BOOK VIII. 

FROM THE DEATH OF POPE BONIFACE VIII TO THE END  OF THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE,  A.D. 1303-1418.

 

CHAPTER VI.

WYCLIF.

 

WE have seen that, ever since the submission of John of England to Innocent III, a spirit of disaffection towards the papacy had been growing in the minds of the English people, who held themselves degraded by their sovereign’s humiliation; that the popes throughout the thirteenth century had unwisely provoked this spirit by their exorbitant claims on the English church, and by their shameless interference with the disposal of English preferment; and that, although the feeble Henry III was afraid to place himself at the head of the nation as the representa­tive of its feelings towards the papacy, the strong will and hand of Edward I were exerted in opposition to the Roman usurpations. Under Edward II the crown of England again became weak; but the antipapal spirit continued to increase among the people, and was swollen by the circumstance that the popes at this time took up their residence at Avignon, and became subservient to the interest of France. While the college of cardinals was full of Frenchmen, Edward II was unable to obtain, by repeated entreaties, that a single Englishman might be promoted to it, even although a vacancy had been made through the death of an English cardinal. It was found that, in the great war which arose out of the pretensions of Edward III to the French crown, the popes, while affecting neutrality, were always favourable to the opposite side. Edward, able, vigorous, and successful in war, was not disposed to imitate the submissiveness of his feeble and unfortunate father; and the growing power of the commons in the legislature was strongly adverse to the assumptions of the papal court.

Even the privileges of the English clergy were now becoming less than before. The representation of their grievances presented to Edward II in 1316, and known by the title of Articuli Cleri, shows a great practical abatement of the system which Becket had endeavoured to establish; and the answer which was made in the king’s name, while it admitted some points, refused to concede others, and treated some of the alleged griev­ances as imaginary. The immunity of the clergy from secular authority, for which Becket had contended, was greatly infringed. When Adam of Orleton, bishop of Hereford, was brought before his peers in parliament, on account of his share in the political intrigues which had resulted in the deposition and murder of Edward II, he was carried off, without having pleaded, by the archbishops of Canterbury, York, and Dublin, as if his clerical privilege exempted him from the jurisdiction of the house. But Edward III, instead of relinquishing the proceedings against the bishop, or transferring them to an ecclesiastical tribunal, caused him to be tried by a common jury of the county in which his see was situated, and, on his conviction, confiscated his property. When Stratford, archbishop of Canter­bury, was embroiled with the same king, the ground on which he rested was not that of the clerical immunities, but his privilege as a lord of parliament—a circumstance significant of the change which had taken place in the minds of men. When Simon Langham, archbishop of Canterbury, had been created a cardinal by Urban V, without having previously consulted the king, Edward seized the temporalities of the see, and Langham submitted to spend the rest of his days in exile, without venturing to remonstrate in the tone of Becket, or, like him, securing for himself the sympathy of all Latin Christendom. And in the civil distractions which marked the end of the fourteenth century in England, the treatment of great prelates was yet more regardless of the pretension to exemption from secular judgment. Even the claim of freedom from taxes had been practically decided against the clergy by Edward I, in de­claring them to be out of the protection of the law; and all that they retained of privilege in this respect was the right of assessing their own order in convocation.

Collisions frequently took place between the papacy and the English crown. The popes took it on themselves to nominate bishops, in disregard alike of the right of chapters to elect, and of that of the sovereign to permit and to confirm the election: and in conferring the spiritual character on new bishops, they omitted to request, as had formerly been customary, that the sove­reign would invest them in their temporalities. But in order to meet this, the kings compelled the bishops to renounce by oath all things in the papal letters which might be contrary to the rights of the crown, and to acknowledge that the temporalities were held of the sovereign alone. And this system of imposing contradictory obligations continued to later times.

The attempts to burden the benefices of the English church with foreigners, who were unacquainted with the language, who were wanting in qualities suitable for their office, and probably never set foot in the country,—who, perhaps, might also be in the interest of France and opposed to that of England,—such attempts, in proportion  as they became more impudent, were more strongly resented. Thus, when Clement VI took it on himself to provide for two cardinals by English benefices to the value of 2,000 marks a-year, his agents were ordered to leave the kingdom; and he was sternly warned against attempting by his own authority to assume the patronage of bishoprics, or to bestow patronage on any who would not reside on their preferments. The encroachments and abuses of the papal court were now met by the legislature with the statutes of provisors and praemunire, which enacted heavy penalties against receiving presentations from the pope, and against appealing from the king’s court to any foreign tribunal.

Among the causes of offence during this time, the mendicant orders were conspicuous for their assumptions and their rapacity. They attempted, by acting as confessors and otherwise, to engross all spiritual power, to the prejudice of the secular clergy; to divert to themselves the income which the seculars were entitled to expect from the administration of penance and other sacraments. They attempted to get into their own hands all the teaching of the universities, where they enticed young men of promise to enter their ranks, even in defiance of the will of parents; and it is said that, in consequence of this, the number of students at Oxford was reduced from 30,000 to 6,000, as men chose that their sons should become tillers of the ground rather than that they should be thus carried off by the friars. By these and other practices, the mendicants raised up determined enemies, of whom the most noted was Richard Fitzralph, an eminent teacher of Oxford, and afterwards archbishop of Armagh. Fitzralph inveighed against the prominent faults of the friars—their pride, their greed, their notorious disregard of their rules, their usurpations on the parochial clergy. He tells them that all the privileges which they laboured to acquire for themselves were such as were attended with temporal gain; that they showed no eagerness for those unpaid duties in which they might have usefully assisted. Fitzralph carried his complaints against the mendicants to Avignon; but he was strongly opposed by the interest which their money acquired for them in the papal court, where the funds supplied by the English clergy for the support of his cause were soon exhausted; and while the question was yet undecided, he died there in 1361.

In many respects, therefore, the practical grievances of the Roman system had provoked the angry discontent of the English people; and by this feeling the minds of many had been prepared to welcome an attack on the doctrine of the church, as well as on its administration. The opposition to the doctrines of the church of Rome, however formidable it had been in some instances, had never yet been of such a kind as to be fitted for attracting general sympathy. Sometimes it had been carried on by enthusiasts, who were evidently weak or disordered in judgment; sometimes by men whose opinions were so utterly remote from the traditional system, that they could have little chance of acceptance with those who had been trained in it; nor had any one of the sects which arose during the middle ages been able to gain a footing in England. A reformer of a new and more dangerous kind was now to arise—a man who, before appearing in that character, had gained a high reputation in literature and philosophy; one who was fitted either to address him­self to the learned, or to adapt his teaching, in language and in style of argument, to the understanding of the common people; a reformer whose opinions were not, indeed, free from extravagances, but yet were professedly grounded on Scripture, and appealed from the prevailing corruptions to the standard of an older time.

The earlier part of John Wyclif’s life is involved in much obscurity; and such discoveries as have lately been made respecting it have resulted rather in disencum­bering the story of errors which had long prevailed than in the establishment of any new truths. His birthplace was probably somewhere in the neighbourhood of Richmond, in Yorkshire : the year usually given for his birth, 1324, is perhaps somewhat later than the true date. He studied in the university of Oxford; but the statements that he was educated at Queen’s college, and that he took a prominent share in Fitzralph’s controversy with the mendicants, are not warranted by any sufficient evidence. The first certain notice of him belongs to the year 1361, when he appears as master or warden of Balliol college; and this preferment he exchanged in the same year for the parish of Fillingham, near Lincoln, to which he was presented by his college. It would seem, however, that with the bishop’s permission he continued to reside for the most part at Oxford. The statements which were long received as to the offices and benefices held by Wyclif are very perplexing, especially as they seem to show a glaring contradiction between his own practice and the opinions which he professed as to the possessions of the clergy. But it now appears that the reformer has been confounded with another person of the same name, or one nearly resembling it,—and that to this other John Wyclif or Whytecliff are perhaps to be referred the fellowship of Merton college, the living of Mayfield, and the mastership of Canterbury Hall—to the loss of which last preferment, by a papal sentence in 1370, Wycli’s entrance on the career of a reformer has often been ascribed by his enemies. By others among those who have wished to charge him with interested motives, it has been supposed that his zeal was awakened by disappointment as to a bishopric in the year 1364; but his earliest appearance as a reformer has been more truly referred to the time when he became a doctor in divinity, and in right of this degree began to read lectures in the university. He was already eminent as a philosophical and scientific teacher, and, having adopted the theory of Realism (which had for a time been discountenanced by the authority of Ockham and other popular masters), he had produced a treatise “On the Reality of Universals”, which was regarded as marking an epoch in the history of opinion. If a book entitled “The Last Age of the Church” were really Wyclif’s, it would prove that he was at one time affected by the ideas of abbot Joachim and the fraticelli. But it seems to be certain that this was never the case; and the tract in question is clearly the work of a Franciscan.

In 1366 Urban V demanded from England thirty-three years’ arrears of the tribute which king John had bound himself to pay to the Roman see. At a former time, John XXII had obtained from Edward II a similar payment of arrears as a condition of his favour in the conflict with Robert Bruce; and throughout the earlier years of Edward III’s reign the money had been regularly paid. But during the costly war with France it had again fallen into neglect; and when in 1357 a claim was made by Innocent VI, the king answered by declaring himself resolved to hold his kingdom in freedom and independence. On the renewal of the claim nine years later, the parliament, headed by the bishops (who gave their opinion before the lay peers), resolved that king John had had no right to bind his people or future generations to such subjection. Wyclif, who was already one of the king’s chaplains, appears to have been consulted by the government on this question; and in answer to a challenge by a doctor who belonged to some monastic order, he defended in a determination at Oxford the course which had been taken in answer to the Roman claim.

The employment of ecclesiastics in secular offices was denounced by Wyclif as an abuse; and of this system the most conspicuous representative was William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, a man whose dignities had been won by his own talents, and whose name is honourably preserved to this day by the great foundations on which his wealth was munificently spent. Against him, therefore, the efforts of a party in the state were chiefly directed. While Edward III, towards the close of his long and glorious reign, had fallen under the domination of a worthless woman, and his son Edward, the favourite hero of the nation, was sinking under long disease, the king’s next surviving son, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, headed the party of the old feudal aristocracy. Lancaster was a man of corrupt life, of selfish ambition, closely allied with Wyclif’s enemies, the mendicant friars, and bent on humiliating the clergy, whereas Wyclif’s object was to purify them. Yet the two co-operated towards what was nominally a common object, and, with the aid of the commons, Wykeham was in 1371 driven from office and impeached, while other ecclesiastics were also deprived of their secular employ­ments, and the bishop was not summoned to the next parliament.

In July 1374 Wyclif was sent to Bruges, with the bishop of Bangor and others, for the purpose of conferring with some envoys of the Roman court on certain points as to the relations of the English church and the papacy, while the duke of Lancaster and other representatives of England were engaged in political negotiations at the same place with French princes, bishops, and nobles, and with prelates appointed by the pope to mediate between the two nations. The English commissioners complained of the levying of exactions unparalleled in any other country, of the reservations of benefices, and of the pope’s interference with the election of bishops; while on the other side it was urged that papal bulls were not received in England as in other kingdoms, and that the representatives of the pope were not freely admitted. After much discussion, a compromise was agreed on, of which the chief articles were, that the pope should give up his claim to reservations, and that the king should no longer confer benefices by the writ of Quare impedit. In this arrangement the statute of provisors was over-ridden by the royal prerogative. Nothing was, however, concluded as to the important subject of elections; and in the following year we already find a renewal of the complaints as to the encroachments of the Roman court in the matter of reservations. The “good parliament”, as it was called, of that year, while it took up the cause of William of Wykeham and his fellows, and procured their restoration to the royal council, showed itself resolutely hostile to the corruptions of the Roman administration. It was said that the money drawn by the pope from England was five times as much as the taxes paid to the crown; and a formidable list of English preferments held by cardinals and other members of the papal court was exhibited. Such representations were frequent; the statute of provisors was twice re-enacted, and each time with increased severity; but the popes continued to violate these statutes, and to carry on the usurpations by which the mind of the English nation had been so long provoked.

In the end of the year 1375 Wyclif was presented by the crown, in right of a patron who was under age, to the rectory of Lutterworth in Leicestershire—a parish which was his home throughout the remainder of his life, though his residence there was varied by frequent visits to Oxford. The experience which he had gained at Bruges had probably made him more fully acquainted than before with the faults of the Roman system. He had satisfied himself that the pretensions of the papacy had no sufficient foundation; and this conviction he published indefatigably, in learned lectures and disputations, in sermons, and in tracts which for the first time set before the humbler and less educated classes, in strong and clear English prose, the results of inquiry and thought in opposition to the existing state of the church. He denounced the pope as “anti-Christ, the proud worldly priest of Rome, and the most cursed of clippers and purse-carvers.” He inveighed against the pride, the pomp, the luxury of prelates, against their enmity to the power of sovereigns, against the claims of the clergy to immunity from secular jurisdiction, their ignorance, their neglect of preaching, the abuse of the privilege of sanctuary to shelter notorious criminals. He held the temporal lords were entitled to resume such endowments of the church as were abused; and that it was for the temporal lords to judge of the abuse as well as to execute the sentence, and probably also to benefit by the forfeiture.

It was natural that such opinions should give great offence to those who were attacked, especially as the political connexion of Wyclif with the duke of Lancaster invested them with a more alarming character. Wyclif was summoned to appear before the primate and the bishop of London in St. Paul’s church on the 23rd of February 1377; and the character of the prosecution is shown by the fact that, although errors of doctrine had already been laid to his charge, those which were now brought forward related entirely to political and social questions. The reformer had with him two powerful supporters, the duke of Lancaster and Lord Percy, earl marshal, and the scene was one of great violence. In­stead of the proposed inquiry, there was an exchange of reproachful words between Wyclif’s friends and the bishop of London—William Courtenay, a son of the earl of Devon—while Wyclif himself appears to have been silent throughout, as if ashamed of the unruly conduct of his protectors. Lancaster threatened to bring down the pride not only of Courtenay, but of all the prelacy of England : he charged him with relying on the power of his family, but told him that, instead of being able to help him, they would “have enough to do to defend themselves”; and when the bishop replied with dignity that he trusted not in his kinsfolk, nor in any man else, but in God alone, the duke, unable to find an answer, declared that he would rather drag him out of the church by the hair than endure this at his hand. The Londoners who were present, furious at this insult to their bishop and to the privileges of their city, broke out into tumult, and it was with difficulty that Wyclif and his friends escaped. It happened that on the same day a proposal was made in parliament to transfer the government of the city from the lord mayor to a commission of which Percy was to be the head, and the report of this increased the exasperation of the mob, who next day attacked and plundered Lancaster’s palace of the Savoy, barbarously murdered an ecclesiastic who was mistaken for the earl marshal, and might have committed further outrages but for the interposition of the bishop of London, who hastened to the scene of the tumult and succeeded in appeasing it.

Before the meeting at St. Paul’s, nineteen articles of accusation against Wyclif had been submitted to Gregory XI, and in the end of May 1377 the pope addressed bulls to the king, to the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, and to the university of Oxford, reproving the ecclesiastical and academical authorities for their supineness, and requiring an investigation of the case. Wyclif was said to have revived the errors of Marsilius and of John of Jandun—to have maintained doctrines subversive of ecclesiastical and civil government—to have denied the force of papal commands and the power of the keys—to have asserted that excommunication is a nullity, unless a man be excommunicated by himself—that the endowments of the church may be taken away if abused, and that the clergy, including even the pope himself, may be accused and corrected by the laity. In the letter addressed to Oxford it was ordered that such teaching should be suppressed in the university, and that the chancellor should arrest Wyclif and bring him before the primate and the bishop of London. But before these documents could reach England an important change took place through the death of Edward III, who was succeeded by his grandson Richard, then only eleven years old.

The university authorities of Oxford, jealous of its in­dependence, showed no eagerness to carry out the papal commands; but the archbishop and the bishop of London required the chancellor to present Wyclif before them for trial. In the meantime a new parliament made strong representations against the encroachments of the papacy, and consulted certain authorities on the question whether the king were not entitled to prevent the exportation of treasure from the realm, although the pope might have required it to be sent to him. To this Wyclif, always a partisan of the crown as against the claims of the papacy, answered that for the defence of the country such a seizure would be warranted by the law of Christ, even although the pope’s requisition should be made on the ground of the obe­dience due to him, and should be enforced by the penalty of his censures.

By the death of Edward the duke of Lancaster's influence was lessened, and the clergy felt themselves stronger than before. In December Wyclif was cited to appear again at St. Paul’s within thirty days; but the place of hearing was changed to the archbishop’s chapel at Lambeth, where, early in the following year, Wyclif was required to answer to the nineteen articles charged against him. But immediately after the proceedings had been opened, a message was received from the young king’s mother, desiring that the bishops would carry the inquiry no further; and while the latter were deliberating whether this order should be obeyed, a mob of Londoners, now favourable to Wyclif, as from special circumstances they had lately been opposed to him, broke into the chapel and compelled them to withdraw.

Wyclif had already replied to the charges against him in three tracts, of which one would seem to have been intended for the clergy and for academic readers, while another was laid before parliament, and the third is a vehement attack on some opponent, whom he styles a “medley divine”. The obscurity and over-subtlety which have been imputed to these papers arise in part from the scholastic method of argument. Wyclif endeavours to explain and to justify, on grounds of scripture and of canon-law, such of the questioned opinions as he admits to be really held by him, and to obviate the misconceptions which his language might be too likely to produce. He speaks of himself as a sincere son of the church, and as willing to retract wherever he can be convinced that he is wrong—a profession which, as it is often repeated by other reformers of the period, may be presumed to have been in their minds something more than a nugatory truism. Wyclif was not further cen­sured at this time than by being warned to avoid the danger of misleading the ignorant; and he thought him­self at liberty to put forth ten new propositions, which were chiefly directed against the interference of spiritual persons with secular power and possessions.

The death of Gregory XI put an end to the commission under which the late proceedings had taken place; but the great schism which followed, while it was favourable to Wyclif by supplying him with fresh arguments against the papacy, and by weakening the power of the clergy everywhere, yet told against him by removing so much of the cause for the anti-papal feeling of the English as had arisen from the connexion of the late popes with France; for England, as we have seen, acknowledged the Roman line of popes, and disowned that of Avignon. Wyclif himself had at first hailed the election of Urban VI as a reforming pope; but he found his hopes disappointed, and, after some observation of the schism, he declared that the church would be in a better condition if both the rival popes were removed or deposed, forasmuch as their lives appeared to show that they had nothing to do with the church of God.

In his preaching at Oxford and elsewhere, Wyclif vehemently attacked the mendicant orders, which he declared to be the great evil of Christendom. He charged them with fifty errors of doctrine and practice. He denounced them for intercepting the alms which ought to belong to the poor; for their unscrupulous system of proselytizing; for their invasion of parochial rights; their habit of deluding the common people by fables and legends; their hypocritical pretensions to sanctity; their flattery of the great and wealthy, whom it would rather have been their duty to reprove for their sins; their grasping at money by all sorts of means; the needless splendour of their buildings, whereas parish-churches were left to neglect and decay.             

That these complaints were well grounded there can be no doubt; but it must be remembered that the faults which Wyclif rioted were for the most part deviations from the intentions of those by whom the orders had been founded. Indeed, Wyclif himself had much in common with those founders. He held that tithes and other endowments were in their nature eleemosynary; that the clergy ought to receive only so much as might be necessary for their support; he insisted on the idea of apostolic poverty which had been advocated by Arnold of Brescia and by many sectaries—not considering that the effect of reducing all clerical income to that which is merely necessary will not be a removal of all secular temptations to enter into the ministry of the church, but will leave such temptations as can attract only an inferior class of men. In his earlier days he had distinguished the mendicants favourably from the other monastic orders; and it was probably not until their faults had been brought home to him by special circumstances that he entered on a declared opposition to them. In order to counteract the efforts of the friars and to spread his own opinions, he instituted a brotherhood of his own, under the name of “poor priests”, who were to go about the country barefooted, roughly clad in russet frocks, penetrating, as the mendicants had done, to the humblest classes of the people, and giving such elementary religious instruction as they could. These simple teachers were employed under episcopal authority throughout the vast diocese of Lincoln, and perhaps elsewhere; but they appear to have been suppressed in a later stage of Wyclif’s career. Wyclif refused to admit the monastic preten­sions in favour of a life of contemplation and prayer; he regarded the idea of such a life as selfish, and held that the clergy ought rather to labour in preaching, as being a work beneficial to others.

In 1379 Wyclif, while residing at Oxford, had a dangerous illness, in which it is said that four doctors, belonging to the mendicant orders, visited him with the design of bringing him to express contrition and to retract his sayings against their brethren; but that he astonished and scared them away by declaring, in scriptural phrase, “I shall not die, but live and declare the evil deeds of the friars” : and he was able to keep his word.

He now entered on a new and important portion of his work—the translation of the Holy Scriptures ’into the vernacular tongue. In the prologue to the version by his follower John Purvey, the venerable examples of Bede and king Alfred are cited in favour of such translations; but whatever means of attaining a knowledge of Scripture through their native tongue may have been open to the English in earlier ages, they had for centuries been without such aids, and in the meantime the reading of Scripture had been forbidden, as being dangerous to the unlearned. Of late, however, renewed attempts had been made to exhibit the sacred writings in an English form. About the beginning of Edward III’s reign, William of Shoreham, vicar of Chart Sutton in Kent, rendered the Psalter into English prose; and he was soon after followed by Richard Rolle, “the hermit of Hampole”, who not only translated the text of the Psalms, but added an English commentary. But no other book of Scripture appears to have been rendered into our language for centuries before the time when Wyclif undertook a version of the whole. How much of the gigantic labour was done by his own hands it is impossible to determine; but to him we must refer at least the general merit of the design and the superintendence of the entire work.

The effect of thus bringing home the word of God to the unlearned people is shown by the indignation of a contemporary writer, who denounces Wyclif as having made the gospel “common, and more open to laymen and to women who can read than it is wont to be to clerks well learned and of good understanding; so that the pearl of the gospel is scattered and is trodden under foot of swine”; and he applies, as if prophetical of Wyclif’s labours, some passages in which William of St. Amour had denounced the “everlasting gospel” of an earlier party. It is said that the bishops attempted in 1390 to get the version condemned by parliament, lest it should become an occasion of heresies; but John of Gaunt “with a great oath” declared that the English would not submit to the degradation of being denied a vernacular Bible, while other nations were allowed to enjoy it; and other nobles added that, if there were danger of heresy from having the Scriptures in English, there had been more heresies among the Latins than among the people of any other language. The attempt at prohibition, therefore, failed, and the English Bible spread far and wide, being diffused chiefly through the exertions of the “poor priests,” whom Wyclif employed to publish his doctrines about the country, and furnished with portions of his translation as the text which they were to expound, and the foundation on which they were to rest their preaching.

Soon after having engaged in the translation, Wyclif, who had thus far shown himself as a reformer only in matters relating to ecclesiastical and civil government, and as to the powers of the clergy, or as a maintainer of philosophical opinions which differed from those generally accepted, went on to assail the doctrine of the church in the matter of the Eucharist, by putting forth certain propositions, which he offered to maintain in public disputation. This, however, the authorities of Oxford would not allow; the chancellor, William Berthon, with some doctors, condemned Wyclif’s opinions, whereupon he appealed to the king—an act which naturally excited the anger of the clergy, as being an attack on the church’s right of judgment. His old patron the duke of Lancaster, who took no interest in such ques­tions, charged him to refrain from teaching his doctrine as to the Eucharist, but Wyclif, instead of obeying this order, put forth a “confession” in which he asserted and defended his opinion. He maintained that the sacrament of the altar was not a mere sign, but was at once figure and truth; that all teachers since the year 1,000 had erred, with the sole exception of Berengar,—the devil having been let loose, and having had power over the “master of the Sentences” and others. He distinguished various modes of being, and said that the body of Christ was in the consecrated host virtually, spiritually, and sacramentally, but that it was not substantially, corporally, or dimensionally, elsewhere than in heaven; that, as St. John the Baptist, on becoming the Elias, did not cease to be John—as one who is changed into a pope still remains the same man as before—so it was with the bread and wine of the sacrament. And he severely reprobated the holders of the current doctrine as being “followers of signs and worshippers of accidents”. It was, he said, beyond the reach even of almighty power to cause the existence of accidents without any subject. Thus an important addition was made to the subjects of controversy between Wyclif and the ruling party in the church; and in order to set forth his views in a popular form, he produced a treatise which is known as his “Wicket”.

In the same year took place the rising of the peasantry under Wat Tyler—a movement similar to those which somewhat earlier had been designated in France by the name of Jacquerie. It was the policy of Wyclif’s enemies to connect him with this insurrection, by representing it as the effect of his teaching; and one of the leaders, a priest named John Ball, declared in his con­fession that he had been two years a follower of Wyclif, whom he described as the chief author of the revolt. But, in truth, this connexion was imaginary. The fury of Tyler’s followers was especially directed, not against the clergy (as would have been the case if the impulse had been derived from Wyclif), but against persons in secular authority and administrative office, against lawyers, gentlemen, and men of wealth, especially those who had become rich by commerce. It was not on account of his spiritual office, but as chancellor of the kingdom, that archbishop Simon of Sudbury was beheaded on Tower Hill. Ball, instead of having learnt his principles from Wyclif, had, for twenty years before this outbreak, been notorious as a preacher of communism and revolution; he had been censured by three successive primates, and at length, for his irregularities, had been committed to the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone, from which he was released by the rioters. Another priest, who, under the name of Jack Straw, was prominent as a leader, held opinions akin to those of the fraticelli. There were no demonstrations against the popular superstitions of the time; the insurgents were in alliance with Wyclif’s enemies, the friars, and were furious against his patron the duke of Lancaster, whose palace of the Savoy underwent a second spoliation and serious damage at their hands. In the suppression of this rebellion, a conspicuous part was borne by Henry Spenser, bishop of Norwich, who had obtained his see as a reward for military services rendered to Urban V in Italy. He took the field in armour, delivered Peterborough from the insurgents, contributed to discomfit them in the neighbouring counties, and, when peace had been restored, made over the local ringleaders to execution, after having, in his episcopal character, administered to them the last conso­lations of religion.

For Wyclif the result of the insurrection was unfavourable, as the place of the murdered primate was filled by his old enemy Courtenay, who was not likely to distinguish in his favour between political and doctrinal innovations. Immediately after having received his pall, the new archbishop brought the question of Wyclif’s opinions before a council of bishops, and other ecclesiastics (mostly belonging to the mendicant orders), with some lawyers, which met at the Dominican convent in Holborn. As the session was about to begin, a shock of an earthquake was felt, and some of the members in alarm proposed an adjournment: but the archbishop, undisturbed by the omen, declared that it signified the purging of the kingdom from heresy. Wyclif was not present, nor does it appear that he had been cited to defend himself; but twenty-two propositions were brought forward as having been maintained by him—ten of them being branded as heretical, while the others were only designated as errors. Among the heresies were the assertions that the material substance of bread and wine remains in the sacrament of the altar; that accidents do not remain in it without a subject; that Christ is not in it “identically, truly, and really, in His proper bodily substance”; that the ministrations of bishops and priests who are in mortal sin, and the claims of evil popes over Christ’s faithful people, are null; that contrition super­sedes the necessity of outward confession; that God ought to obey the devil; that since Urban VI no one was to be received as pope, but the Christians of the west ought to live, like the Greeks, under their own laws; and that it was contrary to Holy Scripture for clergymen to hold temporal possessions.

Among the propositions noted as erroneous were several relating to the effect of excommunication; the assertions already mentioned as to the power of secular persons to take away ecclesiastical endowments, with others of like tendency; and some denials of the utility of the monastic life.

The council held five sessions, and in the meantime the archbishop wrote to Oxford, denouncing the preaching of uncommissioned persons, and ordering that the opinions of Wyclif should be suppressed in the university. The council condemned the doctrines which were brought before it, and three of Wyclif’s most prominent followers—Philip Repyngdon, Nicolas Hereford, and John Ayshton—after having been examined before the primate, were sentenced to various punishments. The archbishop brought the matter before the house of lords, and an order was obtained from the crown, by which the sheriffs were required to assist the officers of the bishops in arresting heretics. But in the following session, the bill which the lords had passed in accord­ance with the archbishop’s wishes was disowned by the commons, who declared that they had never assented to it, and prayed the king that it might be annulled; chiefly, it would seem, in consequence of a petition which Wyclif had addressed to the king and to the parliament.

The reforming party was now attacked in Oxford, which was its chief stronghold. The chancellor, Robert Rygge, although he had subscribed the former condemnation, was inclined to favour the Wyclifites, and to maintain the exemption of the university from the power of the archbishop and bishops. He appointed Repyngdon, and others of like opinions, to preach on some public occasions. On being required by the archbishop to publish a denunciation of Wyclifism, he declared that to do so might endanger his life. And when a Carmelite, named Stokes, appeared at Oxford, with a commission to carry out the archbishop’s mandate, it is said that the chancellor made a display of armed men, so that the friar withdrew in terror, without having executed his task. Rygge was, however, compelled to appear in London, with the proctors of the university, and to ask pardon on his knees for having favoured Wyclifism. He was com­manded by the archbishop to allow no new doctrines to be taught or held; and, in obedience to a royal order (which had, perhaps, been obtained by representing Wyclif’s opinions as connected with the late revolutionary movements), he published the suspension of Repyngdon and Hereford. The bishop of Lincoln, Bokyngham, within whose diocese Oxford was situated, exerted himself vigorously for the suppression of Wyclifism in the university. Repyngdon, Hereford, and Ayshton recanted, after having in vain attempted to gain the intercession of the duke of Lancas­ter; but their explanations were not deemed sufficient, and it was not without much trouble that they procured their restoration. Hereford, in order to clear his orthodoxy, went to Rome, where he was committed to prison by Urban VI, who, in consideration of the support which he had received from England, was unwilling to inflict the extreme punishment of heresy on any Englishman. Having recovered his liberty through a popular outbreak while the pope was shut up in Nocera, Hereford returned to England, where he was again imprisoned by the archbishop of Canterbury, and was denounced by the bishop of Worcester as a preacher of Lollardy in 1387; and ended his days as a Carthusian monk. Repyngdon became one of the bitterest opponents of the party to which he had once belonged; and his zeal was rewarded with the bishopric of Lincoln, and with the dignity of cardinal. According to some writers, Wyclif himself appeared before the archbishop and other prelates at Oxford, and explained himself in terms which are treated by his enemies as evasive; and it would seem that his explanation was accepted by his judges as sufficient to justify them in dismissing him. But the party at Oxford never recovered from the effects of these proceedings.

The remaining two years of Wyclif’s life were spent in his parish of Lutterworth; and such was the effect of his labours in the surrounding country, that, according to the writer who is known by the name of Knyghton, a canon of Leicester, “You would scarce see two in the way, but one of them was a disciple of Wyclif.” During this period of his life his pen was actively employed. When the warlike bishop Spenser, of Norwich, led into Flanders a rabble of disorderly recruits, to fight as crusaders for pope Urban against pope Clement, Wyclif sent forth a pamphlet “On the Schism” and one “Against the pope’s Crusade.” In these he denounces the system of indulgences in general, and the abuse of holding forth such privileges as an inducement to enlist in such an enterprise, the taking of arms by the clergy, the nature of the war itself, the secular and unchris­tian motives from which it originated, and the share which the mendicant friars had taken in promoting it. And to this time belongs one of his most remarkable works— the “Trialogue,” which, as its name intimates is in the form of a conversation between three persons, bearing the Greek names of Aletheia, Pseustis, and Phronesis—Truth, Deceiver, and Thoughtfulness. In this book Wyclif lays down a rigid doctrine of predestination. He exposes the popular errors of reliance on the saints, declaring Christ to be a better, readier, and more benign mediator than any of them; he mentions without disapproval the opinion of some who would abolish all festivals of the saints, and who blame the church for canonizing men, inasmuch as without revelation it can no more know the sanctity of the persons so honoured than prester John or the sultan. In like manner he reprobates indulgences, on the ground that the prelates who grant them pretend foolishly, greedily, and blasphemously to a knowledge which is beyond their reach. He maintains the superiority of Holy Scripture to all other laws; if there were a hundred popes, and all the friars were turned into cardinals, their opinion ought not to be believed, except in so far as it is founded on Scripture. It is chiefly in the last book of the Trialogue that Wyclif shows himself as a reformer. He states his doctrine of the Eucharist, which, he says, had been held by the church until Satan was let loose. As to the hierarchy, he says that the only orders were originally those of priest and deacon, that bishops were the same with the priests, and that the other orders were the inventions of “Caesarean” pride. The pope he considers to be probably the great antichrist, and the “Caesarean” prelates to be the lesser antichrists, as being utterly opposite to their pretensions as Christ’s vicar and his representatives. He declares himself strongly against the endowments of the church; he tells the story of the angel’s lamentation over the gift of Constantine, to which he traces all the corruptions, abuses, and decay of later times; he holds that the error of Constantine and others, who thought by such means to benefit the church, was greater than that of St. Paul in persecuting it; nay, he says that the princes who endowed the church are liable to the punishment of hell for so doing. And, as a simple remedy for the evils of the case, he recommends that the king, on getting the temporalities of a bishopric or of an abbacy into his hands through a vacancy, should avoid the mistake of restoring them to the next incumbent. He denies the necessity of confession, and attacks the penitential system, as also indulgences and the sacrament of extreme unction. And he is severe against the clergy—more especially against the monks, canons, and friars. These last he traces to antichrist, and declares to be the means of spreading all heresies; he even charges their idle and luxurious lives with rendering the land less productive and the air unwholesome, and so with causing pestilences and epidemics.

Although Wyclif’s last years appear to have been wholly passed in his retirement, his constant and varied activity, and the influence which he exercised, were not to be overlooked; and it has been supposed that in 1384 he received a citation to appear before Urban VI. The paper which is commonly regarded as his answer does not clearly state the grounds on which he excused himself; but he had been disabled by illness, and especially by a stroke of palsy. On the 28th of December 1384, as he was engaged in the service of the church, he was struck down by a second attack of the same sort: and on the last day of the year he expired. His enemies found a pleasure in relating that his seizure took place on the festival of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the champion and martyr of the hierarchical claims, and that he died on the festival of St. Sylvester, the pope on whom the first Christian emperor was supposed to have bestowed those privileges and endowments which Wyclif had pertinaciously assailed.

It is remarkable that, although Wyclif had many points in common with the Waldenses, he never shows any trace of acquaintance with the history of that party, but seems to have formed his opinions in entire independence of them. Attempts have been made to connect him with the school of Joachim of Fiore; but although the constant use of the word gospel may naturally recall to our minds the “everlasting gospel” of the earlier party,—although there was in both parties a tendency to apocalyptic speculations, and although Wyclif’s followers were infected with that fondness for prophecies, partly of a religious and partly of a political tendency, which had prevailed widely from the time of Joachim downwards,—it would seem that these resemblances are no proof of any real connexion.

Wyclif opposed, either entirely or in their more exaggerated forms, most of the corruptions and superstitions which had grown on the church—such as the system of indulgences, the reliance on the merits of the saints, the trust in supposed miracles; and if he held the doctrine of purgatory, and allowed the utility of prayers and masses for the departed, he was careful to guard against the popular errors connected with these beliefs. He denied the usual distinctions of mortal and venial sin. He regarded confession as wholesome, but not as necessary; he limited the priestly power of absolution to that of declaring God’s forgiveness to the truly contrite, and blamed the clergy for pretending to something more than this. He denied the effect of excommunication, unless when uttered for just reason, in the cause of God, and agreeably to the law of Christ. He opposed compulsory celibacy, and the practice of binding young persons to the monastic life before their own experience and will could guide them in the choice of it. With regard to marriage he is said to have held some singular opinions—that it had been instituted as a means of filling up the places of the fallen angels, and that the prohibition of marriage even between the nearest relations had no other foundation than human law. He admitted the seven sacraments, but not as all standing on the same level; and he found fault with confirmation, as involving a pretension on the part of bishops to give the Holy Spirit in a new way, and thus to do more than give that Holy Spirit who was be­stowed in baptism. He objected to the prevailing excess of ceremonies, although he admitted that some ceremonies were necessary and expedient. As to the splendour of churches, he rejects the authority of Solomon—an idolatrous and lascivious king under the old covenant—forasmuch as our Lord himself prophesied the destruction of the Temple. He did not condemn images absolutely, but the abuses connected with the reverence for them. He also found fault with the elaborate music which had come into use in the church, declaring it to be a hindrance to study and preaching, and ridiculing the disposal of money in foundations for such purposes.

As to the constitution of the church, Wyclif held that God had not bestowed on any man that plenitude of power which was claimed by the papacy; and, while he did not refuse to style the pope Christ’s vicar, he considered that the emperor was also His vicar in the temporal sphere; that even the pope might be rebuked, and that even by laymen. With some of the schoolmen he held (as we have seen) that bishops and priests were one and the same order; but it does not appear that he countenanced the practice of some of his followers, who claimed for presbyters the power of ordination. We have already seen that he wished the clergy to cast themselves, like those of the first days, on the oblations of the faithful for maintenance; that he would have allowed them to enjoy only so much as was absolutely necessary, and held it to be the duty of secular lords to take away from them such endowments as were abused. But he disavowed the idea that this was to be done arbitrarily, and limited the exercise of the right by the conditions of civil, ecclesiastical, and evangelical law. And, although his enemies are never found to charge him with inconsistency, he confessed that his own practice had been short of his theory,—that he had spent on himself that which ought to have been given to the poor.

In some respects Wyclif seems to have been justly chargeable with the use of language which was likely not only to be misunderstood by his opponents, but to mislead his partisans. Thus the proposition that “Dominion is founded in grace” seems to imply a principle of unlimited anarchy and fanaticism, but is explained in such a manner as to lose much of its alarming character. Wyclif’s conception of dominion was altogether modelled on the feudal system. He believed that God, to whom alone dominion could properly belong, had granted in fee (as it were) certain portions of His dominion over the world, on condition of obedience to His commandments, and that such grants were vitiated by mortal sin in the holders. But this Wyclif admitted to be an ideal view, which must be modified in order to accord with the facts of the case; and by way of corrective he advanced another proposition, of at least equally startling appearance—that “God ought to obey the devil.” In other words, as God suffers evil in this world—as the Saviour submitted to be tempted by the devil—so obedience is due by Christians to constituted authority, however un­worthy the holders of it may be. The wicked, although they could not have dominion in its proper sense, might yet have power, so as to be entitled to obedience. And thus there is no ground for the imputations which have been cast on him by his enemies as if he had advocated the principles of insurrection and tyrannicide. Wyclif considered that, while the pope and the king are each supreme in his own department, every Christian man holds of God, although not “in chief”; and that hence the final court of appeal is not that of the pope, but of God. In like manner, when he asserted that one who was in mortal sin could not administer the sacraments, the proposition was softened by an explanation—that a man in such a condition might administer the sacraments validly, although to his own condemnation.

Wyclif’s opinions as to the doctrine of the Eucharist have been already stated. On predestination and the subjects connected with it, his views were such that his admirers are said to have given him a name derived from that of St. Augustine. He held that all things take place by absolute necessity; that even God himself cannot do otherwise than he actually does; that no predestined person could be finally obdurate or could be lost; that no one who was “foreknown” would have the gift of final perseverance, or could be saved; and that while in the body we can have no certainty who those are that belong to the one class or to the other. Yet with these opinions it is said that he professed to reconcile a belief in the freedom of man’s will, so that in this respect he expressed his dissent from the teachers whom he most revered, as Augustine and Bradwardine. Philosophy mingled largely with his theology; he maintained that true philosophy and true theology must go together; and thus, as his own views were strongly realistic, he concluded that the nominalists could not receive the truth of Holy Scripture.

A document is extant which professes to be a testi­monial in favour of Wyclif, granted by the university of Oxford in 1406; but it is very inconsistent with what is known as to the disposition of the university authorities towards his memory at that time, and it is supposed to have been forged by a noted Wyclifite named Peter Payne, who published it in Bohemia.

After Wyclif’s death the Lollards (as his followers were called) rapidly developed the more questionable part of his opinions. They became wildly fanatical against the Roman church and the clergy. Some of them denied the necessity of ordination, maintaining that any Christian man or woman, “being without sin,” was entitled to consecrate the eucharist; or they took it on themselves to ordain without the ministry of bishops. Some declared the sacraments to be mere dead signs; and, whereas Wyclif had held a sabbatical doctrine as to the Lord’s day, they denounced the observance of that day as a remnant of Judaism. With such opinions in matters of religion were combined extravagances dangerous to civil government and to society; and prophecies, which were in great part of political tendency, were largely circulated among the Lollards.

Notwithstanding the defection of some of the most eminent clergy of the party, it still numbered among its members many persons of distinction, who encouraged the preachers in their rounds, gathered audiences to listen to them, and afforded them armed protection. But its main strength lay among the humbler classes. London was a stronghold of Lollardism, as were also the counties of Leicester and Lincoln, where Wyclif’s personal influence had been especially exerted.

In 1394 the Lollards affixed to the doors of St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey placards in which the clergy were attacked and the current doctrine of the sacraments was impugned;  and they presented to parliament a petition, in which the peculiarities of their system were strongly enounced. The bishops took such alarm at these movements that they urgently entreated the king to hurry back from Ireland in order to meet the new dangers which had arisen; and during the remaining years of Richard’s power active measures were taken for the discouragement of Lollardism. In 1396 Boniface IX entreated the king to assist him in suppressing heresy, as being dangerous alike to the church and to the crown; and in the same year archbishop Arundel, immediately after his elevation to the primacy, held a synod, in which eighteen propositions, attributed to Wyclif, were condemned. The democratic and communistic opinions which had become developed among the party, while they attracted the poorer people, must have tended to alienate those of higher condition, and thus were, on the whole, disadvantageous to its progress.

But most especially the Lollards suffered from the change which placed Henry of Lancaster on the throne instead of Richard. Archbishop Arundel, their bitter enemy, had a powerful hold on the new king, whom he had greatly aided to attain the crown; and Henry, in his feeling of insecurity, was eager to ally himself with the clergy, the monks, and the friars—so that under the descendants of Wyclif’s old patron, John of Gaunt, the condition of the Wyclifites became worse than it had previously been. Henry in his first year sent a message to the convocation, that it was his intention “to maintain all the liberties of the church, and to destroy heresies, errors, and heretics to the utmost of his power”; and in the following year, after a representation by the clergy to parliament as to the necessity of checking the growth of heresy, was passed the statute De haeretico comburendo. By this it was enacted that any one whom an ecclesias­tical court should have declared to be guilty, or strongly suspected, of heresy, should, on being made over to the sheriff with a certificate to that effect, be publicly burnt.

The first victim of this statute is supposed to have been William Sautre, priest of St. Osyth’s, in London, who had before been convicted in the diocese of Norwich, and suffered as a relapsed heretic in 1401, chiefly for the denial of transubstantiation.When the parliament in 141 o asked for a mitigation of the statute, the king answered that it ought to be made more severe.There is a succession of measures intended for the repression of the Lollards. In 1407 an ordinance was passed which condemns their opinions as to church property, and seems to connect the party with those who used the name of the deposed king as if he were still alive. In the following year a synod assembled in London, under the presidency of the archbishop, decreed that Wyclifs books should not be read, unless allowed by one of the universities, and that no English versions of the Scriptures should be made, because of the difficulty of securing a uniform sense, “as the blessed Jerome himself, although he had been inspired, avers that herein he had often erred.” It was ordered that at Oxford the authorities should inquire, once a month or oftener, whether Wyclif’s opinions were held by any members of the university; and in 1412 two hundred and sixty-seven propositions from his works were con­demned there, “as all guilty of fire.”  The pope, John XXIII, at Arundel’s request, confirmed this sentence; but he rejected the archbishop’s proposal that Wyclif’s bones should be dug up and burnt.

During the reign of Henry IV the statutes against Lollardism were but partially enforced; but Henry V (whatever may have been his conduct in those earlier years, as to which we have received an impression too strong to be effaced by any historical evidence) showed himself, when king, strictly religious according to the ideas of the time, and conscientious, even to bigotry, in the desire to signalize his orthodoxy and to suppress such opinions as bore the note of heresy. Under the influence of his Carmelite confessor, Thomas Netter, one of the bitterest controversial opponents of Wyclifism, the laws were now rigorously executed. The victims were of all classes; but the most conspicuous for character and for rank was Sir John Oldcastle, who, in right of his wife, sat in parliament as Lord Cobham. Oldcastle, who seems to have been a man of somewhat violent and impetuous character, had been highly distinguished in the French wars, and had been on terms of intimacy with Henry in his earlier days. Having taken up the opinions of Wyclif with enthusiastic zeal, he endeavoured, by encouraging itinerant preachers and otherwise, to spread these doctrines among the people; and it was feared that his military skill and renown might make him dangerous as the leader of a fanatical and disaffected party. The king himself undertook to argue with him; but Cobham, knowing his ground better, withstood the royal arguments. After having been called in question by the archbishop of Canterbury for his opinions (as to which he appears, while denying transubstantiation, to have consistently maintained that the very body and blood of Christ are contained under the form of the eucharistic elements), he was excommunicated. He then made his escape from London, and for some years lived obscurely in Wales; but he afterwards re­appeared, and, as he was supposed to be concerned in revolutionary designs, was arrested, and was brought to the bar of the house of lords. The sentence which had before been pronounced against him on a mixed charge of heresy and treason was read over in his hearing, and, as he made no defence, he was forthwith, in pursuance of that sentence, hanged and burnt in Smithfield on the 18th of December 1417.

 

 

CHAPTER VII. BOHEMIA