INTRODUCTORY. J I 



revolution in which the clergy might be passive, might be even 

 the abettors, but which it was dangerous or offensive to resist. 

 It is true that the principal charges against Pecok were a mis- 

 chievous meddlesomeness in politics, especially illustrated by 

 his letter to Canyngs, Lord Mayor of London, by his loose 

 criticism on the authority of the Fathers, and by his doubts 

 about the historical genuineness of the Apostles' Creed. But 

 these were pretexts under cover of which the clergy and the 

 courtiers of Henry, when the storm was impending, sacrificed 

 the most unpopular of their order with the object of saving the 

 status of the rest. There is however an interest in Pecok's 

 career which is quite apart from his political and literary merits. 

 He is the first author of the Middle Ages who propounded 

 reason as a judge of faith, and who without possessing the 

 instrument which the revival of letters was about to afford, 

 anticipated the destructive criticism of a later period by the 

 mere machinery of scholastic philosophy working on a sceptical 

 intellect. Pecok in short might be claimed as at once the 

 forerunner of the Erastian theory of the Church, and of the 

 Rationalist interpretation of its theology. The occurrence of 

 such a person, a century before the Reformation, at a time when 

 the Church was exceedingly corrupt, and orthodoxy was very 

 angry and very sanguinary, is the most remarkable phenomenon 

 in the literary history of the fifteenth century. 



The piety of the fifteenth century created some magnificent 

 institutions, the usefulness of which was greater than that of 

 the monastic orders. Henry, as is stated above, surrendered 

 the lands of the alien priories in order to found King's College, 

 Cambridge, Eton, and the great abbey of Sion. One of Henry's 

 bishops, who by the way adhered readily to the Yorkist cause 

 when it was in the ascendant, William Waynflete, founded an 

 equally opulent college in Oxford. The resources of Wayn- 

 flete's college curiously illustrate the foundations of this time. 

 Originally it appears that this prelate, of whom Henry had been 

 the patron, for he made him his Provost of Eton and Bishop of 

 Winchester, intended to establish a modest place of education 



