DURING THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 73 



the struggle to a successful issue. In England, the strength of 

 the Lollard party was from the days of Wiklif to the days of 

 Cranmer in Norfolk ; and I have no doubt that, as the presence 

 of students from this district must have told on the theological 

 bias of Cambridge University, which came out markedly at the 

 epoch of the Reformation, so the foundation of Henry the 

 Sixth's College, with its strict provisions against the admis- 

 sion of heretics, especially those in whom leanings towards 

 Pecok's doctrine could be detected, is relevant to the theo- 

 logical disaffection of the Norwich weavers. I have given in 

 the notes ' an account of the burning of three heretics at 

 Norwich, under the year 1427, and these are only a few 

 victims of the holocaust 1 . 



English Lollardy was, like its direct descendant Puritanism, 

 sour and opinionative, but it was also moral and thrifty. They 

 who denounced the lazy and luxurious life of the monks, the 

 worldliness and greed of the prelates, and the gross and shallow 

 artifices of the popular religion, were pretty sure to inculcate 

 parsimony and saving. By voluntarily and sturdily cutting 

 themselves off from the circumstance of the old faith, they 

 were certain, like the Quakers of more than two centuries 

 later, to become comparatively wealthy. They had nothing to 

 spare for monk or priest, the former of whom, as I have said, 

 was now beginning to prey on what was left of the resources of 

 the latter. The uprisings of 1450 I am not speaking of 

 Cade's insurrection in which the two bishops were murdered, 

 when we are told that a bishop dared not show his face in 

 London at the risk of his life, and was not much more safe in 

 his diocese, were certainly not mere expressions of political 

 animosity. While England was nominally orthodox, the 

 murder of a bishop was no light act, and the murder of 

 Aiscough was a deliberate act of revenge, on a man who had 

 merely used his see to enrich himself. We are told too that 

 the decline of the parochial system, owing to the increasing 



1 By 2 Hen. IV, cap. 15, persons were inhibited from preaching unless they had 

 previously obtained their diocesan's licence. 



