jewels in mortars, trampled on his cloth of gold and embroidered silks, smashed the gold and silver plate, the spoils of many a hard fight, and hurled them into the Thames. The Duke himself at this time was at the head of his troops in Scotland, and it is therefore inexact to say that he had fled before the storm. The facts connected with the death of Archbishop Sudbury and the Treasurer Hales are by no means clear ; but the beheading on Tower Hill may be supposed to have been intended as an assertion by the " sovereign people" of its right to execute summary justice. In the wallet of one of the Essex men, who suffered for his part in the great disturbance, a letter was found which was manifestly the composition of John Ball. " John Schep, som tyme Seynt Marie prest of Yorke, and nowe of Colchestre, greteth welle Johan Nameles, and Johan the Mullere, and Johan Cartere, and biddeth hem that thei ware of gyle in borugh. And stondeth togiddir in Goddis name, and biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his werke, and chastise Hobbe the robber, and taketh with you Johan Trew- man, and alle his felaws, and no mo, and loke scharpe you to on heved and no mo [obey one head and no more]. 294 John Wyclif. ti38i " Johan the Muller hath ygrownde smal, smal, smal ; The Kyngis sone of hevene shall pay for alle. Be ware or ye be wo, Knoweth your frende fro youre foo, Haveth ynowe, and seythe ' Hoo ' : And do welle and bettre, and fleth synne, And seketh pees, and holde therynne. And so biddeth Johan Trewman, and alle his felavves." It may be said that in bidding Piers Ploughman to chastise Hobbe the robber, Ball was inciting to violence and even to bloodshed. But clearly the prevailing note of the significant document above quoted is one of peace and moderation of course pre-supposing the intention to march on London and demand redress. The comparative elevation and morality of this and other appeals from the dema- gogue priest, which must have circulated in great numbers for some time before the outbreak, have been recognised in every generation. Ball did not always disguise his name. Here is one of his missives. "John Ball greeteth you all, And doth for to understand he hath rung your bell. Now right and might, Will and skill, God speed every dele." And another : " Help truth, and truth shall help you. Now reigneth pride in price, And covetise is counted wise, And lechery withouten shame, And gluttony withouten blame. Envy reigneth with treason, And sloth is take in great season. God do bote, for now is tyme." 1381] The Headless Rebellion. 295 Jack Miller, Jack Carter, Piers Ploughman, John Trewman, appear again and again in these moving appeals ; and perhaps some of them, if not all, stood for the names of men who were familiar in the coun- try-side. The parable of the mill was manifestly a favourite one amongst the rebels. 11 Jack Miller asketh help to turn his mill aright. He hath grounden small, small ; The king's son of heaven he shall pay for all. Look thy mill go aright with the four sails, and the post stand with steadfastness. With right and with might, With skill and with will ; Let might help right, And skill go before will, And right before might, So goeth our mill aright." Unfortunately for the peasants, or at any rate for the victims on whom the worst of the vengeance was to fall, they could not or did not follow the ad- vice of John Schep on all points. They did not stand together ; guile overtook them in the borough, and they could not tell their friends from their foes. The vast majority of them unquestionably" sought peace and held therein," but the few who became violent and the turbulent citizens were perhaps more responsible for the violence than the rustics themselves gave some sort of warrant for the re- pudiation of the terms which had been granted by Richard, and on the faith of which so many thou- sands of the serfs had gone quietly home. There are but slight traces of generosity in the treatment of the peasants when all danger was at 296 John Wyclif. [1381 an end, and authority had renewed its sway. The strong course would have been to confirm the am- nesty and the emancipation, to compensate those who had suffered from mob violence, to keep the word of the King, and to maintain the supremacy and impartiality of the law. Richard's Council acted fairly enough in suggesting to Parliament that the serfs should have their liberty. The land-owners would not listen to it, wrongly supposing that things could be put back on their old footing, and urging that the King had no right to take away their chat- tels without their consent which, said they, " we have never given, and never will give, if we were all to die on the same day." That was at the beginning of the autumn session of 1381 ; and though many members came up prepared to think more of redress than of vengeance, the majority were bent on a policy of stern repression. It was determined that the promises extorted from the King by force were not binding, and ought not to be kept. Amongst these promises were a large number of individual manumissions, and some half-dozen charters of emancipation and pardon to the serfs of different counties, drawn up in the following terms : u Richard by the grace of God King of England and France, and Lord of Ireland, to all his stewards and trusty servants to whom this present letter may come, greeting. Know ye that by our special grace we have manumitted all our lieges and bondmen of the county of , and we have freed them from all bondage, themselves and each of them, and do sat- isfy them by these presents ; and moreover we 1381] The Headless Rebellion. 297 pardon the same our lieges and bondmen all their felonies, betrayals, transgressions and extortions of whatsoever kind, committed or perpetrated by them- selves or others, as well as any outlawry, if any such shall have been pronounced against them, or any of them, in consequence of these events; and further- more we grant them, and each of them, absolute peace. In testimony whereof we have caused these our letters patent to be drawn up. As witness our hand, at London, on the fifteenth day of June, in the fourth year of our reign." It was on the faith of these charters that the men of Essex, Hertford, and other counties left London without striking a blow. Some at least of the King's promises were made of his own accord, when he bravely faced the seething crowds, before there had been any violence in the streets. At no time was he himself in duress or danger; and to contend that he ought not to keep terms with his subjects, when it would have been a point of honour to do so with a foreign enemy, was no more reasonable than it was to urge that a Plantagenet King in the later feudal age was not entitled to insist on the emanci- pation of the serfs. The King's attendants and the City authorities* who had lost their nerve in presence of the immense crowds of rustics, seem to have taken heart again as soon as they had seen the dead body of Tyler, and the last contingent of the rebels had disappeared from the capital. The worst was over; henceforth the marshal could answer at any rate for the streets of London ; and, if there were to be further troubles 298 John Wyclif. C1381 in the counties, they could be dealt with in detail by the royal forces. It must have been patent to everybody that the strength of the rebellion was broken ; and no man would see this more plainly than John Ball, who knew his countrymen so thor- oughly. Even if he had faith to believe that the serfs had not struck their blow for freedom utterly in vain, he must have felt that he and his immediate friends had nothing to expect from the clemency of their enemies. He fled without delay to his native town of Coventry, and after a few days, probably recognised and betrayed by some one who knew him, the " mad priest " was captured in an old ruin so Froissart tells us and taken before the King at St. Albans. The unfortunate man had a short shrift ; he was condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quar- tered, and the sentence was carried out in Richard's presence on the 15th of July. CHAPTER XVI. courtenay's triumph. PON Wyclif and his friends the effects of the Peasants' Re- volt could not fail to be very disastrous. The King's Council was not satisfied with the vengeance which it had executed throughout the dis- turbed districts, with violat- ing the young King's pledges, annulling the manumissions and indemnities granted to the serfs, and attempting to rivet their chains more securely than ever. It determined to curb the spirit of Wyclif and his Poor Priests, believ- ing or feigning to believe that they were in part responsible for the outbreak. In most of these measures it required the assistance of Parliament, and it might have been thought that reaction in the country, added to the influence of the King's uncles and principal officers, would have ensured the elec- 299 300 John Wyclif. M381- tion of a series of Parliaments more than ready to acquiesce in legislation of a reactionary character. But it was not so. The Lords were amenable, and in some particulars they took the lead in a policy of vengeance or panic ; but when in 1382 the bishops and barons voted that Wyclif's Priests should be silenced and suppressed, the Commons disagreed with the ordinance, which never became a statute. Three years later another House of Commons rose to the heroic level of voting the appropriation of the Church endowments to secular uses. The Lords promptly refused their co-operation ; but the action of the more representative House showed that some at least of the new doctrines were firmly rooted in English soil. Courtenay became Primate of England after the death of Sudbury, and a few days later he was cre- ated Chancellor. He preached to the two Houses in English ; and if by any chance he thought it timely to enlarge upon the virtues of fidelity and good faith, it may easily be imagined that the Lords and Commons would listen to him at that moment with very little patience, for the mood of forgiveness was not upon them. Parliament met, and Courtenay preached his sermon, on the 9th of November, 1381 ; nine days later he resigned the great seal. It is at any rate not improbable that he did this through lack of stomach for the work of undoing all the King's pledges voluntary and spontaneous, as well as forced and of sanctioning the continued severities ofTressilian and the other justiciaries. According to one account, an actual petition of Parliament 13821 Courtenay s Triumph. 301 for anew Chancellor compelled Courtenay's retire- ment. It was not until the following January, on the marriage of the King to Anne of Bohemia, that the beheadings and burnings and disembowel- lings ceased, and the seven thousand victims were held to have paid the debt of revojt. But it was necessary that Wyclif also should suffer for the suspicions which had fallen upon him. He was accused of having contributed to bring about the disorders, and there would naturally be a preju- dice against him in the minds of some who had hitherto favoured his cause. In the spring of 1382 Courtenay was directed by Parliament to inquire into the doctrines of the Rector of Lutterworth, on the express ground that he and his preachers had disturbed the peace of the realm. It is doubtful how far this mandate proceeded from a majority in both Houses ; and, considering that the Commons soon afterwards refused to agree to the suppression of the Poor Priests when this had been proposed by the bishops and barons, it seems unlikely that the popular representatives should have ordered the proceedings against Wyclif in a message which so entirely pre- judged his case. We can easily imagine what argu- ments the primate would employ to convince the Lords of the wisdom and necessity of a prosecution. When John Ball had been condemned to death Courtenay had obtained for him a respite of two days, during which he had wrestled with the " mad priest " for his soul ; and he may have been able to assure his colleagues in perfect good faith that he had traced out all the ramifications of the doctrine 302 John Wyclif. ri38i which began in the schools and the Latin treatise, and ended in revolt against the government and the assassination of the chief ministers of the Crown. However this may have been, Courtenay lost no time in proceeding once more against the redoubtable Oxford professor, and with a better assurance of suc- cess than on either of the former occasions when he had set the machinery of the Church in motion. He had no longer much to fear, if anything, from John of Gaunt, who had cooled very considerably towards Wyclif and his friends, even before the terrible scare which the peasants had given him a year ago. Poor Sudbury, too, the mild and irresolute, had gone to his account, and there was no power in the land which was able, or disposed, to interfere with the exercise of his authority. As soon as the session was over he summoned a Synod of the English Church to meet him, on the 2 1st of May, in the priory of the Dominicans in Holborn (" apud Prcedicatores "J. There were present in this assembly ten bishops, including Courtenay himself, Robert of London, William of Winchester, John of Lincoln, Thomas of Exeter, John of Durham, John of Hereford, Ralph of Salis- bury, Thomas of Rochester, and William Bot.elle- sham of Nantes the latter being an old friar. The doctors of theology in addition to these were four Carmelites Glamvile and Dysse of Cambridge, Lovey and Kynyngham of Oxford ; three Domini- cans Sywarde and Langeley of Oxford, and Parys of Cambridge ; four Augustinians Ascheburn and Bankin of Oxford, Hormenton of Cambridge, and [13821 Courtenays Triumph, 303 Waldeby of Toulouse ; four Franciscans Karlelle and Bernevvell of Oxford, Folvyle and Frysby of Cam- bridge ; and the Benedictine monk John Wells of Ramsey. There were also eleven doctors of law, two bachelors of law, and seven bachelors of theology, including Bloxham, custos of Merton, Humbleton and two other Dominicans, two Carmelites, and a Franciscan. This was not the full number summoned by Courtenay. Rygge, the Chancellor of Oxford, was not present, nor did Wyclif himself put in an ap- pearance, being very possibly out of health. Dr. James asserts in his Apology that Wyclif " volun- tarily absented himself, because he knew that the bishops had plotted his death by the way, devising the means and encouraging men thereunto." This is not at all likely, though the suspicion may have been entertained. It is more than probable that the Reformer's friends dissuaded him from going to London, through fear that his death might follow on his condemnation. It would be impossible, in the light of subsequent events, to admit that such fears were groundless. Or it may have been that Wyclif had good cause to know that he would at least be arrested if he left Oxford in 1382. Parlia- ment as well as the bishops was now against him, and for the moment Oxford was perhaps the only place in the country where he could be free from the dan- ger of arrest. In his absence the Synod discussed the conclusions which had been attributed to him, and condemned ten of them as distinct heresies and fourteen more as erroneous. 304 John Wyclif. 11381 Whilst the discussion was proceeding, the hall in which the Council sat was shaken by an earthquake. It may well be supposed that Wyclif's friends if there were any present, which seems doubtful would claim this portent as a sign from Heaven in his favour ; and even the most orthodox of the clergy must have been startled and perturbed. One can- not but admire the splendid courage of Courtenay, who instantly turned the shock to good account ; for, he said, as the earth expelled its ill humours with so much vehemence and convulsion, they ought to take it as a happy omen for the expulsion of ill humours from the Church of Christ. The Synod was then adjourned until the 12th of June, at the same time and place ; and in the mean- time the Primate took measures to make an impres- sion on the obstinate spirits at Oxford, who under Chancellor Rygge still remained loyal to their friend. On the 28th of May Courtenay sent his missive to Peter Stokys, a friar of the Carmelite Order, and a "professor of the sacred page." The prelates of the Church, he said, owed it to the lambs to warn them against wolves in sheep's clothing. There were cer- tain "sons of eternal damnation" who, "under a cloak of great sanctity," claimed authority to preach in spite of prohibition a number of heretical, erro- neous, and false conclusions, already condemned by the Church, and contrary to decisions of the ecclesi- astical authorities, " which threaten to overturn the Church and the peace of the nation." These men are not afraid to assert and publicly teach the errors in question, " not only in the churches but also in 11382] Courtenays Triumph. 305 the open squares and other unconsecrated places within our province of Canterbury." Therefore the Archbishop had called together a number of doctors of theology and professors of the canon and civil law, with other clerics of repute, that they might give an opinion thereon. By them it was found and declared that of the said conclusions some were heretical, whilst others were erroneous and contrary to decisions of the Church. The Archbishop therefore commands Friar Peter to warn and inhibit any who preach or defend such doctrine, of whatever state or condition they may be, in the University of Oxford, in the schools or out- side, in public or in private, and any who shall listen to those who preach it, or shall favour or consort with them in public or in private. They are to be fled from and avoided like a snake emitting deadly poison, under penalty of the greater excommunication. To this missive the Primate added a list of the heresies and errors which had been condemned by the Synod of Blackfriars namely, ten heresies and fourteen erroneous conclusions. The heresies are as follows : " 1. That the material substances of bread and wine continue after consecration in the sacrament of the altar. " 2. The bread and wine do not remain in the same sacrament sine subjecto (as accidents without substance). " 3. Christ is not in the sacrament of the altar identically, truly, and really in his proper corporeal personality. 306 John Wyclif. [1381 u 4. If a bishop or a priest is in mortal sin, he does not ordain, consecrate, or baptize. " 5. If a man is in a fit condition of soul, external confession is superfluous and even invalid for him. " 6. There is no authority in the Gospel for de- claring that Christ ordained the mass. " 7. God is constrained to give place to the devil. " 8. If the Pope is a reprobate and wicked man, and consequently a member of the devil, he has no power over Christ's faithful people assigned to him by anyone, unless it be by Caesar (that is, temporal). "9. After Urban VI. no one else ought to be elected as Pope, but we ought to live in the manner of the Greeks, under our own laws. " 10. It is contrary to Holy Scripture for ecclesias- tics to hold temporal possessions." At the same time that he wrote to Peter Stokys, the Archbishop sent a letter to Chancellor Rygge, expressing his surprise at the favour which had been shown by him to Master Nicholas Hereford who had just been appointed to preach before the University exhorting him thenceforth to amend his ways, lest he should himself appear to be one of the heretical sect, and it should be " our duty thereon to exercise our authority against you." And the Chancellor is enjoined to assist Stokys in giving publicity to the Archbishop's denunciation. Courtenay was grimly in earnest : but he had some trouble yet before he could make his will pre- vail. After receiving his letter, Dr. Rygge appointed Repyngdon, another Wycliffite, to preach before the University. It is evident that he was only in- 1382] Courtenay s Triumph, 307 terpreting the spirit of Oxford, so far as the aca- demic element was concerned. The Lollards, as they now began to be generally called, were in fa- vour ; the University men would not hear them ill spoken of, and applauded those who did them honour. Rygge gave Stokys no active assistance, and the Carmelite wrote to Courtenay saying that he dare not carry out his behests for fear of death. The defiance was open and aggressive. Not only did Repyngdon call the men who had been condemned by Courtenay holy priests, and contrast their mor- ality with the abuses which were rife amongst the wealthier clergy, but when Stokys came into the schools and prepared to inhibit him in the name of the Archbishop, the scholars drew their arms and threatened his life. Then he hurried back to Lon- don, leaving the Wycliffites masters of the field. Courtenay, naturally enraged at this resistance to his authority, sent such an urgent summons to the Chancellor, calling upon him to attend the ad- journed meeting of the Synod on June 12th, that Rygge did not venture to disobey. By way of celebrating the long-desired condemna- tion of the teaching of Wyclif which was completed at the first sitting of the Synod and possibly at the same time commemorating the irruption of the peasants and the murder of Sudbury, the bishops and clergy determined upon a grand open-air pro- cession on Whitsunday. The people of London were already keen for a pageant of any kind, and they gathered together in crowds to see the priests and devout laymen marching barefoot through the 308 John Wyclif. [1381- city and suburbs, chaunting the litany and peniten- tial psalms. After the procession John Kynyngham, the Carmelite Friar (who is said to have been John of Gaunt's confessor, though he certainly had no sympathy with the Duke's admiration for Wyclif against whose Latin treatise De Esse he had argued long and drily twenty years ago), preached a sermon before his brethren of the Synod, and publicly re- peated their condemnation of the Oxford heresies. He pointed the moral of the great act of expiation which had just been performed for the violated sanctity of the mass ; and, if the reports of his friends are to be believed, he effected at least one note- worthy conversion. A certain Cornelius Clonne, an old soldier and a Lollard, was turned from the error of his ways ; and so strongly was he affected by the exposure of Wyclif s blasphemies that on the follow- ing day, whilst attending mass in the church of the Black Friars, he saw with his own eyes . . . Perhaps there is no need to repeat exactly what he saw ; but it was a conclusive argument against both Wyclif and the orthodox clergy ; for, if it was not material bread and wine, it was just as little the acci- dents of the consecrated host without a subject. On the 1 2th of June the Synod met again in Hol- born ; and there were present, in addition to many of those who had met in May, Robert Rygge, Laundreyn and Brygtwell, Peter Stokys and Henry Crompe, Radeclyff, Sutbraye, the monk of St. Alban's, Bromyerde, a Black friar from Cambridge, with two other doctors of law and two bachelors of theology. Stokys would now be able to repeat the 1382] Courtenay s Triumph. 309 story of his treatment at Oxford ; but it was not until the next meeting that Crompe was in a posi- tion to relate how he had been suspended by the masters for speaking of Wyclif and his followers as heretics. The most striking feature of this second sitting was the humble submission of the Chancellor, who is said to have gone on his knees to the Arch- bishop, and accepted the discipline of Holy Church. His forgiveness was made conditional on his assist- ing to extirpate the condemned doctrine from the University ; but when the Primate gave him the pro- clamation, which denounced Hereford, Repyngdon, John Aston, and Laurence Bedenham, suspending them from their functions, he protested that it would cost him his life to enforce it. "Then," said Courtenay, " your University is an open fautor of heretics, if it suffers not the truth to be proclaimed within its limits." Rygge went back to Oxford, and doubtless made his friends acquainted with the decision of the Arch- bishop; but he certainly took no action against them. He had, it seems most probable, been elected this year as the champion of the Wycliffite party, and could not have retained the chancellorship if he had turned round on his supporters. Courtenay meanwhile had brought other influences to bear upon the Lollards. Parliament (at any rate the Lords and the King's Council) gave him the assistance which they had promised. The Duke of Lancaster made the Wycliffites understand that they would receive no further help from him ; and in all probability Wyclif himself was ill at this moment. 310 John Wyclif. [i38i- Bedenham is not mentioned as having appeared before the Synod, but the other three who had been suspended now thought it prudent, or were constrained, to answer the citation of the Primate. The third sitting had been fixed for June 14th. Hereford, Aston, and Repyngdon put in an appear- ance, but refused to make the recantation which Courtenay demanded. He gave them a short respite, and appointed a fourth meeting for June 20th. In the interval Aston himself one of the Poor Priests against whom the tide had turned so strongly drew up a manifesto for his friends outside, in which he boldly re-stated his conclusions. The result was that when the Synod met again he was formally condemned as a heretic. But once more the haughty prelate four years after the memor- able trial at Lambeth was interrupted by an incur- sion of Londoners, who had been moved by Aston's appeal, and could not restrain themselves when they heard that he had been condemned. They might indeed have been headed by the same worthy draper, John of Northampton, who came to the help of Wyclif in the Archbishop's chapel, for he was still a warm sympathiser with the Lollards, and had not yet risen to the dignity of the mayoralty. Courtenay gave Hereford and Repyngdon another eight days in which to make submission, afterwards postponing the date to the 1st of July; and, as he had no mind to be interfered with in the dis- charge of his duty by the obstreperous citizens, he changed the place of meeting on this occasion to Canterbury. There were six new doctors at the 1382] Courtenay s Triumph. 3 1 1 fifth and final sitting of the Synod, including Wil- liam Berton, who had already pronounced against Wyclif at Oxford. Neither Hereford nor Repyngdon put in an ap- pearance at Canterbury, and they were both con- demned in their absence. From the final record of the Synod it appeared that Courtenay had collected seventy-three signatures to the formal condemnation of Wyclif s conclusions. One of the most entertaining of the songs, Latin or English, bearing upon the events of this period, which have been preserved in the Cotton manu- scripts, and printed by Mr. Wright in the Rolls Series, deals with the Council of 1382. It refers to the plague, the Peasants' Revolt, and the earth- quake, as well as to sundry characters in the drama of Wyclifs life with whom the reader is already acquainted. It may perhaps be a pardonable licence to quote three or four of the more pertinent stanzas of this Wyclifrite poem. " Armacam quern cselo Dominus coronavit, Discordes tantomodo fratres adunavit ; Sed magno miraculo Wyclif coruscavit, Cum fratres et monachos simul collocavit. With an O and an I, consortes effecti, Quovis adversario dicunt, sunt protecti. M Tunc primus determinans est Johannes Wellis, Istos viros reprobans cum verbis tencllis, Multum conversatus est ventis et procellis ; Hinc in ejus facie patet color fellis. With an O and an I, in scholis non prodest, Imago faciei monstrat qualis hie est. 312 John Wyclif. [1381; " Hie promisit in scholis quod vellet probare Wyclif et Herford simul dictis repugnare ; Sed cum hie nescierat plus argumentare, Nichol solvens omnia jussit Bayard stare. With an O and an I, Wellis replicabat ; Sed postquam Nichol solverat, tunc Johannes stabat. Tunc accessit alius, Stokis nominatus, Rufus naturaliter, et veste dealbatus, Omnibus impatiens, et nimis elatus, Et contra veridicos dirigens conatus. With an O and an I, sub tam rubra pelle Animus non habitat nisi unctus felle." The entry made in the Archbishop's register by Courtenay's direction, relating to the condemnation of Wyclif in 1382, is printed by Wilkins in his Councils of Great Britain. It is of course set forth in Latin, and is to the following effect. " Whereas it was matter of common repute amongst the nobles and the people of England that certain heretical conclusions, and some which were erroneous, and contrary to decisions of the Church, which aim at overthrowing the entire Church, and our province of Canterbury, and the peace of the realm, had been generally, commonly, and publicly professed in various places within our said province ; we, William, by Divine permission Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England, and legate of the Apostolic See, having taken cognisance of these matters, and being minded to exercise the functions of our office, called together certain venerable brethren, our suffragans and others, and many doctors of the sacred page, of the canon and civil 1382] Courtenay s Triumph. 313 law, and bachelors, all of whom we believed to be the most reputed and able of the realm, and most devout in maintaining the Catholic faith, whose names are included below. And on the 7th day of May, A. D. 1382, in a chamber within the confines of the priory of the Preaching Friars of London, under our presidency, when our aforesaid brethren had been called together and were in personal at- tendance, the conclusions already mentioned, the tenor of which is given below, were openly stated and read in a clear and distinct voice ; and we charged our aforesaid brethren, and the doctors and bache- lors, by the faith whereby they were bound to our Lord Jesus Christ, and as they expected to answer at the day of judgment before the Supreme Judge, that they all and each should declare to us their opinion concerning the said conclusions. " And finally, when a discussion had been held thereon, on the 21st day of the same month, our said brethren with the doctors and bachelors appear- ing before us in the same chamber, and the said conclusions having been read out a second time and plainly expounded, when we and all who were pres- ent had expressed our opinion, it was declared that of the said conclusions some were heretical, and others erroneous, and contrary to the decisions of the Church, as more clearly appears below. And whereas we have discovered, on sufficient informa- tion, that the said conclusions have been taught in many places within our province as aforementioned, and that particular persons have held and taught some of them, and that they have been strongly 314 John Wyclif. [1381- and notoriously suspected of heresy, we have taken the following proceedings both general and particular." Long entries follow in the same register, detailing the inquiries held by Courtenay at the other sittings, as already recorded. But as they give us little or nothing in the shape of question and answer, and baldly recite the opinions and acts of the Archbishop himself, they are hardly worth the space which their transcription would occupy. Courtenay had struck a shrewd blow at what he naturally considered a pestilent and fatal heresy ; and perhaps there was not another bishop on the bench who would have done it half so thoroughly. But if he flattered himself that his end was gained when Wyclif had been declared a heretic, and his principal supporters had been excommunicated, he would soon be undeceived on that point. The probability is that he knew the strength of Lollardy too well to suppose that it had been absolutely crushed by his Synod, or that either pope or bishop or monk would be strong enough to stem and to turn the advancing tide of rationalism in matters of doctrine. None the less did he fight a strong and resolute battle for the faith as he conceived it. He fought, moreover, so far as one can see, fairly and aboveboard, taking no mean advantage, giving plenty of notice and warning, as ready to remove his censures as to impose them, whenever a rebel against the authority of the Church submitted him- self to her maternal discipline. No one could be more unyielding, more stern and arbitrary in the 1382] Courtenays Triumph. 315 face of defiant opposition. No one, if his acts have been read aright, could be more magnanimous in victory. In Wyclif, if in Wyclif only, he found a will and a resolution to match his own. Wyclif never yielded to him nor to Parliament, nor to King, nor to Pope. There is one thing stronger than 'the strongest au- thority that was ever set up, and that is the spirit of revolt against wrong based upon an overwhelming conviction of truth. Wyclif had such a conviction, and nothing on earth could shake him. " Justum ac tenacem propositi virum Si fractus illabatur orbis, Impavidum ferient ruinse." And assuredly Wyclif had suffered and was yet to suffer more than enough to convulse a stronger man. His life had been a perpetual struggle, and within the last seven or eight years he was never free from keen antagonism. The friars and monks had poured the vials of their wrath upon him. One Pope had launched five bulls against him, and another was already being urged to summon him to Rome. The Primate and nine bishops had solemnly denounced him as a heretic. The Chancellor of his beloved Uni- versity had condemned him in the open schools, and forbidden him to teach what he believed to be true. He had passed through dark clouds of suspicion ; the mother and the uncle of the King had ceased to defend him ; Parliament, which used to ask for and follow his advice, had arraigned him as a disturber of the public peace. His most formidable enemy, at 316 John Wyclif. H381- the head of the English Church, had smitten his friends, hip and thigh, until they were either dis- persed or beginning to fail in the hour of persecu- tion ; and now the hand of God was upon him, and he must have felt in 1382 that his days on earth were numbered. " All thy storms have gone over me," he might have said ; w I am feeble and sore smitten ; mine enemies close me in on every side." Who could have wondered if he had faltered in the end of his life, if he had shown one moment's weakness, or compro- mised himself by one impatient word ? But he did nothing of this kind. He stands out to the last, amid the storm and stress of persecution, as firm as the cliff in Teesdale from which he took his name. Wyclif addressed an independent petition to Par- liament, on May 6, 1382, urging the authorities of the realm to support the simple faith of Christ, indepen- dently of the errors by which it has been overlaid. As to the form of this petition there is not a little un- certainty, for whilst some manuscripts have preserved a long " Complainte to King and Parliament " in English, consisting of four main clauses amply ex- pounded, Walsingham briefly recapitulates seven points, which do not correspond with the English document. Walsingham's " seven interpretations " are as follows : 1. Neither the King nor the nation ought to yield to any external see or prelate. 2. The money of the realm ought not to be sent out of the country, to Rome, to Avignon, or elsewhere. 3. Neither cardi- nal nor any other mart ought to take the revenue of a church or prebend in England unless he duly resides 1382i Courienays Triumph. . 317 there. 4. The King and his realm are bound to over- throw those who betray the realm. 5. The Com- mons of the realm ought not to be burdened by un- accustomed taxes, until the patrimony which has been given to the clergy has been exhausted. 6. If any bishop or beneficed curate has notoriously fallen into contempt of God, the King not only may but is bound to take away his temporal goods [entrusted to him by the Church]. 7. The King ought not to set a bishop or a curate in any secular office. There is evidently not much in these propositions, unless it be in the fifth, which would make them par- ticularly appropriate as coming from Wyclif at that crisis ; and they had all been maintained, and in great measure admitted, by King, Parliament, and people, several years before. But the " Complainte " is a dignified and carefully considered paper, and might well have been presented to " our most noble and most worthi King Richard, kyng both of Englond and of Fraunce, and to the noble Duk of Lancastre, and to othere grete men of the rewme, bothe to sec- ulers and men of holi Churche, that ben gaderid in the Parlement." The first point in this petition is that the rule of Christ is perfect and sufficient, with- out any other ; that the clean religion of Christ was followed by the apostles, but it has been overlaid by monks and friars. If their rules agree with that of Christ, they should be known by Christ's name, not by that of Francis or Dominic. Therefore it is peti- tioned "that alle persones of what kynne privat sectis, or singuler religioun, maad of sinful men, may freely, withouten eny lettinge or bodily peyne, leve 318 yohn Wyclif. tl381- that privat reule or neue religion founded of sinful men, and stably holde the reule of Jesus Crist." The second demand is that all who have denied the power of the King to deal with the temporalities of the Church should be condemned. The third is that tithes and offerings should be taken away or withheld from clergy of immoral life. "Ah, Lord God," Wyclif writes on this point, " is it reason to constrain the poor people to provide a worldly priest, however unworthy of life and of knowledge, in pomp and pride, covetise and envy, gluttony and drunkenness and lechery, in simony and heresy, with fat horse and jolly and gay sad- dles, and bridles ringing by the roadside, and him- self with costly clothes and pelure, and to suffer their wives and children, and their poor neighbours, to perish for hunger, thirst, cold, and other mis- chiefs of the world ? Ah, Lord Jesus Christ ! since within few years men paid their tithes and offerings at their own will free, to good men and able, for the worship of God and the profit of Holy Church fighting on earth, must a worldly priest destroy this holy and approved custom, constraining men to abandon this freedom, and turning tithes and offer- ings into wicked uses ! " The fourth point in the petition -and it was prob- ably for this in chief that Wyclif wrote and pre- sented it raises the special question of the sacrament, on which the Reformer had but recently declared himself, and which his enemies had magnified into the rankest and most unforgiveable of all his heresies. Let us return once more to Wyclif s 1382] Courtenays Triumph, 319 simple, rough, and nervous English. He prays " that Christis techinge and bileve of the sacrament of his owne body, that is pleynly taught by Crist and his apostelis in gospellis and pistillis, may be taught opinly in chirchis to Cristen puple, and the contrarie teching and fals bileve, brought up by cursed ypocritis and heretikis and worldly prestis, unkunnynge in Goddis lawe, distried. . . Dampne we this cursed heresie of Anticrist and his ypocritis and worldly prestis, seiynge that this sacrament is neither bred ne Cristis body, but accidentis without- en suget, and therunder is Cristis body. For this is not taught in holy writt." Once again after his condemnation by the Synod of Blackfriars he came face to face with Courtenay if we are to accept on this point the evidence of one or two contemporaries who are not invariably correct in dealing with the successive stages of his career. The resistance of Oxford to Courtenay's authority was not at an end when the decision of the seventy-three doctors had been made public ; but Parliament or the King's Council armed the Primate with new powers, including that of im- prisonment, and he went up to his old University in the middle of November in order to drive the nail home. On the 18th he held a Conference at St. Frideswide's, being attended by the Bishops of Lincoln, Norwich, London, Salisbury, Hereford, and Winchester.* Knyghton tells us that Wyclif answered in person before this Conference ; and he * Wykeham had just established his college for boys, and the walls of New College were steadily rising. 320 John Wyclif, [1381- adds a document which he seems to regard as a withdrawal or submission on the part of the delin- quent. It is clearly nothing of the kind. Wyclif merely repeats the general admission which he had made several times already concerning the spiritual identity of the consecrated host with the body of Christ ; and he ends substantially as follows : " You must admit how great a difference there is between us who believe that this sacrament is actual and natural bread, and the heretics who tell us that it is an accident without a subject. For before the enemy and father of lies was loosed (in the first thousand years of Christendom), this ' gabbing ' was never devised. And how great a difference there is between us who believe that this sacrament is true bread in its kind, but sacramentally God's body, and the heretics who believe and tell us that this sacrament can in no way be God's body. For I am bold to say that, if this were truth, Christ and his saints were heretics, and the greater part of holy church at this moment believes in heresy. And herefor devout men suppose that this Coun- cil of Friars at London was with earth-din. For they put a heresy on Christ and the saints in heaven : wherefore the earth trembled, failing man's voice to answer for God, as it did in time of his passion, when he was condemned to bodily death. " Christ and his mother (who destroyed all heresies in the ground) keep his Church in the true faith of this sacrament, and lead the King and his Govern- ment to require of her clerks and all her posses- sionem, under penalty of losing their temporalities, ST. FRIDESWIDE'S SHRINE. THE LATIN CHAPEL, CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL, OXFORD. 1382] Courtenays Triumph. 321 that they teach truly the nature of the sacrament, and of all the Orders of Friars, under penalty of losing their privileges, that they do the same. For I am sure of the third part of the clergy, who main- tain these positions here defined, that they will defend them at the cost of their lives." If this confident reassertion and retort was in reality uttered by Wyclif in person before Courte- nay, Wykeham, Gilbert, and the rest, we can easily imagine how it would trouble them, and perhaps exasperate them. Whether he did or did not see the bishops at this time depends very much upon the date of his first stroke of paralysis. One account, which comes to us at second or third hand, and which shall be quoted by and by, says that he had a minor stroke about two years before the major stroke which carried him off at the end of 1384. By the minor stroke it seems that he was partly dis- abled, and it may well be that movement was difficult for him in the year of the Synod, and that, in point of fact, those who wanted to see him had to come to the side of his couch or his study chair. Already in 1379, as we have seen, he had been seriously ill, and is described as calling on his attendants to raise him up in bed, and put him face forward before the aggressive friars. But then, at all events, he seems to have recovered both in body and in mental vigour. For the last two years of his life he was manifestly disabled ; but this is precisely the period during which his active mind and hand were most productive. At any rate the period following his great conversion or perversion on the subject of the 322 John Wyclif. ti38l- sacrament, the four or five years following his first illness, found him constantly engaged in what turned out to be the main and most durable occu- pations of his life. Meanwhile he was compelled to leave Oxford, and his brilliant university career of nearly half a century was brought to an end. He ceased to reside, prob- ably ceased even to visit, ceased to lecture and de- termine, and contented himself with a quiet existence in his Lutterworth rectory. Courtenay's powers were sufficiently extensive to impose this retirement upon Wyclif, even if he had been unwilling to give up his Oxford work ; and the Primate was not likely to be satisfied with anything less. Moreover, some of the men on whom the discipline of the Church had fallen were no longer able to stand by Wyclif 's side ; and, though there was still plenty of fight left in him, he would have found his position in the University untenable if he had persisted in defying the Primate. With a hostile Chancellor, with Rygge almost de- spairing of the cause, with Hereford, Aston, Repyng- don, and Bedenham either excommunicated, or sub- missive, or sedulously keeping out of the way, and with regulars and seculars combining against him, there was nothing for it but to bid farewell to the home in which his heart had become familiar, and to the focus of light and zeal which his own hand had done so much to maintain. Oxford could ill afford to lose him. The last of the Schoolmen was gone, the dignity of the old scho- lastic learning had suffered a rude reverse, and the first sparks of the new enlightenment might seem to 1382] Courtenays Triumph. 323 have been extinguished. Wyclif's presence had been so large, his influence over the thought of the Univer- sity had been so commanding, that he had broken the narrower groove in which his own life began, whilst the groove which he made for others had been broken by the Church. After Wyclif, no scholar could be a Schoolman ; and the new' founts of schol- arship, such as the spirit of inquiry, the hardihood of logic, the candour of an open mind, were in some sense under a ban. All studies and all books ex- cept those prescribed by special statutes were hence- forth forbidden. Everything written by Wyclif, or by any of those who were alleged to have been his followers, was confiscated and destroyed. The gold- en age of Oxford had come to an end. CHAPTER XVII. THE LAST STAGE. SOLATED at the end of his life, except for the few friends who gathered round him or came to see him in his Leices- tershire parsonage, John Wy- clif devoted himself more and more to his literary labours. In addition to the revised version of the Bible, of which something has been said in a previous chapter, he continued the writing and circulation of English treatises, without entirely abandoning the use of Latin. The Trialogus, for instance, which contains references to the attempted suppression of his Poor Priests, must have been produced in one of the last three years, probably in 1383*; but it was in his * The Trialogus is in the form of a conversation on the nature of God, men, and angels, on virtue and sin, on grace and liberty ; on the 3?4 ?JwmJwa/im JOHN WYCLIF. THE DORSET PORTRAIT. 1383] The Last Stage. 325 mother tongue that he now almost invariably wrote, , as though he would turn aside from the language of the men who had condemned his teaching, and seek " a reversal of their judgment from those who, after all, had always commanded his best service and sympa- thies. Before he left Oxford he had collected his English sermons, and had written some at least of the expo- sitions in which he sought to simplify theology for unlearned readers. The last stage of Wyclif s life saw him virtually transformed into a writer of tracts for the times not so much of controversial and political pamphlets as of expository tracts, clearly intended to give popular interpretations of Scripture and religious worship, for the benefit of humble folk who could understand no language but their mother tongue. He evidently believed that in thus writing he was sacraments, and on the four ends of man. Written as it was towards the close of Wyclif 's life, it embodies most of his deliberate conclu- sions, and has consequently been a happy hunting-ground for the orthodox in search of heresies. The gist of what Wyclif has to say on every point is practically this : that where the Church and the Bible do not agree, we must prefer the Bible ; that where authority and con- science appear to be rival guides, we shall be much safer in following conscience ; that where the letter and the spirit seem to be in conflict, the spirit is above the letter. If the foundations of these maxims are true, it is clear that they afford scope for any number of logical hyper- boles ; and no acute writer of that age could by any possibility resist the tendency to hyperbole. Amongst the charges brought against Wyclif on the strength of the Trialogus was that he made light of the sacrament of marriage; and this merely because he wrote that "I will take this woman " is a stronger pledge than " I take this woman." He only meant that the intention was of greater importance than the act which displayed the intention ; but his enemies twisted the saying into something very serious. 326 John Wyclif. 1383- making his appeal to the great majority of the Eng- lish Church, just as in his earlier life he had been ad- dressing reasonable men and scholars throughout the various parts of Christendom. To the latter he had spoken directly, in the tongue common to learned men of all nations. Long since he had felt a com- punction on behalf of the unlearned men of his own country, who had only been reached at second hand through the language of the schools and the Latin treatises. Now, when God had given him rest and seclusion, and had "laid his constraint upon him" (as he presently told Pope Urban), he was more than ever spurred to talk to his countrymen in a tongue which they could understand, and to use great plain- ness of speech, before the seal was set upon his lips, and the long night closed over him. We have seen already that a large number of English tracts were written by members of the Wy- cliffite and Lollard school of thought, many of which were afterwards attributed to Wyclif himself ; and it has been pointed out that it would be difficult, if not absolutely impossible, to establish a canon of authenticity in regard to them. An individual mind, familiar with the unquestioned works of Wyclif, might set apart to its own satisfaction the unsigned, undated, and generally untitled tracts which belong to the master, and not to any of his disciples. But at best it would be largely a matter of conjecture, and the result could never be definitive. The inter- nal evidence derived from the language alone is of comparatively little value. We might get so far as to say with confidence "This text is northern," 1384] The Last Stage. 327 or " This writer spoke the same dialect as Langland," but it would be very hazardous to say, on the strength of so many vocables and grammatical forms, " Wyclif himself wrote this, and no other man of northern origin, of Oxford training, and of occasional sojourn in London." The English of the fourteenth century was in a specially plastic and evolutionary phase ; the yeast of stimulated thought was constantly changing its form ; the same writer presents a varying model at different stages of his life. Chaucer's prose is not identical in point of language with his poems ; the Knighfs Tale may be readily discriminated from his earlier essays in verse ; and even in the same poem we find words which are used in two or more forms. Wyclif doubtless varied in this way, as his contemporaries did ; and thus we should be slow to say that a particular piece was either his or not his, on this score alone. But when we add to the testi- mony of the words that of idiom, manner, turn of expression, and habit of thought, unquestionably there is a better foundation to go upon. There are sundry English works which have been universally attributed to Wyclif, which raise no question in the mind, but rather produce a conviction of authen- ticity as they are read, and of which the date of writing is fixed between the years 1382 and 1384 by the mention of events then in progress. Of these, two or three are especially characteristic of Wyclif The Church and Her Members, the Great Sentence of Curse, and the tract on the Schism of the Roman Pontiffs. In each of them there is a reference 328 John Wyclif. C1383- to the internecine war of the rival vicars of Christ " the unkouthe discencion that is betwixt thes popes " with further reference to the campaign in Flanders and the proclamations of Pope Urban and the English bishops on behalf of their crusade against the cross. In Wyclif s eyes, we may be sure, this particular outcome of the great Schism was the worst of the long series of scandals which had been presented to Christendom by the Papacy. It is probable enough that he would refer to it in everything which he wrote during his later years. Bishop Despenser of Norwich, whom Urban ap- pointed to lead the crusade against the friends of Pope Clement in Flanders, had been nominated to his see by papal provision when he was a young soldier of thirty. His martial tastes led him to take part in the suppression of the Peasants' Revolt in 1 38 1, when he attacked and dispersed John Littes- ter's contingent at North Walsham. It was at the end of 1382 that Urban's bulls, proclaiming the crusade and granting plenary indulgence to all who took part in it, were sanctioned by the King and Parliament. Courtenay published them, and so no doubt did other bishops, including Despenser him- self. The disastrous expedition lasted from May till September, 1383, and there would thus be nearly a year during which the subject was one of present interest in the minds of Englishmen, as well as a rock of offence to vast numbers of pious Churchmen. Wyclif saw in this war of popes for temporal authority and possessions a striking instance and 1384] The Last Stage. 329 confirmation of all that he had said about the cor- ruptions of the Roman pontiffs in the second millennium. The majority of the friars, also, were enthusiastic about the crusade, and this was a fact which certainly would not tend to qualify the indig- nation of the old Reformer whom they had so persistently and successfully attacked. The tract on the Schism is largely occupied with a reasoned condemnation of the offer of indulgences for the special purpose and advantage of Pope Urban ; and possibly this very tract provided Martin Luther, more than a century later, with some of his arguments against the huckstering of pardons in his own day. In The Church and Her Members, Wyclif devotes one or two chapters to the misdeeds of the friars, and to the special injuries which they had brought upon the Church of Christ. " They despoil the people in many ways by hypocrisies and other false- hoods, and with the spoils they build Caym's castles,* to the damage of the countries where they build them. They steal poor men's children, which is worse than stealing an ox ; and they are particularly glad to steal heirs (I say nothing of the stealing of women) . . . They stir up nations to war, and peaceable men to lawsuits ; they cause many divorces and many marriages without love, by the falsehoods which they tell, and by privileges of the court. I will not speak of the fighting that they do in one land or another, and of other bodily harms which * " Caim's Castles." This was Wyclif 's name for the houses of the friars, made up of the initials of the Carmelites, Augustinians, Jaco- bites (Dominicans), and Minorites. 330 John Wyclif. [1383- are too many for the tongue to tell. For, however much they waste the goods of men, so much and yet more do they bring hurt upon the nations, as in this last expedition that Englishmen made into Flanders, when they despoiled our realm of men and money, more than the friars have taken for themselves. And Englishmen did not for a moment doubt their bringing this expedition to pass, by their preaching, collecting, and personal exertions. Even the friars who seem to be blameless in this matter could not escape giving their assent ; for one manner of consent is when a man keeps silence, and does not speak up. And if friars are slipping out of it now, and saying that they never held with it, they are only resorting to their old craft of gabbing." The sharp and spirited criticism which the old Rector of Lutterworth had directed for some time against the schismatics and their partisans must have shrewdly touched those to whom it particularly ap- plied. The English friars, who had not for a moment ceased to rail and write against Wyclif, took the tracts of the impenitent heretic very much to heart, and the disgraceful failure of the Flanders crusade would doubtless exasperate their bitter ani- mosity. They seem now to have sent fresh allega- tions of heresy to Rome, and Urban replied, after no long delay, by citing Wyclif to appear before his court. If Urban knew the crippled state in which the English doctor had been living for more than a year, this summons to Rome was hardly less than barbarous. Though the Pope may not have known 1384] The Last Stage. 331 it, the friars did ; and the malignity of their hatred towards a brave enemy who was so evidently marked for early death may be judged from the persistency with which, under such circumstances, they tried to hurry forward the last stages of his prosecution. Wyclif was unquestionably at this time disabled for travelling, and with the best intention he could not have made the long and troublesome journey to Urban's court. He therefore sent an excuse, with a formal statement of his attitude towards the Pope writing it, of course, in Latin ; and either he or one of his friends made the following English version, slightly amplified by the translator, in order that his countrymen might know why he had not obeyed the summons : " I joyfully admit myself bound to tell to all true men the belief that I hold, and especially to the Pope ; for I suppose that if my faith be rightful, and given of God, the Pope will gladly confirm it ; and if my faith be error, the Pope will wisely amend it. I suppose, moreover, that the Gospel of Christ is the heart of the body of God's law ; for I believe that Jesus Christ, that gave in his own person his Gospel, is very God and very man, and by this heart passes all other laws. Above this, I suppose that the Pope is most obliged to the keeping of the Gospel among all men that live here ; for the Pope is highest vicar that Christ has here in earth. For the superiority of Christ's vicar is not measured by worldly superiority, but by this, that this vicar follows Christ more closely by virtuous living ; for the Gospel teaches that this is the sentence of Christ. 332 yohn Wyctif. tl383- "And from this Gospel I take it as a matter of belief that Christ, during the time he walked here, was the poorest of men, both in spirit and in goods ; for Christ says that he had nought to rest his head upon. And Paul says that he was made needy for love of us. And poorer could no man be, neither bodily nor in spirit. And thus Christ put from him all manner of worldly lordship. For the Gospel of John tells that, when they would have made Christ king, he fled and hid himself from them, for he would have no such worldly greatness. " And above this I accept it as a matter of belief that no man should follow the Pope, or any saint now in heaven, except in so far as he follows Christ. For John and James erred when they coveted worldly greatness ; and Peter and Paul sinned also when they denied and blasphemed in Christ ; but men should not follow them in this, for at that time they were parting from Jesus Christ. From this I take it as a sound counsel that the Pope should abandon his worldly lordship to worldly lords, as Christ has given them, and at once persuade all his clerks to do the same. For thus did Christ, and thus he taught his disciples, until the fiend had blinded this world. And lit seems to some men that clerks who continue to abide in this error against the law of God, and cease to follow Christ in this, are open heretics, and such as support them are partners in their sin. " And if I err in this opinion, I am willing meekly to be corrected yea, even by death, if it be skilful [right- ful], for that I hope would be a blessing to me. And if I might travel in my own person, I would with good 1384] The Last Stage. 333 will go to the Pope. But God has laid his constraint upon me to the contrary, and has taught me to obey God rather than man. And I suppose of our Pope that he will not be Antichrist, and oppose Christ in his working, to the contrary of Christ's will ; for if he summon against reason, by himself or any of his servants, and follow up his unskilful summoning, he is an open Antichrist. And merciful intention did not save Peter from being called Satan by Christ ; so blind intention and wicked advice do not excuse the Pope here ; but if he require of true priests that they should travel more than is possible for them, he is not relieved from the charge of being Antichrist. For our faith teaches us that our blessed God suffers us not to be tempted beyond our ability. Why should man require such service? " Wherefore we pray to God for our Pope Urban VI., that his former good disposition may not be quenched by his enemies. And Christ, that may not lie, says that a man's enemies are specially those of his own household." It was his last word to Rome. For all we know, it may have been the last word of controversy or argument which he wrote in his lifetime. The date of the citation is not ascertained, but this letter to the Pope was apparently one of the latest occur- rences in Wyclifs life of which we possess any record. He lived till the close of 1384, and then, as was right and fitting, in his own church at Lutter- worth, on the feast of the Holy Innocents, at the elevation of the host, in the very act of reasonable and reverent worship, the light went out. He lay 334 John Wyclif. [1383- for a few days, watched and tended by those who had clung to him in his direst extremity, and who must have been prepared for this closing scene ever since the illness of 1382. Most of all, we may be sure, the veteran himself, who had continued his battle for the truth without the slightest intermis- sion, had never buckled on his armour in the morning without reminding himself how feeble was the hold which he had upon life. Wyclif's enemies could only regard his death from one point of view, as the judgment of God upon the greatest of sinners. The account of Walsingham is very much what we might expect of the pious and superstitious monk of St. Alban's. On the feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury, he says, " Organum dia- bolicum, hostis Ecclesite, confusio vulgi, haereti- corum idolum, hypocritarum speculum, schismatis incentor, odii seminator, mendacii fabricator, Johannes de Wyclif whilst he was about to spue forth against Saint Thomas himself (as they tell us) invectives and blasphemies in the sermon which he had prepared to preach, was suddenly smitten by the judgment of God, and felt that paralysis had spread over his whole body. Thus his mouth, which had spoken high-swelling words against God and his saints, or against holy church, presented a horrid spectacle to those who gazed at him, being twisted out of shape; his tongue was stricken dumb and refused him utterance ; his wagging head proclaimed that the curse of God against Cain had fallen upon him. And, as they who were present at his death inform us, he manifestly despaired in his last RICHARD FLEMMYNQ, BISHOP OF LINCOLN. FOUNDER OF LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD. 13841 The Last Stage, 335 moments, so that all may recognise without doubt his affinity to Cain. And such was the end of all his wickedness." But the most direct and credible testimony which has reached us concerning the death of Wyclif is that presented by Dr. Thomas Gascoigne, who wrote down in 1441 the sworn evidence o'f an eye-witness. The paper is not long, and it is of sufficient import- ance to be quoted in full. " Master John Wycliff, an English priest, was excommunicated after his death by Thomas Arun- dell, the lord bishop (sic) of Canterbury, and subse- quently he was disinterred by a doctor of theology of Oxford, by name Master Richard Flemmyng, of the diocese of York, and now bishop of Lincoln ; and his bones were burnt, and his ashes were scattered in a stream near to Lyttyrwort by order of the pope Martin V. "And the same Wyclif was paralysed for two years before his death, and he died in the year of our Lord 1384, on the sabbath, on St. Sylvester's day, on the eve of the Circumcision ; and in the same year, that is on the day of the Holy Innocents, as he was hearing mass in his church at Lyttyrwort, at the time of the elevation of the host, he fell down, smitten by a severe (magna) paralysis, especially in the tongue, so that neither then nor afterwards could he speak, to the moment of his death. He spoke indeed on going into his church, but being struck by paralysis on the same day he could not speak, nor did he ever speak again. " John Horn, a priest of eighty years, who was a 33 6 ' John Wyclif. [1383-1384 parochial priest with Wyclyff for two years up to the day of Wyclyff's death, told me this, and con- firmed it with an oath, saying : ' As I must answer before God, I know these statements to be true, and, as I witnessed, so have I given my evidence.' "The said John Horn related this, in the year of our Lord 1441, to me Doctor Gascoigne." It seems to be a pious act, even if it be no more than that, to accept the statement of the old Lollard priest, which Netter of Walden who might have seen both Horn and Gascoigne included in his Fasciculi Zizaniorum. The picture that rises before us as we read these simple words may appropriately close the record of this half-obliterated, never-to-be forgotten life. Let us leave him so, the protagonist of the English Reformation, dying almost alone and forsaken, who had been the friend of princes and the withstander of popes ; passing mutely from a world in which his voice had re-asserted the highest of human philosophies, and glowing like a star in the darkness with the fire of a yet unrisen sun. LUTTERWORTH CHURCH-INTERIOR. PARTLY CONTEMPORANEOUS WITH WYCLIF J SHOWING AN ANCIENT FRESCO OF THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. CHAPTER XVIII. THE WORK THAT LIVED. HE story of Wyclif s life would not be complete if it did not take into account the effect of his work on those who came after him, and the strength of the links with which he bound himself to posterity. We have seen how he was allied in his intellect- ual origin to the Schoolmen and the earlier Fathers of the Church ; it is right that we should ask our- selves what was the measure of the return which he made to humanity for the influences under which he came to maturity. We have watched him, in the spring-time of the Modern Ages, sowing the seed of a new faith and a new devotion, whereof he must have seen for himself, before he died, the first green blades of a harvest that was to cover the land. Yet it is certain that the history of the Anglican Refor- M 337 32>8 John Wyclif. mation has often been told with less than adequate reference to the ideas and work of Wyclif, and to the first of that historic series of religious movements in Oxford which, perhaps once in every century, have pricked the conscience and remodelled the creed of England. It may help us to form our final estimate of the man whose career we have been following, to gauge his strength and to understand his dynamic force, if we place ourselves for a moment at a Continental and Roman point of view, and look at Wyclif as he is regarded to-day by some of the more learned, mod- erate, and perhaps unprejudiced writers of the Church of Rome. " The History of the Popes," by Prof. Ludwig Pas- tor, which is recommended in a special brief by Leo XIII., and has been translated into English by Mr. Antrobus, a member of the Brompton Oratory, is a work of great research, containing much that is new to the historical student ; and it is so far impartial that it frankly condemns many of the personal acts of Gregory XI., and his successors at Rome, espe- cially during the Papal Schism. The German his- torian reflects the settled opinion of Roman Catholic writers when he says that " the errors of the Apocalyp- tics and the Waldenses, of Marsiglio, Ockham, and others, were all concentrated in Wyclif s sect." John Huss, he says again, " was not merely much influ- enced, but absolutely dominated by these ideas. Recent investigations have furnished incontestable evidence that, in the matter of doctrine, Huss owed everything to Wyclif." The Work That Lived. 339 We have seen how it happened that the preachers and scholars of Bohemia learned and adopted the views of the English Reformer, and how the torch of free inquiry was passed over from the hands of Ox- ford to those of Prague. History is clear enough about the succession of ideas from Wyclif onward, but it would be difficult to show the descent of the scholastic and Wycliffite innovations from the Albi- gensian heresies, except on the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc. If the conclusions of Wyclif in- volved all those of the Vaudois, why not also those of the Arian Visigoths, and all the errors which had at any time germinated in that hotbed of religious crudities, the land of Languedoc? If the facts of transference between England and the continent had been the converse of what we know them to have been, and if Wyclif had taken his ideas from Bohe- mia, instead of giving his ideas to Bohemia, there would have been more ground for this theory of Waldensian origin. Unquestionably the Walden- sian ideas were not obliterated by the Inquisition of Dominic and the crusade of Innocent III., but spread themselves to the eastward in Bavaria and Austria, and were found re-asserting themselves with inextinguishable energy throughout the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries. Prof. Pastor him- self, referring to the disastrous time of the great Schism, says : " It was not only in Southern Ger- many and the Rhine country, the two centres of Mediaeval heresy, that a great proportion of the population had embraced the Waldensian doctrine ; it had also made its way into the north and the 34-0 John Wyclif. furthest east of the empire. Waldensian congrega- tions were to be found in Thuringia, the March of Brandenberg, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Pomerania, Prussia, and Poland." There is no inducement to deny that some of the ideas of Pierre de Vaud, like some of the ideas of Marsiglio and Ockham, were contributory to the body of independent thought into which Wyclif would be initiated at Oxford in his early manhood. We have seen that Archbishop Langham had thought it neces- sary to remonstrate with the holders of unsound doctrine at the University when Wyclif was not much over forty-five years of age, and that this doctrine was by no means on all points identical with the con- clusions taught by Wyclif ten or twelve years later. How much (if anything) these earlier divagations owed to the Waldensians it is impossible to say, for the inquiry into their character has not been worked out with sufficient detail. If the censors who are bound to begin by regarding Wyclif as a heretic, in- stead of a restorer of truths which had previously been obscured, mean no more than that some things which he taught had been held on the Continent before he was born, we can readily agree with them. The point is important, because there are some who have attempted to make Wyclif responsible for all the acts committed by Protestant combatants in the fifteenth century, with about as much reason as is displayed in the charge that he fomented the revolt of the peasants in England. The Czechs and the Germans must be held responsible for their own religious wars ; and assuredly there is enough to The Work That Lived, 341 account for the fact and for the bitterness of these wars without attributing them in any measure to the imported seditions of the Oxford professor. Wyclif did not even seduce the people of Bohemia and Germany from their spiritual obedience and ortho- doxy. They were Waldensians or Beghards before they had heard his name. They were heretics, and well on the way to being rebels, before the Church of Rome began to turn against herself the fatal weapon of her own corruption. " Too little atten- tion," to cite Professor Pastor once more, " has hitherto been bestowed on the revolutionary spirit of hatred of the Church and the clergy, which had taken hold of the masses in different parts of Germany. Together with the revolt against the Church, a social revolution was openly advocated. A chronicler, writing at Mayence in the year 1401, declared that the cry of ' Death to the Priests/ which had long been whispered in secret, was now the watchword of the day." It is evident that, both on the Continent and in England, these two revolutions were proceeding side by side, and that, although they assisted each other, they' were due to different predisposing causes. That they should have been confounded together by the authorities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was no more than natural ; and it would have been strange if the champions of orthodoxy had not availed themselves of every opportunity of impressing upon temporal rulers and magnates that their inter- ests were attacked by the teachers of heresy. The papal legates in the fifteenth century, adopting the 342 John Wyclif. language of popes and cardinals, invariably preached the extermination of heretics on the ground that they undermined all authority, that they would rob not merely the Church but also the Kings and the nobles, that they encouraged the refusal of taxes and other dues to rulers who could not stand a test of morality, and that their doctrines would soon reduce the wealthy to beggary and the State to anarchy. If there had not been at the same time an internecine war of pope against pope, bishop against bishop, and priest against priest, this dead set against the heretics in every country would have been far more effectual. As it was, the rulers of the earth were filled with panic, and the persistence of the new ideas was main- tained in spite of every effort to stamp them out. Historians of the Roman Church have recognised the magnitude of the disaster which fell upon Chris- tendom at the time of the Schism, though perhaps they have not always seen it in its true proportions. The demoralisation consequent on the " Babylonian Captivity," and on the return of Gregory to Rome, contributed not a little, as we have seen, to the immunity of Wyclif, and enabled him to put forth his plea for reform, from his vantage-ground of Oxford, with an authority and a deliberation which he could not otherwise have hoped for. If Rome had been free and unfettered, it is urged by her historians, she would have nipped such heresy as Wyclif s in the bud ; the tide of " rationalism " might have been completely turned, and the unity of the Church might never have been broken. No doubt there would have been a notable difference in the The Work That Lived. 343 Christian world if Pope Boniface had never given himself away in his quarrel with Philip of France; if the captive popes at Avignon had had the courage to confine themselves to the spiritual sphere, and to abandon their secular ambitions ; if Gregory had not hurried back to the seething intrigues of Rome, against the judgment of his cardinals, and under the patronage of the well-meaning but irresponsible nun, Catherine of Siena. The unity of the Church might indeed have been preserved ; and if we could suppose it probable, or even possible, that this might have been done by a spontaneous reform of abuses from within by the expulsion of strained dogma and depraved morals without forcing saintly men like John Wyclif into the position of heretics it is manifest how great a disaster the acknowledged guardians of the Church would have avoided. In any exhaustive history of the English people and the Anglican Church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it would be necessary to bring to the front every incident and detail bearing upon the relations of the Church and the people, to study every indication of popular enthusiasm or prelatical tyranny, and to develop anew every fading feature of a deeply interesting picture. The work would be well worth doing, and to do it thoroughly would compensate the labour of a lifetime. Here it is not possible to go beyond some further suggestion of the magnitude, importance, and permanence of Wyclif's achievement. He had not only embodied and vocal- ised the aspirations for reform which he found at Oxford in his early days : he had infused into the 344 John Wyclif. movement so much of new energy and virility that the Reformation in England was virtually effected at the moment of his death, and there was nothing to come but the outward and political manifestations of its completeness. Lollardy, in fact, was Protes- tantism in all its essential features predestinarianism, constructive pantheism, as its ecclesiastical censors are wont to complain, but in any case the Protes- tantism which won for England the open Bible and the prayer-book, which overthrew the monasteries, the Orders, the Roman obedience, and the mass. It was not Cranmer, nor Cromwell, nor Henry VIII. and his two Protestant children, who banished papal authority from the Anglican Church. They were the accidents, or at most the instruments of a victory already accomplished. For the true moment of victory, and for the effective Reformer, we must look back to the fourteenth century. The history of England between the reigns of Richard II. and Henry VIII. seems to be more fully dominated than historians have generally admitted by the great forces of religious, moral, and social upheaval which had come to maturity in the lifetime of Wyclif. The outcome of the religious upheaval was Lollardy. The effect of the moral upheaval was an earnest, evangelical spirit, a somewhat stern and harsh puritanism, a more pure and consequently more refined conduct on the part, especially, of the poorer clergy and their congregations. By the social upheaval there was created in England, between the Plantagenet and Tudor epochs, nothing less than the English people a people emancipated, dignified by The Work That Lived. 345 independent industry, annealed by common interests and resolutions, energetic, honest, and self-respect- ing. These were the operative forces which in fact produced the people of England as we know them to-day, which worked with silent and subtle machinery amidst the transient din and chaos of the fifteenth century. We are apt to be misled by such terms as the " Wars of the Roses," the " Lancastrian and York- ist parties," the " Lollards " described as a mere persecuted sect, and " Jack Cade's rebellion." We have had, perhaps, too much of the mere story of White Rose and Red Rose, and too little of the history which explains who they were that fought, and why they fought, and what depended on the issue of each battle. In this sense, the history of the English people may almost be said to have been begun by Green. Up to his time it had been a sealed book ; the seals are broken, but even now the pages are no more than half exposed. Green shows us how, from the Peasants' Revolt, from the perse- cution of Courtenay and the death of Wyclif, Lollardy was dispersed but not destroyed how, stricken down and left for dead by the authorities, the spirit of religious independence revived amongst its friends and permeated many classes of the population. "All the religious and social discontent of the time floated instinctively to this new centre ; the socialist dreams of the peasantry, the new and keener spirit of per- sonal morality, the hatred of the friars, the jealousy of the great lords towards the prelacy, the fanaticism of the Puritan zealot, were blended together in a 346 John Wyclif. common hostility to the Church, and a common resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical system." The reaction of this spirit on the political movements of the day followed as a matter of course. " Nobles, like the Earl of Salisbury, and at a later time Sir John Oldcastle, placed themselves openly at the head of the cause, and threw open their gates as a refuge for its mission- aries. London in its hatred of the clergy was fiercely Lollard. It was in vain that the clergy attempted to stifle the new movement by their old weapon of persecution. The jealousy entertained by the baronage and gentry of every pretension of the Church to secular power foiled its efforts to make persecution effective. Powerless as the efforts of the Church were for purposes of repression, they were effective in arousing the temper of the Lollards into a bitter and fanatical hatred of their persecutors. The Lollard teachers directed their fiercest invec- tives against the wealth and secularity of the great Churchmen. In a formal petition to Parliament they mingled denunciations of the riches of the clergy with an open profession of disbelief in tran- substantiation, priesthood, pilgrimages, and image worship, and a demand, which illustrates the strange medley of opinions which jostled together in the new movement, that war might be declared un- christian." How large a part Wyclif had borne in the assertion of this influence, political as well as religious, the reader of the preceding pages will be in a position to judge. The Work That Lived. 347 Lollardy was, in fact, the keystone of the arch whereon the newer liberties of Englishmen are sup- ported. In the reign of Richard II. the followers of Wyclif were virtually under royal protection ; they were respectfully listened to by Parliament and King ; their patron, Salisbury, was potent at Court ; and not even Courtenay or Arundel was able to take any effective measures against them. For a time, in spite of all that the Church could do, they steadily increased in number and strength, and for the re- mainder of the fourteenth century they enjoyed comparative immunity. But the instability of the King ruined both himself and all who depended on him. Richard had thoroughly alienated the Church. His quarrel with and banishment of Archbishop Arundel, which may have been to some extent justified by the intrigues of Arundel and his brother, hastened his own deposition and death. The head of the English clergy and the head of the House of Lancaster were exiles at the same moment, and it was at the invitation of Arundel, representing a powerful party in London, that the son of John of Gaunt returned to England and usurped the Crown. Henry IV. never forgot how much he owed to the Church ; and indeed the three Lancas- trian Kings continued for the next sixty years to rely upon the clergy and to play into their hands. The persecution of the Lollards now began in earnest, and Arundel devoted the rest of his life to an unwearying effort to destroy both them and their teaching. In Oxford the memory of Wyclif was still affectionately and courageously preserved. The 348 John Wyclif. University, which had successfully resisted the authority of the Bishops of Lincoln, afterwards con- tested the claims of the Archbishops of Canterbury to exercise a right of visitation. Arundel, with shrewd judgment and calculation, had turned his attention to Oxford from the beginning of his pri- macy, probably considering that the best way to deal with a flood is to cut off the springs that feed it. It was ostensibly on the solicitation of a strong party in the faculties of law and divinity that he announced his intention to come down and assert his right in 1397 ; but he was foiled by the produc- tion of a bull from Boniface IX., declaring the Uni- versity exempt. It is characteristic of that age of lame and ineffectual resolutions, that the popes themselves were found impeding the efforts of their legates to crush out a most formidable heresy for it is evident that there was an intimate relation between the prosecution of the Oxford Wycliffites and the question of archiepiscopal visitation. Offi- cious appeals on both points reached Arundel simul- taneously, and he went so far as to declare, in a letter to the Chancellor, that he had been informed "that almost the whole University was affected by heretical pravity." The phrase seems to have stuck in the gizzard of the Chancellor and Regents, for we find it again in a letter under the University seal, apparently addressed to the Archbishop some time later. This document bears witness to the manner in which Wyclif's repute was still cherished by the men who personally remembered him. " His conversation from his youth The Work That Lived. 349 to his death was so praiseworthy and honest in the University that he never gave any offence, nor was he aspersed with any mark of infamy or sinister suspicion ; but in answering, reading, preaching, and determining, he behaved himself laudably, as a val- iant champion of the truth, and catholicly vanquished by sentences of Holy Scripture all such as by their wilful beggary blasphemed the religion of Christ. This doctor was not convicted of heretical pravity, or by our prelates delivered to be burned after his burial. For God forbid that our prelates should have condemned a man of so great probity for a heretic, who had not his equal in all the University, in his writings of logic, philosophy, divinity, morality, and the speculative sciences." * Certainly there is more evidence of courage in this letter than is apparent in the attitude of some of the Wycliffites in 1382 and the following years. Not long afterwards, in 1407, Arundel held a Provincial Synod at Oxford, having possibly found a more amenable Chancellor for the dispute concerning his right of visitation was not yet adjusted. It was ordered on the authority of the Church that no works of Wyclif should be used in the universities, and that all works written in Wyclif 's lifetime should pass under the censorship of the universities and the Archbishop before they were used in the schools. Apparently Oxford faced the Primate without flinch- ing, until the accession of Pope John XXIII. in 1410. John sent Arundel a bull reversing that of Boniface in the matter of visitations ; and it was about the * The passage is printed as quoted by Lewis. 350 John Wyclif. same time that the Archbishop prevailed on Congre- gation to nominate a committee of twelve doctors in order to draw up a list of Wyclif's errors. The will was everything in a search of this kind, and out of fourteen works examined and subsequently burnt at Carfax the committee were fortunate enough to light upon two hundred and sixty-seven instances of false teaching. By the time that the Council of Constance met in 1414 to put an end to the scandal of the Schism, to burn John Huss, and to lay a solemn curse on the memory of Wyclif, somebody had increased this catalogue of errors to more than three hundred. The formal record of the Council in regard to the condemnation of Wyclif is as follows: " By the authority of the sentence and decree of the Roman Council, and of the mandate of the apostolic see, the Council proceeded with the con- demnation of John Wyclif and his memory: and, having published injunctions to cite all who would defend the said Wyclif or his memory, and nobody appearing for that purpose, and having moreover examined witnesses of the impenitence and final obstinacy of the said Wyclif, and the things being proved by evident signs attested by lawful witnesses, the holy Synod did declare and define the said John Wyclif to have been a notorious heretic, and to have died obstinate in heresy, excommunicating him and condemning his memory ; and did decree that his body and bones, if they could be distinguished from those of the faithful, should be disinterred, or dug out of the ground, and cast at a distance from the sepulchre of the church." The Work That Lived, 351 Twelve years later, Pope Martin found that the decree of the Council had not been obeyed m Eng- land. He wrote an urgent letter on the subject to Richard Flemmyng, Bishop of Lincoln, whom 1 we have encountered already as one of the younger dis- ciples of Wyclif, and who in 1407 was still some- thing of a Wycliffite, though he presently began to receive preferment. Flemmyng, in his old age, was full of zeal for orthodoxy, and brought himself to the point of desecrating his old master's grave and burn- ing his bones. Orthodoxy would willingly have stamped out everything that Wyclif wrote, with a great deal more into the bargain. Even Caxton, seventy or eighty years after the date of Arundel's Synod at Oxford, never ventured to touch a Wyclif manuscript. Indeed there are comparatively few religious works amongst the fourscore printed books attributed to him and his personal assistants. A Latin psalter appears to be the only complete book of the text of Scripture which found its way into print in the fifteenth century, though there are books of devo- tion, collections of papal indulgences, and a few orthodox sermons, which bear witness to the fact that the ignoring of Wyclif was not due to any secu- lar exclusiveness amongst the early printers. The effort to suppress the writings of Wyclif was not confined to England. Two years after the adoption of Arundel's constitutions the Pope ap- pointed a Conference of learned men from the uni- versities of Bonn, Paris, and Oxford to discuss the expediency of burning those heretical writings. For- tunately the hint from Rome was not taken ; and it 352 John Wyclif, must be remembered that the authority of Rome was still impaired by the Papal Schism. The Conference was candid enough to say that there were " many true, good, and useful things " in Wyclif, of which the students in the schools ought not to be deprived. The universities were not heroic enough or were perhaps too heroic for the popes and archbishops ; and in fact it is to them, and especially to the Uni- versity of Prague, that we owe the preservation of many of Wyclif's works. The statute of 1401, reviving the punishment of the stake for obstinate heretics, was one of the first acts of the reign of Henry IV., and Arundel had at once availed himself of it by passing censure on the Lollard priest, Sawtre, and handing him over to be dealt with by the secular arm. The enactment of this statute did not lead to many burnings in Eng- land ; but it is a mistake to conclude that it had effected the purpose of those who obtained it. No doubt to some extent it would drive heresy beneath the surface, and close the mouths of the wilder sort of heretics, whose noise had been in excess of their courage. But Lollardy remained an open profession, and if the spirit of the age had allowed many scan- dals, such as those exhibited by the deaths of Sawtre, Badby, and Lord Cobham,* the bishops and judges would certainly not have lacked victims amongst the followers of Wyclif, who courted the utmost terrors * Cobham was a personal and most devoted follower of Wyclif. " Before God and man," he said on his trial for heresy, " I profess solemnly here that I never abstained from sin until I knew Wyclif, whom ye so much disdain." The Work That Lived. 353 of the law. It was an age in which many parts of England were involved in almost constant civil war. The Lancastrians and the Church had made common cause, and their enemies combined against them with arms in their hands. In all the revolts that marked the reign of Henry IV., the Lollard's everywhere took an active and a prominent part. The bitter hostility of the clergy towards the men whose very existence was a reproach against them was well illustrated by the conduct of some of the highest authorities of the Church and religious Orders, when they heard that Salisbury had been slain in battle. " His gory head was welcomed into London by a procession of abbots and bishops, who went out singing psalms of thanks- giving to meet it " ; and amongst these exulting pro- fessors of Christianity there were probably some who had taken part in the barefoot litany of 1382, which celebrated the condemnation of Wyclif. It was war to the knife between the Lancastrians and the Lollards so completely had the earlier tra- ditions of the first Duke of Lancaster been aban- doned by his family. Parliament was still subject to the violent and rapid fluctuations which we have already observed in the reigns of Edward and Richard. If it was by no means always on the side of the clergy, still it was nearly always prejudiced against the Lollards as a fighting party. The survival of pure Wyclifiism was conspicuous enough in the repeated demands made by the House of Commons for the appropriation of Church property to secular and popular uses. Demands to this effect were made by the Lack-Learning Parliament in 1404, by 354 John Wyclif. the Parliament of 1410, and at least once thereafter. Shakspeare may be cited in this connection, not in- deed as an historical authority, but for an illustration of the well-known facts. In the opening lines of Henry the Fifth, Chicheley says to his brother prelate : " My lord, I '11 tell you, that self bill is urg'd Which in the eleventh year of the last king's reign Was like, and had indeed against us pass'd But that the scambling and unquiet time Did push it out of further question. . . . For all the temporal lands which men devout By testament have given to the Church Would they strip from us ; being valued thus As much as would maintain, to the king's honour, Full fifteen earls, and fifteen hundred knights, Six thousand and two hundred good esquires ; And, to relief of lazars and weak age, Of indigent faint souls, past corporal toil, A hundred almshouses, right well supplied ; And to the coffers of the king beside, A thousand pounds by the year. Thus runs the bill. Ely. This would drink deep. Canterbury. 'T would drink the cup and all." On the whole, the Parliaments of the Henrys were decidedly inimical to the men whom Englishmen had been taught to hold responsible for the rebellion of 1 38 1, and who were certainly disaffected towards King and Church. On the meeting of the second Parliament of Henry V., the Lollards were accused of disturbing the peace of the realm, and attempting to subvert the faith, and to destroy the King and the law of the land. An Act was subsequently passed which provided that all officers on their admission "M 4 . f few y< Kv '*?* >wl S- i B B - m M . JB "5 J fife [1 ARCHBISHOP CHICHELEY, FOUNDER OF ALL SOULS. 1414-43. BY J. FABER. The Work That Lived. 355 should take an oath to destroy Lollardy, and to assist the bishops therein ; that " heretics convict " should forfeit their lands, goods, and chattels ; that the justices should have power to inquire into offences against the Act, and to issue a capias with other stringent provisions of the same kind. Archbishop Chicheley, who succeeded Arundel in 1414, did his best to eclipse the zeal and fame of his predecessor. In 1416 he enjoined all his suffragans and archdeacons in the province of Canterbury " diligently to inquire twice every year after persons suspected of heresy." Wherever heretics were reported to dwell, three or more of that parish should be obliged " to take an oath that they would certify in writing to the suffragans, archdeacons, or their commissaries, what persons were heretics, or kept private conventicles, or differed in life and manners from the common conversation of the faithful, or asserted heresies or errors, or had any suspected books written in the vulgar English tongue, or received, favoured, or were conversant with any persons suspected of error or heresies." The diocesans, upon information received, were to " issue out process against the accused persons, and if they did not deliver them over to the secular court, yet they should commit them to perpettial or temporary imprisonment, as the nature of the cause required, at least until the sitting of the next Convocation." This device of the Archbishop's amounted, clearly, to nothing short of a petty Inquisition in every parish, and the words in italics show how easily it 356 John Wyclif. might be converted into an instrument of the most outrageous tyranny over the innermost thoughts and feelings. There we have another instance of what has so frequently been displayed in the history of mankind : spiritual authority, pushed to a logical extreme, pronounces its final edict in the sentence, " I kill you because I do not like you." It was the jut) eivai of Aristotle, translated into an Athanasian curse. Archbishop Chicheley has been roundly accused of instigating Henry V. to renew the war with France in order to relieve the strain at home, and to turn aside the danger with which the Church was menaced. Of course these were amongst the natural effects of the war, which produced another " scambling and unquiet time," and did much to postpone the religious and other evolutions in England, already more than due. Though the evidence becomes fainter as we ad- vance more than half a century beyond Wyclif's death, yet there is ample proof of both the religious and the political survival of Lollardy in England. It may be true that we do not hear much more of the term in the pages of the fifteenth-century chron- icles ; but, unfortunately, some of these chronicles are more distinguished for what they omit than for what they include. And, after all, if every scrap of direct evidence on the subject had been brought together, the fact would remain that we need no proof of this kind to assure us that the spirit and conviction of the Lollards, having once taken hold of so large a fraction of the nation, could not pos- The Work That Lived, 357 sibly die out again. The love of truth and inde- pendence, the hatred of religious tyranny and the revolt against it, would not be suppressed by such a feeble reign of terror as the Lancastrians, the schis- matic popes, and the plethoric English clergy were able to set up ; nor would they disappear because the country was plunged for another generation into a wanton and disastrous war. A mighty change had passed over the nation between 1380 and 1450. The men who followed Cade to London, the soldiers who gathered under the banners of York, Warwick, and Salisbury (and who in the course of the civil war displayed their hatred of the prelacy by assassinating several bishops who fell into their hands), were sons and heirs of the Lollards who had revolted against Henry IV. and Henry V. Whether they professed to be Lollards or not and some of them professed it they were one with their fathers in revolting against the Lan- castrian and ecclesiastical tyrannies, against the restrictions of liberty, the overbearing of the nobles, and the persistent aggressions of the Church and the Crown. No doubt they revolted blindly but it was under the compulsion of a blind necessity, and with an instinctive faith in the principles which they had imbibed in their youth. And finally, when the Tudors sat firmly on the throne of England, when Parliament was in abey- ance, and the tyranny of the monarch had become greater than ever, was it merely fortuitous that the papal hierarchy and the monasteries should have been swept away whilst the prerogative of the Crown 358 John Wyclif. was steadily increased and strengthened? Surely not. The contract made in 1399 between the son of Gaunt and the representative of Rome in England was perhaps the only thing which could at that time have retained the Anglican Church within the Latin communion. When the Lancastrians had gone, the monarchy sought and discovered new bonds of na- tional allegiance, and the Church was no longer indis- pensable. Crown and Church, henceforth, could not be simultaneously powerful, and the monarch sacri- ficed the Church in order to purchase the loyalty and obedience of the people. There was at any rate so much of political philosophy under the policy of Edward IV., and still more under the policy of Henry VIII. and his counsellors virtual if not expressed, and in effect if not in deliberate purpose. The sum of the whole matter, so far as the reader of the present volume is specially concerned in the historical developments of the fifteenth century, is this: If the Roman authority in England, and the English hierarchy as representing Rome, had been fatally undermined in the fourteenth century if, buttressed up by the Lancastrian Kings, the prelati- cal system shook to its fall under the Tudors if, when the political moment arrived, the nation stood ready for the change, ready and eager for the ex- pulsion of the monks and the rupture with Rome all this was mainly and primarily due to the innovating spirit of the Schoolmen, and above all to the life and work of John Wyclif. He sowed the seed that raised this harvest ; he spoke the hardy words that grew into counsels of courage and perfection ; he spread The Work That Lived, 359 wide the pages which, in the awakened conscience of every independent Christian, were to replace the authority of fallible men. In a word, Wyclif was no mere forerunner of the Protestant Reformation, but the Reformer in chief. In the intellectual domain, in the field of ideas and of spiritual activity, he originated the movement which had its issue in the sixteenth century, when the Tudor monarchs rode but did not raise the storm. For one reason or another Wyclif was long excluded from his proper place in history ; but the nineteenth century, bringing together for the first time all the main con- temporary documents, has been able to take the true bearings of the epoch of religious reform. And per- haps no one hereafter will attempt to explain the conduct of Henry VIII., of Thomas Cromwell, and the martyred bishops, withom^^beginning his story from the last of the Schoolmen, and from the golden prime of the University of Oxford. 3 6 John Wyclif. CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS 1 301 to 1353 Facts in Wyclif's Life 1320. Born (at Wy cliff e or Spes- well ?) Son of Roger and Catherine Wyclif. 1335. At a grammar school in Oxford"? r Probably heard Ockham, Bradwardine, and Fitz- ralph ; and read Marsiglio and Cesena. Wyclif speci- ally owns his obligations to Augustine and Grosteste. According to James he was a Doctor of Divinity soon after 1355?? b Beneficed in Oxford?(James). Kings of England Edward I. 1307. Edward II. 1327. Edward III, Archbishops of Canterbury Winchelsey. 13 13. Reynolds. 1327. Simon Meopham. 1333. John Strat- ford. 1348. John Ufford. Thomas Bradward- ine. !349.SimonIslip. 1349- Chronology. 3 6i CONNECTED WITH WYCLIF. Popes of Rome Boniface VIII. 1303. Benedict XI. [At Avignon.] 1305. Clement V. 1316. John XXII. 1334. Benedict XII. 1342. Clement VI. :352. Innocent VI. Kings of France Philip IV. 13 14. Louis X. 13T5. John I. 1316. Philip V. 1323. Charles IV. 1328. Philip VI. 1350. John II. Contemporary Events 1302. 1303. 1305. Arrest of Boniface. Increasing power of English Par- liament. Bull Unam Sane tarn. Dante. Petrarch. Boccaccio. Popes at Avignon. 1307. Statute of Provisors (1). 131 1. Council of Vienne : Olivi condemned. 1322. Franciscan Congregation at Perugia (for evangelical pov- erty). 1324. Defensor Pacis written. 1328. Lewis of Bavaria at Rome. Antipope Peter. 1333. English tribute to Rome sus- pended. 1338. Scots and French Wars. 1340. John of Gaunt and Chaucer born ? First lay Chancellor. 1343. Parliament petitions King against Papal provisions. 1346. Crecy. 1347. Rienzi's Revolution. 1349. Worst visitation of the Plague. Flagellants come to the front. 1350. Papal Jubilee : lavish gifts to the Church. 135 1. Statute of Provisors. 1352. Statutes of Labourers. 1353. Statute of Praemunire (1). 362 John Wyclif, CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS A.D. Facts in Wyclif's Life Kings of England Archbishops of Canterbury 1354 to 1360 1356. Fellow of Merton ? Fellow of Balliol (date unre- corded). Master of Balliol (date unre- corded). Lord of the Manor of Wy- cliffe (a knight's fee) ? Edward III. Simon Islip. 1361 to 1365 1361. Maintains authority of Uni- versity against the Friars? Rector of Fillingham (col- lege living). 1363. In residence at Queen's. Presents W. Wycliffe to family living of Wycliffe ? 1365. King's Chaplain. Probably begins to preach in London. Lectures on Divinity at Ox- ford. Writes scholastic works De Esse, De Compositions Hominis, etc. Edward III. 1366 to 1370 1366. Called upon by Parliament to show cause against pay- ing tribute to Rome : De- terminatio qucedam de Dom- inio. 1368. In Oxford again. 1369. Presents H. Hugate of Bal- liol to Wycliffe rectory? Exchanges Fillingham for the poorer living of Lud- garshall. 1370. Doctor of Divinity. Edward III. 1366. S.Langham 1368. W. Whittle- sea. 1371 Personal influence of Wyclif at Court, over Princess of Wales, Lancaster, Lord Latimer, Alice Perrers, etc. Also over Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Berkeley and many others. Edward III. Chronology. 363 CONNECTED WITH WYCLIF. Popes Kings of France CONTEMPORARV EVENTS Innocent VI. John II. 1354. Turks cross the Hellespont. 1356. Poitiers. 1357. Edward refuses tribute to the Pope. Fitzralph attacks Franciscans at Rome. Ock- ham dies. 1358. Papal envoys executed in England. 1360. Treaty of Bre'tigny. 1362. Urban V. 1364. Charles V. 1362. Jubilee of Edward's life. English language adopted in the courts. 1365. Suits in Papal court forbid- den again. 1366. Parliament refuses tribute to Pope. Wykeham Bishop of Winchester. 1367. Wykeham Chancellor of England. 1369. Portsmouth burnt by the French. 1370. Sack of Limoges. 1371. Gregory XI. 1371. Removal of ecclesiastics from offices of state on petition of Commons. Heavier taxa- tion of the Church. Re- verses in French and Span- ish Wars. .64 John Wyclif. CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS A.D. Facts in Wyclif's Life KlNCS OF England Archbishops of Canterbury Edward III. W. Whittlesea. 1374. Appointed by Crown to living of Lutterworth. 1372 Appointed on Commission to to confer with Papal legates at 1375 Bruges. 1375. Resides at Bruges as Com- 1375. S.Sudbury. missioner, fifty days. Refuses the prebend of Aust. 1376. Complaints of Wyclif made by the friars to the English bishops, and then to Rome. 1377. Summoned to St. Paul's by 1377. Richard II. Courtenay ; attended by Lan- 1376 caster and Percy. Citizens to break up the meeting. 1377 In residence at Black Hall, Oxford. Five Papal bulls against Wy- clif, who makes his defence at Oxford and in Parlia- ment. Wyclif, consulted by Parlia- ment as to payment of Peter's Pence, refutes the claim, but declines to advise non-pay- ment. Chronology. 365 CONNECTED WITH WYCLIF. Popes Kings of France Contemporary Events Gregory XI. 1372. English navy destroyed. 1373. Mission to Avignon about provisions, etc. Courtenay in Convocation demands re- lief for the Church. Com- mission on alien incumbents. 1374. Peace with France : media- tion of Pope. 1375. Conferences at Bruges, politi- cal and ecclesiastical. Com- promises effected in both cases. Senility of the King. Great influence of Alice Perrers. Parliament not summoned this year. Courtenay Bishop of London. 1376. Good Parliament. Ecclesi- astics recalled. Prince of Wales dies. Parliament overruled. Wykeham dis- graced and Speaker impris- oned. Pope excommunicates the Florentines. Attacks on foreigners in England. 1377. Courtenay demands the restoration of Wykeham. Commons packed by John of Gaunt. Attempt to curtail the privileges of the City. Riots in London and Westminster. First poll-tax. Death of Edward III. War renewed with France. 3 66 John Wyclif. CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS A.D. Facts in Wyclif's Life Kings of England Archbishops of Canterbury 1378 to I380 1378. Cited to Lambeth; re-asserts his conclusions. Princess of Wales protects him. Lon- doners again interrupt. He withdraws to Lutterworth or Oxford. 1379. Serious illness at Oxford. Friars call upon him for retraction. He defies them. Sends his defence and chal- lenge to Rome. Great literary activity : writes De Veritate Sane tee Scrip- inrce. Richard II. I38l to 1382 1 38 1. Begins to lecture at Oxford against transubstantiation, and carries many with him. Inquiry by Chancellor Ber- ton and a Council of twelve. Wyclif's doctrine condemn- ed, and he is forbidden to lecture. Appeals to the King ; John of Gaunt asks him 10 desist. Writes his Confession or Apologia, claiming the au- thority of the earlier Church. Many replies from monks and others. Proceedings against the Poor Priests. 1382. Accused of complicity in the Peasants' Revolt. Cited by Courtenay before a Synod at the priory of the Black Friars in London. He does not at- tend (through illness or otherwise), but twenty-four of his conclusions are con- demned, for heresy or error. (The Earthquake Synod.) His chief supporters con- demned at subsequent meet- ings. He re-asserts his conclusions at Oxford. Richard II. 1381. W. Courte- nay. Chronology. 367 CONNECTED WITH WYCLIF. Popes Kings of France Contemporary Events SCHISM. ro^ai R.UrbanVI. 1370 ^Clement VII. 1380. Charles VI. 1378. England acknowledges Pope Urban. Courtenay ex- communicates Lancaster's friends. Parliament sits at Gloucester. John of Gaunt reconciled to the Church. 1379. Sudbury appointed Chan- cellor. 1380. New and more stringent poll- tax imposed. John of Gaunt Envoy to Scotland and Lieutenant of the Marches. ' 1 38 1. Ruthless exaction of second poll-tax. Peasants' Revolt ; the march on London ; terms granted. Cruel suppression, and repu- diation of the terms by Par- liament ; 7,000 executed. Serfdom virtually ended. Courtenay Archbishop and Chancellor. 1382. Richard II. marries Anne of Bohemia. Parliament calls on Courte- nay to proceed against Wy- clif and others. He assem- bles a Synod, sends Stokys to Oxford, reduces Rygge and others to submission. Processional Litany in Lon- don, Whitsunday. Convocation of St. Frides- wide's, Oxford. 3 68 John Wyclif. CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS A.D. Facts in Wyclif's Life and Relat- ing to Him Kings of England Archbishops of Canterbury 1382 to 1384 1382. (Cont.) Greater literary activity. Collects his ser- mons ; writes a number of English tracts, in which he denounces the Papal crusade, the conduct of the Friars, etc. Engaged on Eng- lish translation of the Bible. First stroke of paralysis. 1383. Persecution of his friends. Some fall away. Continued literary activity. Writes the Trialogus. Cited to Rome. Excuses him- self on the ground of ina- bility to travel. 1384. Has a second stroke at Lut- terworth, Dec. 28th, and dies Dec. 31st. Richard II. W. Courtenay. 1385 to 1401 1385. Buried in the church at Lut- terworth. Second text of his Bible pre- pared by Purvey. (The Pleshy Bible, copied for Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, murdered 1397, was valued amongst his effects at 40J. It is now in the British Museum.) 1397. Arundel presides over a Synod which condemns eighteen conclusions of Wyclif. 1401. Jerome of Prague and others carry many works of Wyclif to Bohemia. Richard II. 1399. Henry IV. 1396. T.Arundel. Chronology. 369 CONNECTED WITH WYCLIF. Popes Kings of France Contemporary Events Charles VI. 1382. (Cont.J Bishop Despencer's expedition(papal crusade) to Flanders ordered by Urban. Bulls and plenary indul- gence proclaimed in Eng- land. Active assistance of the Friars. 1383. Crusade from May to Sep- tember ; disastrous result. The Scots raid Northumber- land. John of Gaunt retal- iates. Chaucer assisted by Lancaster. Inclines to Church reform and ecclesiastical poverty. Gower in his Latin and English poems attacks the peasants, Lollardism, and the policy of Richard II. (i38r-97). 1389. R.Boniface IX. 1 394. A. Benedict XIII. 1385. Commons demand seculari- sation of Church property. 1388. Courtenay (under parlia- mentary powers) proceeds against heretics and seizes books. Lays Leicester un- der interdict, '89. 1390. Statute of Provisors enlarged. 1391. Statute of Mortmain con- firmed. 1393. Second and more stringent Statute of Praemunire. Peace between England and France. 1395. Parliament petitions against alien clerics. 1396. Archbishop Arundel opens severely against the Lol- lards. Accused of intrigues and banished, '97. 1399. Duke of Lancaster dies. Richard II. deposed. 1401. Statute De Hcerelico Combu- rendo. Sawtre burned. 37o yohn Wyclif, CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS 1402 to 1455 Facts Relating to Wyclif 1403. Huss protests against con- demnation of Wycliffism. 1407. Arundel's Council at Oxford. 1409. Two hundred and sixty-seven errors gathered by an Ox- ford committee from Wy- clif's works. The books burned at Carfax. 14 10. Papal bull against Wycliff- ism in Bohemia. Seven- teen works condemned. Huss and others protest ; two hundred copies pub licly burned. 141 1. Huss excommunicated. 141 3. Wyclif s books burned by order of the Council of Rome. 1415. 1416. 1423. The Council of Constance confirms the condemnation of the Council of Rome, and orders Wyclif 's bones to be exhumed and cast forth. Chicheley's Inquisition. Condemnation of Wyclif by the Council of Pavia. 1428. Bishop Flemmyng exhumes and burns Wyclif's bones at Lutterworth. Kings of England Henry IV. 141 3. Henry V. 1422. Henry VI. Archbishops ok Canterbury T. Arundel. 1414. H. Chiche- ley. 1443. J. Stafford. 1452. J. Kemp. 1454. T. Bourch- Chronology. 37i CONNECTED WITH WYCLIF. Popes Kings of France Contemporary Events 1404. R. Innocent VII, 1406. R. Gregory XII. 1409. Alexander V. 1410. John XXIII. (Interregnum: May 29, 1415-Nov. 11,1417.) 141 7. Martin V. 1422. Charles VII. 1404 and 1410. The Commons re- new their demand for secu- larisation. The Lollards take sides against Henry IV. at Shrewsbury and elsewhere. 1409. Council of Pisa. Gregory and Benedict deposed. 1410. Badby of Evesham burned. 141 1. Arundel asserts his right to visit Oxford. 1413. Henry IV. d. Sir John Old- castle (Lord Cobham) con- demned as a heretic. Coun- cil at Rome. 1414. Abp. Arundel d. One hun- dred alien priories dis- solved in England. 1414-18. Council of Constance. John XXIII. deposed. End of Schism, 141 5. Huss burned at Constance. Battle of Agincourt. 141 7. Cobham burned in England ; afterwards Claydon and Taillour. Beaufort, son of John of Gaunt, made Cardinal; after- wards Kemp and Bourchier. Council of Pavia. Council of Basle. 1450. Rising in Kent. 1455. Civil war breaks out in Eng- land. Indications of Lollard or anti-ecclesiastical lean- ings on the Yorkist side. 1418. 1423 I43i INDEX. Abelard, 49, 63, 68 Anne of Bohemia, 300 Antichrist, 224, 332 Aristotle, 61, 64, 73, 216, 355 Arnold, T., 213, 256 Arundel, Abp., 9, 223, 346/". Aston, John, 212, 230, 308^*. Augustinians, 45, 246, 247, 254, 301 Avignon, 38, 57, 73, 93, 101, 122, 125, 144, 156, 220 B Bacon, Robert and Roger, 50, 64 Bale, Bp., 9, 15, 17, 50, 213 Ball, John, 259, 284/". ; his fly- leaves, 292 ff. ; his death, 297, 300 Balliol College, Wyclif's connec- tion with, 6, 86, 94-6, 200 Bebenburg, 73 Bedenham, L., 230, 308^. Benedict XI., Pope, 38 Benedict XII., Pope, 102 Benedictines, 41, no, 118, 147, 148, 247, 302 Berton,W., Chancellor, 84, 125, 127, 132, 230, 243/:, 254, 310 Bible, English translation of, 99, 193 ff- Black Death, 102, iro, 143-5, 276 Black Hall, 182 Bohemia, 14, 63, 68, 338^. Boniface VIII., 32-8 Boniface IX., 347 Bradwardine, Abp., 63, 68, 141 f> Bruges, conferences at, 121 ff., 151, 158 Calvinists, 69 Cambridge, 45, 48, 63, 186, 301, 307 Canon Law, 66 Canterbury Hall, 148, 239 Canterbury, Wyclif condemned at, 310 Caxton, 350 373 374 Index. Chaucer, 42, 64, 69, 106, 138, 199, 266, 326 Chicheley, Abp., 353 ff. Chronicon Anglice, 84, 154, 162 jr.. 187 Church of England, 23, 104, 108 ff., 121, 141/"., 149. 158, 185, 250, 299, 342, 356, 357 Civil law, 66, 67 Clement VI., Pope, 93, 102, 142 Clement VII., 220, 327 Clifford, Lewis, 187 Coleridge, S. T., onWyclif, 246, note Commission on alien benefices, 126 Council of Constance, 220, 223, 349 Courtenay, Abp., 74, 84, 132, 140, 149/*., 157/*., 176, 180 ff., 220, 250, 257, 271 ; suc- ceeds Sudbury, 299 ; third prosecution of Wyclif, 301^". / his character, 313 D De la Mare, Peter, 134-7, 166 De la Mare, Thomas, 136 Despenser, Bp., leads the Papal crusade, 327 ff. Dominic, St., 46, 338 Duns Scotus, 68, 70 Edward III., 27, 99, 103, 108, 115, 118/:, 168, 281 Edward IV., 357 Edward, Prince of Wales, 103, 115, 119/"., 133-7, 242 Eucharist, interpretation of the sacrament, 8, 222, 227, 243 ff., 257 Europe in the fourteenth cen- tury, 22 Evangelical poverty, 56-8, 70, 88, 93, 98, 111-3, 155, 181 Fasciculi Zizaniorum , 15 ; see " Netter " and " Shirley " Feudalism, 62, 273 ff. J Fitzralph, 63, 93, 233, 241 ! Flagellants, 144-6 ; Flemmyng, Bp., 13, 230, 334, 350 j Friars, various, 9, 45, 50, 93, no, 148, 150, 158, 162, 194, 202, 233, 301, 328, 352 ; Do- minican, 41, 242, 247 ; Fran- ciscan, 52, 57, 68 247 Gilbert, Bp., 125/*., 132, 151, 301, 319 Gloucester, Duke of, 164 Gloucester Parliament, 169 ff. Gregory VII., Pope, 28 Gregory IX., 47 Gregory XL, 38, 125, 153, 169 ff., 190, 220, 222, 337, 342 Grosteste, Bp., 92 H Henry IV., 351 Henry V., 354.355 Henry VIII., 357 Hereford, Nicholas, 94, 196, 212, 230, 305, lo&ff. Index. 375 Hugate, H., 85, 96 Hugate, J., 94, 96 Huss, John, 220, 337, 349 Innocent III., Pope, 28, 47, 55, 101, 338 Islip, Abp., 142-7, 285 J Jamys, W., 220 Jerome of Prague, 68, 220 John, King of England, 28, 1 1 1-4 John of Gaunt, 99, 101, 104^"., US ff'J his character, \2off., *33 ff-S story of his birth, 138, 151/"., 158/"., 184, 241, 244/"., 279, 301, 308, 352 John of Northampton, 184, 309 John XXII., Pope, 27, 57, 70, 102 John XXIIL, 349 Knox and Wyclif , a comparison and a contrast, 1-5 Knyghton, 254, 319 Kynyngham, 51, 114, 301, 307 Lambeth inquiry, 185^. Langham, Abp., 147, 232, 239 Langland, 42, 145, 269 Lechler, Prof., 71, 79 Leland on Wyclifs birthplace, 77 Lewis, Rev. John, 15, 213 Lollards, 50-2, 58, 194, 212, 269, 289, 309, 344/*., 352 Lutterworth, 13, 132, 195, 222, 254, 257, 268, 321 M Marsiglio, 58, 61. 63, 68, 71 ff., 241, 337 Martin*V., Pope, 13, 350 Matthew, F. D., 77, 214 Mediaeval schools and universi- ties, 62, 89, 100, 150 Milton, 69 Monks and monachism, 40, 75, 247, 310, 343. See "Bene- dictines." N Netter of Walden, 9, 14, 17, 186, 223, 243, 248, 250, 254, 335 Nicholas II., Pope, 253 Nicholas III., Pope, 57, 58 Ockham, William of, 56, 61, 63, 68-75, 240, 337 Oldcastle, Sir J., 345, 352 Oxford, before Wyclif, 48, 62, 67, 232 ; in Wyclifs time, 3, 6, 58, 68, 74, 85/:, 93-8, 149, 176, 1 %o ff., 222, 229, 243^"., 268, 302/:, 318 #., 337 ff.; after Wyclif, 3A1 ff- Papal, bulls, 35, 158, 159, 168, 173, 175 ff- >' crusade, 4, 171, 327 ff. ; curia, 14, 33, 112, 376 Index. 192 ; decretals, 58, 64, 66, 142 ; encroachments, 28 ff., 101, 109-15, 121, 123, 130, 242; politics, 28, 62, 124, 190, 341 Parliament, 100, 105 ff. ; exclu- sion of clergy from office, 116, 125, 164, 173, 274, 299, 352 ; the good, 133-7, 251 Pastor, Prof., 337 Peasants' Revolt, 258^., 2%o>ff.; its suppression, 295^*., 327 Perrers, Alice, 105, 135, 137, 154 Perugia, assembly of Franciscans at, 57, 58 Philipot, John, 165, 274 Philippa, Queen, 128, 138, 167 Poll tax, 278/: Poole, R. L., on the influence of Marsiglio, 71^"., 77, 262^". Poor Priests, 56, 99, 193, 259^*., 298, 301, 324 Portraits of Wyclif, 16 Prague, 63, 68, 220, 338 Princess (Joan) of Wales, 99, 149, 166, 184, 187 ff. Purvey, John, 196, 212, 218, 230 R Reformation, the earlier, 31, 41, 58, 106, 115, 144, 272 ; the later, 68, 106, 226, 337, 343 Repyngdon, P., 230, 305/". Richard II., 137, 168 ff., 190, 278, 283, 295/-., 346 Rogers, Prof. J. E. Thorold, 75 note, 277 Rygg e Robert, Chancellor of Oxford, 230, 246, 248, 302 ff. ; submits to Courtenay, 308 Salisbury, Earl of, 345 ff. Schism of 1378, 39, 219/"., 231, 341, 349 Schoolmen, 8, 31, 48, 58, 59/"., 141, 198, 237 Shirley, Dr., 11, 77, 118, 147, 213, 227, 243 Spiritual Franciscans (Observ- ants), 57, 70, 241 St. Frideswide's, conference at, 3i8 Stokys, Peter, 271, 303/"., 311 St. Paul's inquiry, 12, 160-4 Sudbury, Abp., 74, 149, 176, 180/"., 251, 279/*., 285 ; his death, 292 Synod of Blackfriars, 301 ; the charges, 304 ; earthquake, 302; conclusions, 311 ff. Tyler, Wat, 284 Tyssington, John, 247, 250, 254 U Universities, 62. See ** Mediaeval universities." Urban V., Pope, 125, 130 Urban VI., 191, 220, 231, 327^*. Vaughan, Dr., 213 W Walsingham's History, 76, 155, 169, 278, 286^"., 315 Index. 377 Walworth, 165, 274, 283 Whitcliffe or Wyclif, John, of Mayfield, 83, 147 Wilkie's picture of Knox, 1 Wyclif, John (1320 ?-84), his character, 3-14, 60, 233-7, 240, 265, 314 ; his biographers, 8-16 ; his portraits, 16 ; his training, 8, 92 ; his works, 10, 98, 109, in, 115, 118, 170, 191 ; his English Bible and tracts, 196 ff., 238, 251, 257, 261, 270, 307, 320, 323, 325 ff. ; his Milieu, 22, 30, 59, 101 ff.; his descent from the Schoolmen, 59 ff., 71 ff., 92, 240 ; his early days, birth, and parentage, 76 ff., 92 ; his name, 83 ; genealogy, 85 ff.; goes up to Oxford, 89 ; Master of Balliol, 94 ; Rector of Fillingham, 95 ; of Ludgar- shall, 96 ; participation in politics, 100 ff.; King's chap- lain, 104 ; argues against tribute, in ff.; against a Benedictine, 118 ; mission to Bruges, 123 ff.; his expenses, 127 ; Rector of Lutterworth, 132 ; declines prebend of Aust, 132, 147 ; in conflict with Courtenay, 152 ; hostility of the friars, 50, 158 ; cited to St. Paul's, 160 ; consulted as to Peter's pence, 170 ; ad- vises payment, 172 ; the nine- teen charges in Pope Gregory's bulls, 177 ; Wyclif's answers, 180 ; cited again to St. Paul's, 184 ; change of venue to Lam- beth, 185 ; his thirty-three conclusions, 192 ; his errors according to Netter, 223 ; progress of his ideas on the Eucharist, 227 ff.; his illness in 1379, 234 ; renewed attacks on the friars, 238 ; cited by Chancellor de Berton, 244 ; his views on Transubstantiation, id.; condemned and inhibited, 247 ; he appeals to the Crown, 249 ; his Confession, 252 ; his influence on the peasants, 259 ff.; effects of the revolt on Wyclif and his friends, 298 ; condemned at the Earthquake Synod, 301-13 ; his Petition, 315 ; his alleged submissions, 254, 319 ; fresh illness, 320 ; retires from Oxford, 321 ; lit- erary activity at Lutterworth, 324 ; cited to Rome, 329 ; his death, 333 ff.; permanent results of his life and work, 336 ff.; his teaching con- demned at Constance, 349 ; his bones burned, 350 ; his place in history, 358 Wycliffe Rectory, the patronage of, 85/"., 96 Wycliffe, W., 85, 95, 96 Wykeham, William of, Bp., 116, 133-9. 154-6. l66 > 2 50, 301, 318 Iberoes of tbe IRatioim EDITED BY EVELYN ABBOTT M.A., Fellow of B*alliol College, Oxford. 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