863 



WYCLIFPE, JOHN DE. 



WYCLIFFE, JOHN DE. 



851 



the Collegiate church of Westbury, in the diocese of Worcester : the 

 letters-patent of ratification are dated November the 6th, 1375. And 

 about the same time he appears to have been also presented to the 

 rectory of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, the right of nominating to 

 which had fallen for this turn to the crown, in consequence of the 

 minority of Lord Henry de Ferrars of Groby, the patron. Lewis 

 thinks it probable that Wycliffe now left Oxford, or at least was 

 always at Lutterworth during the vacations. " Here," he says, " as it 

 appears by his sermons yet remaining in manuscript, he performed 

 the office of a very diligent and edifying preacher, since he preached 

 not only on Sundays, but on the several festivals of the church, and of 

 a most exemplary and unwearied pastor." There are about 300 of 

 his parish sermons still extant. 



He now however began to speak his sentiments very openly on the 

 subject of the pope and the church. Lewis quotes him as in one 

 of his writings or lectures soon after his return to England styling the 

 pope " Antichrist, the proud worldly priest of Rome, and the most 

 cursed of clippers and purse-kervers " (cut-purses). The consequence 

 was, that in a convocation of the clergy, held on the 3rd of February, 

 1377, a citation was directed to be issued for his appearance at St. 

 Paul's on the 19th of the same month, to answer the charge of holding 

 and publishing certain heretical or erroneous doctrines. Lewis appears 

 clearly to be mistaken in supposing this to have happened in 1378. 

 Wycliffe presented himself on the appointed day, accompanied by John 

 of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and the Lord Henry Percy, earl marshal; 

 a violent altercation .immediately arose between these noblemen and 

 Courtney, bishop of London ; the crowd, which was very great, broke 

 out into a tumult ; and the result was, that the court rose without 

 having done anything. The mob seems on this occasion to have sided 

 with their bishop against Gaunt and Wycliffe. 



A story told by Dr. Vaughan about a reference made to Wycliffe by 

 the first parliament of Richard II., which met in October 1377, on the 

 subject of the right of the kingdom to retain its treasure, when re- 

 quired for its own defence, although demanded by the pope, and 

 about a vindication of that right which he therefore drew up, appears 

 to be indifferently supported. It rests, we believe, on no better 

 authority than that of Fox's ' Acts and Monuments.' Wycliffe may 

 have drawn up some such paper ; but probably not in answer to an 

 application from the parliament. Be this however as it may, the pro- 

 secution against him for his errors of doctrine was speedily renewed 

 in a more formidable shape. On the 22nd of May, 1377 (not the llth 

 of June, as Mr. Le Bas translates ' XI. Calendas Junii'), a bull was 

 addressed by Pope Gregory to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the 

 Bishop of London, directing them to summon Wycliffe before them, 

 and others dated the same day to the king, requesting his favour and 

 assistance in the matter, and to the University of Oxford, desiring 

 them to withdraw their protection from the accused theologian. 

 Before the bulls reached England, which they do not appear to have 

 done till November, King Edward was dead ; but Archbishop Sud- 

 bury issued his mandate about the end of December for Wycliffe to 

 present himself in the church of St. Paul's, London, on the 30th 

 court-day from that date. The accounts that have come down to us 

 are very imperfect and obscure ; it appears that Wycliffe did come, or 

 was brought, early in the following year, 1378, before a synod assem- 

 bled, not in St. Paul's, but in the archbishop's chapel at Lambeth. 

 This new attempt to put down the reformer however was not more 

 successful than the former ; the Londoners now, if we are to believe 

 the chronicler Walsingham, upon whom we are principally dependent 

 for our information as to what took place, showed themselves disposed 

 to take part with Wycliffe, and, breaking into the chapel, threw the 

 synod into consternation ; and the safety of the prisoner was secured 

 by the arrival of Sir Lewis Clifford with a message from the king's 

 mother positively prohibiting them from proceeding with the cause. 

 He was let off with a simple admonition to abstain from repeating the 

 objectionable propositions, that the laity might not be made to 

 stumble by his perversions ; an injunction which, says Walsingham, 

 he treated with contempt, persisting in scattering about conclusions 

 still more pernicious. 



The circumstance however that finally and effectually saved Wycliflfa 

 was the breaking out of the great schism of the West by the election 

 of the two popes on the death of Gregory XI. in this same year 1378. 

 This division and dissension of the Roman world so enfeebled the 

 papal power in England and everywhere else, as to leave it for the 

 present very little of either strength or disposition to proceed to 

 extremities against its enemies where it was possible to take another 

 course. Wycliffe accordingly appears to have been allowed to go on 

 for some years preaching and writing as he chose without further dis- 

 turbance. In the beginning of 1379 he was seized while at Oxford 

 with a dangerous illness, from which however he recovered. Soon 

 after he got well he is supposed to have published his tract entitled 

 ' De Papa Romano,' or ' Schisma Papae,' still preserved in manuscript, 

 in which he called upon all kings throughout Christendom to seize 

 upon the opportunity sent them by Providence of bringing down the 

 whole fabric of the Romish dominion, seeing that Christ had cloven 

 the head of Antichrist and made the two parts fight against each other. 

 This was followed by other writings, both in Latin and English, of 

 which by far the most important was his translation of the whole 

 Bible from the Latin Vulgate, being it is commonly believed, the first 



complete English version of the Scriptures which had appeared. 

 There is reason to believe that this great work was finished, and 

 several transcripts of the whole made and dispersed, some years 

 before the death of Wycliffe ; but it is probable that it was not all 

 executed by himself, although it may have all undergone his revifiaL 



Some odium seems to have been brought upon Wycliffe and his 

 novel opinions by the great outbreak of the Commons, Watt Tyler's 

 insurrection, in 1381, which it was natural enough for the friends of 

 the established religion to refer, in part at least, to the destruction of 

 old convictions and of all reverence for authority, which he and his 

 followers had laboured to produce. For Wycliffe, it is to be noted, 

 while he himself remained stationary at Lutterworth or Oxford, 

 preaching or lecturing there, had numbers of disciples whom, under 

 the name of ' poor priests,' he kept itinerating over the country, in 

 imitation, apparently, of the same effective system for acting upon the 

 great body of the population of which the mendicant order of monks 

 had already set the example. There can be no doubt that his opinions 

 were thus very generally disseminated and adopted. He now besides 

 took what was considered the boldest etep upon which he had yet 

 ventured, by attacking the doctrine of transubstantiation. This he 

 did, according to Anthony Wood, in a course of divinity lectures 

 which he read in the summer of 1381 at Oxford. An assembly of 

 twelve doctors, summoned by the chancellor, unanimously condemned 

 his conclusions, and denounced imprisonment and excommunication 

 as the punishments of whoever should maintain them. Some months 

 after, in May 1382, a synod of divines and doctors of law, assembled 

 at the priory of the Grey Friars in London, on the summons of his 

 old enemy Courtney, recently translated from the see of London to 

 Canterbury, having declared ten opinions which were stated to have 

 been lately publicly preached among the nobles and commons of the 

 realms heretical, and other fourteen erroneous, instructions were im- 

 mediately despatched to the Bishops of London and Lincoln, enjoining 

 them to take the most rigorous measures for the suppression of the 

 said doctrines; and upon that letters mandatory were forthwith 

 issued by the Bishop of Lincoln, charging all ecclesiastical function- 

 aries throughout the archdeaconry of Leicester, within which the 

 rectory of Lutterworth is situated, with the execution of this order. 

 Soon after also a petition to the crown by the lords spiritual in par- 

 liament was answered by a royal ordinance, empowering the sheriffs 

 of counties to arrest all preachers of heresy, and detain them in prison 

 till they should make satisfaction to the Church. But it is remarkable 

 that, although many of Wycliffe's followers were apprehended and 

 proceeded against under the powers thus granted to or assumed by 

 the ecclesiastical and temporal authorities, he himself remained for a 

 considerable time unmolested. He was only named, among several 

 other persons notoriously suspected of heresy, in an order issued by 

 the synod at the Grey Friars to the chancellor of Oxford. It is sup- 

 posed that the protection of the Duke of Lancaster, which, although 

 not openly avowed, was probably as notoriously suspected as his 

 heresy, deterred his enemies from touching him. But having in 

 November 1382, instead of appealing to the king from the sentence 

 which had imposed silence upon him, as he declared at the time he 

 would do, addressed a long statement of his case, under the title of a 

 ' Complaint,' to the king and parliament, in which he both reiterated 

 in very vehement terms his general abuse of the church and the clergy, 

 and avowed his continued disbelief of the doctrine of the real presence, 

 which he affirmed had " been brought up by cursed hypocrites, and 

 heretics, and worldly priests, uukenning in God's law " he was imme- 

 diately summoned before the convocation of the clergy assembled at 

 Oxford to answer for these opinions. It is said that his old friend 

 Lancaster, who had stood by him so long as he assailed merely the 

 constitution of the hierarchy and the temporalities of the church, 

 declined to go along with him now, when he had begun openly to 

 attack the commonly received faith on the most sacred points of 

 doctrine ; and after advising him to retract, or at least to keep his 

 sentiments to himself, openly withdrew his protection. The con- 

 temporary accounts however of this matter are very indistinct and 

 unsatisfactory. All that is certain is, that Wycliffe appeared before 

 the convocation, and gave in two written confessions or defences, 

 the one in English, the other in Latin, in which he explained his 

 opinions on the question of transubstantiation, not apparently with- 

 out a considerable anxiety to give them as little of the air of a 

 deviation from the common faith as possible. The account given 

 by his enemy Knighton is, that " he laid aside his audacious bear- 

 ing, put on the breastplate of dotage, attempted to disclaim his 

 extravagant and fantastic errors, and protested that the follies he 

 was called upon to answer for were basely and falsely ascribed to 

 him by the malicious ingenuity of his 'enemies." The two con- 

 fessions are entirely different. His apologist and admirer, Mr. Le 

 Bas, describes the one in English as " a concise and tolerably per- 

 spicuous document ; " the Latin one, which is very much longer, is 

 also, he admits, " very much more defective in simplicity : " it is 

 fenced about with all the forms of scholastic dialectics, and is as Mr. 

 Le Bas thinks unintelligible. In both Wycliffe acknowledges that the 

 sacramental bread is really and truly the body of Christ; but he does 

 not, he says, affirm it to be the body of Christ essentially, substantially, 

 corporeally, or identically. The result appears to have been that no 

 sentence was pronounced by the convocation, but that soon after 



