this should be secured by a constitution to be made by the bishops. These prisons, especially after the alarms consequent on the Lollard movements, were a grievance in the eyes of the laity, who do not seem to have trusted the good faith of the prelates in their treatment of delinquent clergy. The promise of Archbishop Arundel was not fulfilled.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Gneist, History of the English Constitution, chap. xxvi. Capes, History of the English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Robinson, Readings in European History, Vol. I, chap. xvi. For documents, see Gee and Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History.

CHAPTER V

JOHN WYCLIFFE AND THE CHURCH

THOUGH there were many critics of the abuses in the Church during the Middle Ages, John Wycliffe differed from them in being revolutionary in matters of religious doctrine. He has long been regarded as the precursor of the Reformation in England; but it now seems tolerably certain that his doctrines found no considerable acceptance among the people of England at the opening of the sixteenth century. Indeed, the thoroughness with which his influence was checked is remarkable, especially when his widespread activities, the volume of his writings, and the determination of his followers are taken into consideration. It constitutes an interesting psychological problem just why this was so, in view of the developments a century and a half later. Great light will be thrown upon this problem by studying the conditions of the continental Church which for a time furthered his revolt, and also the causes for the strength of the Church in England at the close of the fourteenth century.

Wycliffe was of North English parentage, and was born about 1320 in the Richmond district of Yorkshire. He was sent to Oxford, but when and how is unknown; the attractions of an intellectual life kept him at the University, where he passed through many grades and offices, and took his share both in the teaching and administration of the place. He was once Master of Balliol; he was perhaps Warden of Canterbury Hall. His reputation as a theologian increased gradually, but until he was some fifty years of age it was an Oxford reputation only. It is impossible to say

1 Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe, pp. 169 ff. By permission of G. M. Trevelyan, Esq., and Messrs. Longmans, Green & Company Publishers.

whether he resided all the year round, or all years together, at the University. From 1363 onwards he held livings in the country, though never more than one at a time.

In 1374 he finally received from the crown the rectory of Lutterworth, with which his name is forever connected. There he lived continuously after his expulsion from Oxford in 1382; there he wrote his later works and collected his friends and missionaries. The Leicestershire village became the centre of a religious movement. Owing to the difficulty of ascertaining the exact dates of his different books and pamphlets, it would be hard to distinguish between those of his theories which issued from Oxford and those which first appeared at Lutterworth. There is no need in a general history of the times to attempt the difficult task of exact chronological division, such as would be necessary in a biography of Wycliffe. It is enough to know that his demand for disendowment preceded his purely doctrinal heresies; that his quarrel with the friars came to a head just before his denial of transubstantiation in 1380, while his attack on the whole organization and the most prominent doctrines of the medieval Church is found in its fulness only in his later works.

§ 2. Scholasticism and Wycliffe's Mental Attitude

The method by which he arrived at his conclusions was in appearance the scholastic method then recognized. Without such a basis his theories would have been treated with ridicule by all theologians, and he would have been as much out of place at Oxford as Voltaire in the Sorbonne. The system of argument, which makes his Latin writings unreadable in the nineteenth century, made them formidable in the fourteenth. And yet, essentially, he was not an academician. Instinct and feeling were the true guides of his mind, not the close reasoning by which he conceived that he was irresistibly led to inevitable conclusions. The doctrines of Protestantism, and the conception of a new relation between Church and State, were not really the deductions of any cut-and-dried dialectic. The one important inclination that he derived from scholasticism was the tendency, shared with all mediæval thinkers, to carry his theories to their furthest logical point. Hence he was rather a radical than a moderate reformer. This uncompromising attitude of mind assigned to him his true function.

He was not the leader of a political party trying to carry through

the modicum of reform practical at the moment; but a private individual trying to spread new ideas and to begin a movement of thought which should bear fruit in ages to come. His later writings show that he had ceased to regard himself as a "serious politician"; perhaps he was dimly aware that he was something greater. He did well, both for himself and the world, to throw aside all hopes of immediate success and speak out the truth that was in him without counting the cost. But his greatest admirers must admit that in some cases his logic drove him to give unwise and impossible advice. Some will think his recommendation of complete disendowment and the voluntary system to be little better, and all will probably agree that his proposal to include the universities in this scheme was unnecessary. But as they were then part of the Church, he did not see how it was consistent with his logic that they should continue to hold endowments of land and appropriated tithes.

83. Development of Wycliffe's Doctrines

In the same way, he carried to an equally extravagant length his theory that the life of the priest should be purely spiritual. To spiritualize the occupations of the clergy was a very desirable reform at this time, but there was no need that Wycliffe should therefore wish to restrict their studies to theology. His objection to the attendance of clergy at lectures on law and physical science was, beyond doubt, a step in the wrong direction. He was confirmed in this error by his belief in the all-sufficiency of the Bible. "This lore that Christ taught us is enough for this life," he says, "and other lore, and more, over this, would Christ that were suspended." Learned as he was himself, he affected to depreciate earthly learning. But while such extravagances detract somewhat from his greatness, as they certainly detracted from his usefulness, they cannot be held, as his enemies hold them, to be the principal part of his legacy to mankind. True genius nearly always pays the price of originality and inventive power, in mistakes proportionately great.

In his political ideas regarding the Church, Wycliffe was one of a school. Continental and English writers had already for a century been theorizing against the secular power of ecclesiastics. The Papal Bull of 1377 had likened Wycliffe's early heresies to the "perverse opinions and unlearned learning of Marsiglio of Padua of damned memory," who had demanded that the Church should

be confined to her spiritual province, and had attacked the "Cæsarean clergy."

Wycliffe himself recognized Occam as his master, for his great fellow-countryman had more than fifty years back declared it the duty of priests to live in poverty, and had maintained with his pen the power of the secular State against the pope. It was by the spiritual Franciscans, "those evangelical men," as Wycliffe called them, "very dear to God," that the poverty ordered by the Gospel had been chiefly practised and preached as an example for the whole Church.

On the other hand, it was to their enemy Fitz Ralph, Bishop of Armagh, that he owed his doctrine of "dominion." Grossetête, the reforming bishop of Lincoln, had in his day attacked pluralities and opposed the abuses of papal power in England. Wycliffe not only spoke of him with respect and admiration, but again and again quoted his words and advanced his opinions as authoritative. But while these predecessors had dealt with one or two points only, Wycliffe dealt with religion as a whole. Besides the political proposals of Occam and Marsiglio, he sketched out a new religion which included their proposed changes as part only of the new ideas respecting the relations of man to God.

In this field of doctrine and religion he was himself the originator of a school. His authorities, his teachers, were not the thinkers of his own century, but the fathers of the early Church. Few, perhaps, of his ideas were new in the sense that they had never before been conceived by man. But many were absolutely new to his age. In those days there was no scientific knowledge of the past, and mere tradition can be soon altered.

If the Catholic faith of the tenth century had been modified, no one in the fourteenth would have known that any such change had taken place. Even the memory of the Albigenses and their terrible fate seems to have vanished, or to have survived only as a tale that is told. They are not mentioned in Wycliffe's writings. He did not borrow his heresies from them, as the Hussites borrowed from him. Wycliffe's restatements, if such they were, were therefore to all intents and purposes discoveries. The doctrine of transubstantiation had not always been held by the Church, but it had been held for many generations when it was denied by Wycliffe. His declaration that his own view had been the orthodox faith for "the thousand years that Satan was bound," was of little meaning to the unlearned and unimaginative.