20 INTRODUCTORY. 



under the statute was compelled, virtute officii, to put the culprit 

 to death by burning. Little or nothing is known of the numbers 

 who suffered. Fox is more than usually vague about the perse- 

 cution during the days of the Lancastrian Henries. I have 

 quoted the terms of an inquisition of Lollardy in the year 1433, 

 in my first vol., p. 101. In 1427, the records of the Corporation 

 of Norwich refer to what appears a general burning in that 

 city. Besides, it mentions the names of three victims, William 

 Qwytt, William Waddon, and Hugh Pye, who suffered at the 

 Bishop's gate, two loads of wood being purchased for the pur- 

 poses of the execution. But it is certain that heresy was general. 

 Gascoigne tells us, with many bitter comments on the ordinance, 

 that the bishops silenced all such preachers as could not pay 

 them for a licence, on the ground that such a regulation was 

 necessary in order to check the spread of heresy. I have little 

 doubt that Lollardy had taken deep root in the manufacturing 

 districts of Eastern England. It is certain that the Reformation 

 made more rapid progress in Norfolk than elsewhere, when it 

 came, and that this county supplied more sufferers during the 

 Marian persecution than any Qther part of England. 



The fifteenth century is a period of almost absolute intel- 

 lectual stagnation in England. The literary monk disappears, 

 the chronicles are dull and jejune. The ' Represser ' of Pecok, 

 the work of Fortescue on the Laws of England, and the com- 

 pilation of Gascoigne, the ' Liber Veritatum/ which is princi- 

 pally a florilegium from the most eminent fathers of the Latin 

 Church from St. Augustine to the Schoolmen, are nearly all 

 the works of English origin which have come down to us. 

 The Latin in which Gascoigne writes he being the most 

 accomplished scholar of Oxford during that century is ex- 

 ceedingly barbarous. To be sure it was the age of lawyers, 

 and the year-books of Edward the Fourth, printed in the reign 

 of Edward's grandson, are a repertory from which the jurists 

 of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drew their pre- 

 cedents and their practice. 



Just as England was preparing or the factions into which 



